Nothing to Declare

I don't really have anything to say about "Valar Doeharis." I mean, there's more of this post, so obviously I have something to say, but only one the level of moment-by-moment critiques. It's not really an ambitious enough episode to warrant an in-depth critique. It's all setup, which isn't objectionable in a modern serialized drama. I don't know, though, about ending the episode with the reveal of Barristan Selmy, AKA "Who?", AKA "Oh, was he in the first season?" AKA "Oh, yeah, him." The sequence with the scorpion was effective, though, not least because the creature itself was remarkably creepy.

I don't know why Benioff and Weiss think their version of Margaery is so interesting, but it was nice to see Joffrey in his fawningly solicitous mode; that, more than the outright sadism, is what makes Gleeson's portrayal of the character so easy to loathe. Elsewhere in King's Landing, the Ros/Shae was notable only in that it highlights the show's delusion that the former is a dramatically valid character rather than a source of moar boobies. The Tywin/Tyrion scene was great, though, a reminder of just how good Charles Dance can be when he isn't forced to play material with a spurious twinkle in his eye.

Robb and Talisa and Catelyn. A pointless scene, there for the sake of having the characters in the episode. Benioff and Weiss seem to think that making Robb into an adolescent prat is good for the character, but all it does is undermine the milieu and create tiresome and conventional teen angst. Speaking of which, how could the show possibly have turned Ygritte into a character I hate? She's the kind of female character Benioff and Weiss love, and yet Rose Leslie's performance never demonstrates actual strength, only self-satisfied flirtatiousness. And speaking of events beyond the Wall...

Why would you cast Ciaran Hinds and then have him play a nothing version of Mance Rayder? I don't know, but I think the writers did a solid job of inventing a new fake reason for Jon to join the wildlings, since the one from the books wouldn't fit this nothing version of Mance Rayder. Did I mention I think this is a nothing version of Mance Rayder? Actually, I'm not as bothered by this as I'm making it sound; I have no attachment to the character. But the show does seem to prefer watering down Martin's larger-than-life personalities, which is odd, since HBO dramas don't generally object to the colorful. I still fear for the Queen of Thorns.

That's all until next week, when "Dark Wings, Dark Words" will presumably bring the Tullys into the picture. Poor Catelyn... in more ways than one.

So Last Year

Season three of Game of Thrones premiered the other night, and it's what everyone's talking about, so of course this blog entry concerns... my thoughts on season two. I rewatched the whole season last week, and meant to write this up before Sunday, but you know how it goes. I'll be watching episode one later today, and possibly blogging about it. I'm already not liking what I've heard about the show's take on Olenna Redwyne. If they've managed to make me not adore the Queen of Thorns, I may never forgive them.

Oh, by the way, I don't think I've said as much before, so: this is a spoiler blog. I'll feel free to mention details from all published books, and from spoiler chapters of The Winds of Winter.

*     *     *

The first thing I should say is that on a technical level the show is a bit better made than I'd been giving it credit for. You can see where the money is going, the direction is sharp, and the performances, while they don't wow me as much as they do some viewers, are consistently solid: no one is bad, though a few are notably underwhelming. What holds the show back from fully enacting the upper-middlebrow template of HBO's prestige dramas (on which see Mike Hale's season three review) is the dialogue, which is horribly flat and banal. Characters are endlessly describing the plot to each other, saying exactly how they feel, and laying out themes. The show's idea of subtle is characters offering memories and legends up as obvious parables, but at least in those instances they leave out the fortune cookie wisdom; most of the time we aren't even that lucky. 

The Littlefinger/Cersei scene about knowledge and power is an especially egregious case of "here is the theme, don't miss the theme" (and also demonstrates that, despite their evident love of a character they shoehorn into other storylines for no good reason, Benioff and Weiss have no grasp of what makes Littlefinger an interesting character). But further examples abound: Margaery telling Renly to man up, Margaery telling Loras to man up, Dagmer telling Theon to man up, Asha telling Theon to... well, you get the picture. And that's another problem: the show is a little over-eager to show its audience that you have to be CALCULATING and RUTHLESS to succeed in this society. That's an accurate reflection of the source material, but this is one of those cases where adaptation ought to have improved things, by removing the thematic repetition that comes with narrative bloat.* Unfortunately, Benioff and Weiss, unlikely the makers of actual quality HBO dramas, are not guided by a sense of dramatic quality, but by coolness of plot and character. Which can still make for an entertaining show.

