BLOGGING GAME OF THRONES, ep. 5: All The King's Bastards

Wow! Shit just got REAL. I like sitting here cracking jokes, but at the end of this last episode I was fucking STRESSED. Be careful, Ned Stark! Be careful, Carcetti! I guess this shows how non-confrontational I am, but I seriously want them to give up this investigation. Fuck John Arryn, ok? Fuck him. He's dead, guys. Walk away.
The tournament is still going on, and Ned Stark finally shows up to watch some of the bloodshed happening in his honor. When Mr. Peekabo from last time loses a joust to one of the kids from One Direction, he freaks out and chops his horse's head off. What is this, an episode of Luck? Then Peekabo's brother, the dude with the melty face, fights him until he calms down. What's going on with those bros? One Direction publicly thanks Melty, and all the ladies coo appreciatively. But One Direction only has eyes for the King's brother. Once he shaves off all that pesky body hair, obviously. ("You don't know you're beautiful (once you shave your chest)"-One Direction)

Lady Stark, with her prisoner Tyrion Lannister, journeys to see her sister, who I guess runs a renegade court of appeals or something. On the way, their party gets attacked and Lady Stark unties Tyrion, who promptly saves her life and busts open the head of her Tusken Raider attacker. After that, she lets him travel unshackled, obviously. 

But the upswing in Tyrion's fortunes is brief, because it turns out Lady Stark's sister is a CRAZY PERSON. "Oh, I forgot, she's crazy! This isn't going to help us at all!"-Lady Stark

Lil Katniss follows a cat around the castle and ends up overhearing some vaguely threatening things about her father. But before those vague threats have time to metastasize, Ned has already gone and told the King to go fuck himself. See, the King gets word that Daenerys (who is totally absent from this episode, by the way) is with horsechild, and starts plotting an expedition to murder her. Ned Stark rightly points out that a paranoid fear of unborn challengers is a trait most associated with evil tyrants, but the King disagrees and Ned Stark resigns. Remember that amazing scene in The Wire when Cutty, fresh out of prison and back at work for the Barksdale crew, realizes that the game isn't in him anymore? He tells Avon Barksdale, and for a split second you think that Cutty's going to get himself killed. Instead, Avon is understanding and compassionate, and lets Cutty go his own way. It's really something. But this isn't like that AT ALL. 

As soon as Ned resigns he starts putting his shit on lockdown, dispatching his assistant, Hank Azaria's brother Barry, to look after his children until he can flee the city. Carcetti has one last lead he wants Ned to follow-up on, which turns out to be (drumroll please) another bastard child of the King. What do you want, Carcetti? He's like a cat who keeps putting dead mice on your doorstep, except it's bastard children instead of mice. OK, Carcetti, I see the bastard kid. What do you want me to do with it now? Outside the whorehouse, Brother Fucker confronts Ned Stark. He's finally heard about Lady Stark's little citizen's arrest stunt, and he wants answers and/or to kill something (That it comes at the same as Ned's tiff with the King is just bad luck. Or a suggestion that this would have happened no matter what). A fight breaks out, and Barry Azaria gets STABBED IN THE EYE. Fuck, I liked that guy. 

Ned and Brother fight, and seem pretty evenly matched, but then some random guard pulls a STRAIGHT BITCH MOVE and spears Ned through the knee. I thought it was over for Ned right there, but Brother Fucker walks away. Is that the end of the fued? Can everybody go home happy now? (See what I am like? How many more businesses must be shut down before Drake and Chris Brown bury the hatchet? JK I want that beef to continue until Chris Brown is fucking DEAD.)

There's not a lot of C plot in this episode. Dany is AWOL (we can assume she's getting angrily fucked and having weird cravings for hay and oats) and back in Winterfell, Ned's squire (who I thought was one of the Jonases) fucks his favorite prostitute. That's about it!

The best scene in this episode is one between the King and his wife after Ned resigns. Unexpectedly, Queen Eyebrow wants the two men to make up. Better the devil you know, I guess, but it's not the first spontaneous act of seeming goodwill we've seen out of her; earlier in this series she spoke to Lady Stark about the sorrow of losing a child, and this was RIGHT AFTER she and Brother Fucker attempted a 23rd trimester abortion on Bonas Jonas. It was a contradiction, sure. I just tried to kill your kid despite the fact that I know first hand how gut-wrenching and awful it is, but it was a contradiction Lena Headey pulled off perfectly. Here, the above conversation evolves and moves past a curious character moment into a damned showstopper of a scene in which she and King Meatsauce openly and fearlessly examine the state of their relationship. In short: they don't love each other, and he never loved her at all. He confesses that he's never gotten over his first, dead wife, Ned's sister. He asks her if it makes her feel better or worse to know. "It doesn't make me feel anything," she says, and I was like DAMNNNNN.