*They ought also to have thought about what happens when dialogue from the books is compressed for use in the show. Catelyn's "they are the knights of summer and winter is coming" line makes sense as the result of a gradually-elaborated thought process over several pages; as off-the-cuff conversation with Renly it feels on-the-nose and written. Likewise, in the big Catelyn/Jaime scene, he brings up Cersei for no evident reason, because a transition from the books has been cut for time. As I've said before, poorly-considered faithfulness is often worse than making changes.

The ending of "The North Remembers" is pretty strong, for instance, a well-directed, difficult to watch, thematically-relevant scene. I don't even mind that the show moved the decision to kill Robert's bastards from Cersei to Joffrey. It's a watering-down of her nastiness, as in season one, but unlike season one, season two doesn't offer other behavior that contradicts that watering-down, so it's at least coherent drama, and the notion of an evil queen uncertain and possibly unhappy in her victory is an intriguing one. It's also a reflection of Benioff and Weiss' preference for making characters ambiguous from the get-go, rather than following Martin's pattern of having them start off as types and show depth later, often when they become POV characters. There's an echo, however faint, of the decaying Cersei of A Feast for Crows in TV Cersei's second season. A big difference, of course, is that book Cersei is largely blind to Joffrey's faults; in fact, her grief for the son she never understood is a big cause of that psychological decay. It'll be interesting to see how season four (which, after the premiere's strong ratings, is a foregone conclusion) balances her grief with her knowledge of what he was.

The complementary mother/son relationship fares less well. The writers persist in taking strategic wisdom away from Catelyn and attributing it to Robb, undermining the books' deconstruction of the "boy king" trope and making her into a more conventional mother figure. It doesn't help that Michelle Fairley is a strong actress, while Richard Madden, who like Kit Harington appears to have been cast largely on the basis of prettiness (where does he get his hair gel out on the battlefield, anyway?), is competent but never compelling. To add further insult to injury, a big part of Catelyn's actual thematic purpose, to argue for peace and against needless war, is given to Talisa, a ridiculous character whose very existence flouts the class hierarchies that are part of the gritty realism the books and show are praised for.

Speaking of flouting class hierarchies, how about Arya and Tywin? Aren't they cute? And Jaime was dyslexic till Loving Papa Tywin fixed him! Reader, my heartstrings have been pulled! I don't even mind that Tywin shows no interest in a highborn northern girl who looks like a Stark, or that "will Littlefinger recognize Arya" is cheap melodrama that also undermines his character, or that all that time could have been used instead to show Arya's psychological coarsening as a result of the brutality of Harrenhal. Arya and Tywin are just so sweet. And sweetness is what Game of Thrones is all about.

Sweetness, and nudity. No one should have needed that Neil Marshall anecdote to recognize that nudity in Game of Thrones is mostly about straight male titillation. Like Osha sleeping with Theon. That was apparently part of her escape plan, though why it was necessary is an open question. Joffrey torturing Daisy and Ros has the fig leaf that it was to show us Joffrey being sadistic... as though we hadn't grasped that yet. (At least it was a rare example of Tyrion, a character whose shades of gray have been whitewashed, making a mistake.) The amount of sex on the show is often defended by pointing out that there's a lot of sex in the books, and of course there is. But proportionally speaking, the show includes much more of the sex from the books than it does anything else, and invents more. And as anyone who's thought about the effects of different media can tell you, prose and film don't work the same way. This is one of those cases where you could actually justify making changes, but of course they haven't.

Talking of changes-- oh, the effort I'm putting into these tortured transitions-- let's look at Daenerys. There was an interview with Emilia Clarke a while back in which she called season two "frustrating" for the character, which brought home to me that, despite the changes they made, Benioff and Weiss hadn't addressed the "problem" with Qarth: Dany's passivity. She reacts rather than acts. The show rather crudely turned this into theme and upped the superficial drama of the surrounding intrigue, but it still started the story slowly and didn't offer the sort of cool Daenerys butt-kicking action that the audience with which Benioff and Weiss seem obsessed would have preferred. And "Daenerys learns to stand up for herself and take what she wants" is, after the first season, an already-learned lesson, one that doesn't play to Emilia Clarke's strengths as an actress. Part of the reason "Where are my dragons?" is so grating is that Clarke turns the frustrated Daenerys into a posturing child. That may be the intention, but if so, it's a bad one. Still, the stuff with Xaro's empty vaults is a nice play on the "power as illusion" theme elsewhere in the book and season, so I'll give the show some credit for that.

I'm out of transitions, so let's just move on to Stannis and Renly. I think the introduction of Stannis works pretty well. You lose something not having all the Cressen backstory, of course, but the show doesn't do that kind of backstory, and I've made my peace with that. The show isn't really interested in the Stannis/Renly dynamic anyway, which I do think is a shame, simply because it captures the way an aristocratic society's political dramas can be driven by family dysfunction. In the books Stannis is the awkward middle child, caught between the gregarious Robert and the equally handsome and charming Renly, who despite his sexual orientation is very much like his brother. TV Renly, by contrast, is a bit of a feeb. This allows for Margaery and Loras to reiterate the themes by telling him to toughen up, but serves no actual purpose, and is remarkably dull to watch, the Tyrell siblings have nothing on the Lannisters when it comes to twisted family dynamics. I should note that TV Margaery is another example of Benioff and Weiss' lack of interest in non-assertive female characters. We can debate the extent to which the book version is politically alert, but she's certainly not shown to be this kind of hard-eyed pragmatist. The more the show turns its female characters into the kind of quote-unquote strong women you get in most epic fantasy, the less rich its portrait of feudal society is going to be. We only need so many Machiavellian schemers.

Speaking of which, what have they done with Stannis? The character in the books, one of the more fascinating non-POVs, is worth reading about precisely because of the ambiguous nature of his claim to be concerned with justice. The reader is left to wonder whether his self-image as the unjustly-ignored loyal and honorable guy doesn't cover up self-serving behavior, and to consider the dangers of devotion to black-and-white morality. None of this is in the show. Oh, a couple bits of dialogue reflecting it have been left in-- thoughtless copy-pasting again-- but the basic notion has been dropped, leaving a character who's cold and pedantic but never especially honorable, someone you're clearly not supposed to sympathize with. Melisandre, who in the books is clearly misguided but not monstrous, is reincarnated as a stock dark sorceress, exotic variety (and God, but that shadow creature is laughable: it's supposed to look like, you know, a shadow, not an ectoplasmic whatever). One has no sense why Davos, a decent guy, would support Stannis, or why anyone would, except as part of an endless series of self-interested calculations.

Well, that marks the end of the list of observations I typed up while watching the season, so I guess I'm done. No big conclusion here: I imagine I've made clear what I think doesn't work about the show. "So why are you watching?", you might ask. So I can complain about it, obviously. I enjoy thinking about what I do and don't admire in the show and its source material and why, and the overall gloss of the production means that watching isn't a painful experience. Plus my mom likes it, so it's something we can watch together. And if there's one more thing Game of Thrones is all about, it's family.

Purity

A new season of Game of Thrones is upon us, and... well, I'm looking forward to seeing Diana Rigg. Otherwise, the TV series is more of a fact on the ground than something I'm likely to get excited about. I'm going to try to get at some of the reasons why, using this Bryan Cogman interview from Rolling Stone as a jumping off point.

The annoying thing about that Cogman interview is the insistence on using pointless language like "book purists." I don't dispute that somewhere, out there in the vast wasteland of the Internet, there's someone who could adequately be called a book purist. But most criticism doesn't come from people who prefer the books over the show out of reflexive stubbornness. It comes from people who prefer the books because the books are less likely than the show to indulge laughable genre cliches, whitewash complex protagonists, diminish and objectify female characters, and generally prioritize cheap, familiar entertainment over anything more ambitious. A Song of Ice and Fire is not high art, but it's not from a tradition where you'd expect it to be. HBO drama, on the other hand, does create those expectations, and Game of Thrones resolutely fails to live up to them. The production values are high, the cast is solid, the direction is competent within its frame of reference, but the writing falls flat. And here's the thing: this isn't primarily a question of faithfulness to the source material. You could change the plot of A Song of Ice and Fire fare more radically than Game of Thrones does, and still wind with up something that was true to its themes while elevating the material above its pedestrian popular-fiction origins. You could, in short, make something that belongs on HBO, instead of something with an HBO budget that belongs on Showtime.

Let's look at the scene Cogman was discussing when he uttered the useless phrase "book purists." The contrived Robert/Cersei scene from season one. Lots of people love this scene. George R. R. Martin loves this scene, somehow. Cogman cites it as a freeing moment in Benioff and Weiss' evolution, the point at which they realized it was OK to make shit up to serve their story. The scene has issues simply as drama-- "seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind" is a terrible piece of on-the-nose writing; Martin's dialogue, crafted to work alongside internal monologue and in the not-superficially-realistic mode of popular fiction, has its limitations, but he hasn't came up with anything that unbelievable-- but its deeper problem is one of adaptation.

Cogman defends the scene by suggesting that even if it isn't true to "book" Cersei and Robert, it's true to "show" Cersei and Robert. But that's the problem: because the TV show is generally so faithful, often to the point of lifting dialogue straight from the novels, most of the time "show" Cersei and Robert are "book" Cersei and Robert. Robert in particular hardly ever shows the contemplative side on display here, though the "first kill" conversation (which, in the interest of fairness, I'll say I like) is an exception. The show's softened take on Cersei is brought across more often, as in the crude, emotionally manipulative dead baby conversation with Catelyn earlier in the season. But the harder, nastier Cersei of the books is also present, as in the scene, drawn directly from the books, where Ned confronts her about the incest. That scene is pretty well impossible to square with the Robert/Cersei exchange, which has wandered in from a fundamentally different conception of the characters. The Robert and Cersei of the books are degraded, unpleasant human beings, and that fact determines their actions; you can't chuck in a random moment of more sympathetic behavior, then have them go back to acting like grotesques.* The problem isn't making the change; it's not thinking the change through in the context of the larger story.

The Cogman interview points to another, somewhat different example of this failure, one that brings us back to Daenerys and the House of Undying. ("Back" in the sense of their having been the subject of my first post nine months ago; I don't blame you for having forgotten.) Cogman says that for Dany "Season Two was basically about her screwing up a lot and learning from her mistakes." I'd love to see him pressed on that claim-- what precisely she learned, and what those mistakes were, apart from letting herself get caught up in Generic Fantasy Intrigue #27, complete with Stock Evil Wizard-- because the central feature of Dany's arc in season two is its pointlessness. In the books, Qarth is not the most essential storyline, but it provides Daenerys with uncertain prophecies to which she continues to respond in later volumes, and it gives the reader even more hints about the future, as well as helping to make clear the increasing significance of magic to the series. TV Qarth does none of those things. Well, I suppose Pyat Pree's magical cloning powers might fall under the "increasing significance of magic" banner, but that's not really enough to justify eight episodes. The key is the reduction of the House of the Undying from a major piece of eerie foreshadowing to a brief bit of fanservice with Dany's beloved rapist husband. Again, it's not the change that rankles, it's the failure to replace the removal of the storyline's payoff with anything else. Benioff and Weiss might just as well have had Dany go straight to Slaver's Bay, except that that would throw the timeline out of whack.

What weakens the dramatic integrity of adaptations like Game of Thrones and the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films is not that the ones doing them are not fans, but that they are fans... on a superficial level. Jackson, Benioff, and Weiss love moments, images, characters, and insist on shoehorning those things into storylines where, due to changes made by their non-fannish sides, those things no longer fit. (This is a good essay on how Peter Jackson falls into that trap.) They cut down half the forest, and expect individual trees to retain their beauty devoid of context, devoid of roots. "Purists" are accused of focusing on small things, but as any good critic can tell you, sometimes small things matter. Sometimes, without small things, all you have is empty grandeur.

*This points to one of the fundamental differences between the books and the show: their approach to moral ambiguity. Martin's moral ambiguity, while it does include characters who are capable of being both nice and nasty, also includes characters who are consistently nasty, but shown to be working, in their twisted way and within the twisted values of their society, from recognizable human motives. In other words, while not psychologically realistic in the way of stream-of-consciousness literature, the novels look at the psychology of monstrous behavior. Benioff and Weiss don't seem interested in that, and would prefer to make the less pleasant central characters more superficially likable by giving them banal moments of "humanity:" Cersei as grieving mother, Tywin Lannister as grandfatherly mentor. But don't let me get started on the Tywin/Arya scenes.

Door Number One

Lately, in lieu of book choices that would require more sustained effort, I've been rereading random chapters and passages from A Song of Ice and Fire. Over the past two days, for example, I reread all twelve Tyrion chapters from A Dance with Dragons, and this morning I reread the two Jon Connington chapters. (I hadn't noticed until now how hard much of a cruel streak he has. I mean, dude is taking Tywin Lannister as a leadership model; this is not good.) And last night I was flipping through the House of the Undying chapter from A Clash of Kings.

The House of the Undying has been at the back of my mind for a few weeks now, after its equivalent appeared on the TV series and there was a fair amount of fan discussion about how disappointing the sequence was or wasn't, how important or impressive the chapter was or wasn't, how important the absence of mystery and foreshadowing from the show was or wasn't. I'm not exactly interested in raking over those issues again here, although on rereading I did get a fresh sense of the chapter's eerie potential and how possible it would have been to capture some of that on the TV series' budget. (A darkened room, creepy extras, whispering voices, maybe a CGI heart: hardly breaking the bank, even if you've already done that making the Blackwater kewl enough.)  What I want to talk about at the moment is this.

She fled from him, but only as far as the next open door. I know this room, she thought. She remembered those great wooden beams and the carved animal faces that adorned them. And there outside the window, a lemon tree! The sight of it made her heart ache with longing. It is the house with the red door, the house in Braavos. No sooner had she thought it than old Ser Willem came into the room, leaning heavily on his stick. “Little princess, there you are,” he said in his gruff kind voice. “Come,” he said, “come to me, my lady, you’re home now, you’re safe now.” His big wrinkled hand reached for her, soft as old leather, and Dany wanted to take it and hold it and kiss it, she wanted that as much as she had ever wanted anything. Her foot edged forward, and then she thought, He’s dead, he’s dead, the sweet old bear, he died a long time ago. She backed away and ran.

That couldn't have been in the TV series even if they'd been willing to create meaningful new sets for the House of the Undying, because the context that makes it meaningful has been omitted. From the first Daenerys chapter in A Game of Thrones:

She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again, just before the Usurper’s brother set sail with his new-built fleet. By then only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had remained of the Seven Kingdoms that had once been theirs. It would not remain for long. The garrison had been prepared to sell them to the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.

She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her “Little Princess” and sometimes “My Lady,” and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever... All Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

So the house with the red door is part of Dany's backstory, a memory of childhood safety and security. And if it had only been mentioned in that one early passage, its absence from the TV show wouldn't even be worth discussing. But that's not the case. It shows up in the House of the Undying, not once but twice: among the flash of images from Dany's past and future when she meets the Undying is "A little girl ran barefoot toward a big house with a red door." And there are many other examples, which I'll get to in a moment.

My point here is not that any recurring image from A Song of Ice and Fire is too important to be omitted from the TV show. In fact, I don't particularly care how faithful the show is to the books, provided it offers quality drama in its own right. When I use material from the books to adversely criticize the show (and I plan to continue doing so in the future, though relatively few of my blogging plans come to fruition), I do so because I think the books, whatever their flaws, generally offer more complicated and worthwhile characterization than the show. The trouble is that this characterization is often only mentioned briefly, suggested, or alluded to symbolically, which makes it easy to miss in the mass of text that is A Song of Ice and Fire, especially if your primary concern is figuring out how to translate that mass into TV storytelling. It might seem that Renly's peach, or the scene alluded to in the name of this blog, are small things, but they have unexpected weight, and are arguably more significant than things that take many more words to describe. The house with the red door is one such.

Later in A Game of Thrones, as she crosses the Dothraki sea, Daenerys thinks again about her yearning for home.

But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King's Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind's eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind's eye, all the doors were red.

Red door imagery again, with the implication that Dany, who in this chapter finds the strength necessary to survive her new life, begins thinking about dragons and dragon eggs, and becomes pregnant, has merged her child's yearning for that house in Braavos with an adult desire for a triumphant return to Westeros.

Later still, after the death of Viserys, she thinks about "home" again:

Home? The word made her feel sad. Ser Jorah had his Bear Island, but what was home to her? A few tales, names recited as solemnly as the words of a prayer, the fading memory of a red door . . . was Vaes Dothrak to be her home forever? When she looked at the crones of the dosh khaleen, was she looking at her future?

But is her memory of the red door really fading? Later in that same chapter, at the Western Market of Vaes Dothrak, she takes as a gift 

a dozen flasks of scented oils, the perfumes of her childhood; she had only to close her eyes and sniff them and she could see the big house with the red door once more.

Then there are her fever dreams after Rhaego's death.

Wings shadowed her fever dreams.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She was walking down a long hall beneath high stone arches. She could not look behind her, must not look behind her. There was a door ahead of her, tiny with distance, but even from afar, she saw that it was painted red. She walked faster, and her bare feet left bloody footprints on the stone.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She saw sunlight on the Dothraki sea, the living plain, rich with the smells of earth and death. Wind stirred the grasses, and they rippled like water. Drogo held her in strong arms, and his hand stroked her sex and opened her and woke that sweet wetness that was his alone, and the stars smiled down on them, stars in a daylight sky. “Home,” she whispered as he entered her and filled her with his seed, but suddenly the stars were gone, and across the blue sky swept the great wings, and the world took flame.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Ser Jorah’s face was drawn and sorrowful. “Rhaegar was the last dragon,” he told her. He warmed translucent hands over a glowing brazier where stone eggs smouldered red as coals. One moment he was there and the next he was fading, his flesh colorless, less substantial than the wind. “The last dragon,” he whispered, thin as a wisp, and was gone. She felt the dark behind her, and the red door seemed farther away than ever.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Viserys stood before her, screaming. “The dragon does not beg, slut. You do not command the dragon. I am the dragon, and I will be crowned.” The molten gold trickled down his face like wax, burning deep channels in his flesh. “I am the dragon and I will be crowned!” he shrieked, and his fingers snapped like snakes, biting at her nipples, pinching, twisting, even as his eyes burst and ran like jelly down seared and blackened cheeks.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon . . . ”

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon . . . ”

She could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb. Her son was tall and proud, with Drogo’s copper skin and her own silver-gold hair, violet eyes shaped like almonds. And he smiled for her and began to lift his hand toward hers, but when he opened his mouth the fire poured out. She saw his heart burning through his chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched her skin.

“ . . . want to wake the dragon . . . ”

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. “Faster,” they cried, “faster, faster.” She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they touched. “Faster!” the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

“ . . . wake the dragon . . . ”

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

“ . . . the dragon . . . ”

And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.

After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the fire within her, and the whisperings of stars.

A tricky passage to unravel precisely, eerie and disjointed as it is (between the House of the Undying, this, and the minimal attempt at capturing Bran's three-eyed crow dreams, it's pretty clear how little interest the showrunners have in dreamlike as opposed to gritty fantasy), but one in which the red door and Dany's dreams of conquest are again juxtaposed.

That's it for red door references in A Game of Thrones, and the two from A Clash of Kings have already been mentioned. The red door is almost absent from A Storm of Swords as well, but in the final Dany chapter we get this, after she wakes from nightmares and goes out onto the terrace to look down upon Meereen:

"Your Grace?" Missandei stood at her elbow wrapped in a bedrobe, wooden sandals on her feet. "I woke, and saw that you were gone. Did you sleep well? What are you looking at?"

"My city," said Dany. "I was looking for a house with a red door, but by night all the doors are black."

"A red door?" Missandei was puzzled. "What house is this?"

"No house. It does not matter."

 This moment, set against the wider context in which Daenerys is deciding to stay in Meereen, suggests that the red door remains her symbol of home; searching for it in Meereen is equivalent to wondering whether that city can ever truly be her home.

The red door returns in Dany's first chapter from A Dance with Dragons, where she "had been dreaming of a house with a red door when Missandei woke her." Note that Dany's first chapter in Dance runs parallel to Cersei's in Feast; both women are woken from dreams and informed of a death. But where Cersei dreams of sitting the Iron Throne and having power over her enemies, Dany dreams of the house with the red door.

Later, she dreams of it again, in a different context:

In her dream they [she and Daario] had been man and wife, simple folk who lived a simple life in a tall stone house with a red door. In her dream he had been kissing her all over-- her mouth, her neck, her breasts.

 (This is before she has taken Daario as a lover.) Shortly thereafter, Barristan Selmy, like Jorah before him, refers to Westeros as home:

Dany had never known a home. In Braavos, there had been a house with a red door, but that was all.

When Quentyn brings her the record of Viserys' betrothal to Arianne Martell, Dany thinks of the red door again:

Dany unrolled the parchment and examined it again. Braavos. This was done in Braavos, while we were living in the house with the red door. Why did that make her feel so strange?

 Perhaps because the reminder that even in that happy time she was the daughter of a royal house and the subject of intrigues is an unwelcome one?

In the chapter where she visits the fighting pits, there are other things Dany would prefer to do:

She would rather have drifted in the fragrant pool all day, eating iced fruit off silver trays and dreaming of a house with a red door, but a queen belongs to her people, not to herself.

Then finally, in the last Daenerys chapter, she uses the red door as a gold standard for happiness when remembering (with an ex post facto nostalgic glow) the crossing of the Dothraki sea:

Not since those half-remembered days in Braavos when she lived in the house with the red door had she been so happy.

At this point I think the significance of the red door references is obvious, but just for the sake of laying out the argument, let's take another passage from that last Dany chapter in Dance, when she is speaking to the phantom Jorah:

You took Meereen, he told her, yet still you lingered.

"To be a queen."

You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros.

"It is such a long way," she complained. "I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl."

No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.

"Fire and Blood," Daenerys told the swaying grass.

This is the crux: on a personal level Daenerys doesn't want to be a queen, a conqueror, a powerful person. She wants a simple life, a husband or lover chosen for her own reasons, a house with a red door. But notions of familial duty, the responsibilities of the blood of the dragon, have set her on a course that is opposite to her deepest, barely-acknowledged desires. And that, to my mind, makes her a richer and more tragic character than if she were simply a kickass dragon princess. The absence of the red door symbolism from the series makes Dany too much like the fantasy trope to which she is a response, and undermines the questions about power, legitimacy, and happiness that the novels pose. 

It's not impossible that some of this characterization will be introduced in future seasons, but the time to do so was at the very beginning. It would scarcely have been difficult or expensive to give Daenerys a quick retrospective dialogue (with Irri, with Mormont, perhaps even with Viserys) establishing the existence of the house and suggesting by the delivery Dany's nostalgia for it. Then the odd "red door" reference could have been added in later episodes, giving alert viewers something to note, an added resonance in her story of conquest and violence. This is the kind of (comparatively) subtle characterization that distinguished great HBO dramas of the past, made them so smart and compelling. Game of Thrones doesn't have that kind of sophistication. This is a larger problem than Dany and the red door; again, I don't mean to suggest that the absence of this particular nuance is a fatal flaw in the TV show. No: that flaw is the absence of any such character-driven thoughtfulness, without which Game of Thrones is simply an exercise in complicated plot, gritty tone, and lavish sets. On that level, it's successful enough. But in different hands, whether by sticking to George R. R. Martin's material or by intelligently altering it, it could have been so much more.