BLOGGING GAME OF THRONES, S5E01: The Crackpots And These Women

And we're back! If you ask me, the season five premiere of Game Of Thrones was a lot like Mance Rayder: well-done! Booyah! But seriously folks--our favorite show (except for Mad Men) has returned in style, and all of our friends who are still among the living are back to party with us (except for Bonus Jonas, apparently, which is fine)! So let's party!

We start with a flashback, where we learn that Teen Cersei did not have nearly the eyebrow mobility she'd gain later in life. But she still had plenty of sass and gumption! She and a friend visit a Wood Witch, as teens do, and this Outdoor Oracle (this Forest Fortune-Teller? Copse-y Cassandra?) gives Teen Cersei a startling and, as she now knows, pretty god-damned accurate prophecy. I know that hindsight is always 20/20 with this shit, but "your kids will all get murdered" is not exactly some kind of vague Nostradamus-y aphorism open to retroactive interpretation.

In the present Cersei's mourning the death of her father, or at least mourning him more than Jaime, who is just worried about the smooth and efficient transition of the Lannister estate. And maybe he should be worried! First of all, I don't know how harsh the estate tax is in the Seven Kingdoms, and second of all Tywin clearly hasn't updated his Will in many years. The most recent draft obviously included the provision "Please bury me in my favorite outer-space-themed pajamas," so who knows what else is in there!

At the post-funeral potluck, Cersei runs into Lancel, AKA Les Cousin Dangeroux, who has gotten all Jesus-y in the intervening months since Blackwater Bay. His father, the potentially important Ser Kevan Lannister, is embarrassed by his son's piety and vowed poverty, but agrees that his new haircut suits him. I'm excited that the religious aftermath of the war is being explored here. One of the few things the later books in ASOIAF do well (more on that below, by the way) is expand their lens to track the social movements and other group dynamics impacting history. The movement outward is not unlike most high school history curricula, which I've always thought was a very nifty touch.

Meanwhile, Lady Marge is still in the outline phase of her scheme for power, as she has been for years. The Game Of Thrones has no room for procrastinators. Get some fucking Adderall and call us when you get a full scheme, lady!

We don't spend much time in King's Landing though, because a majority of the best characters are expatriates now. Tyrion is unboxed at a palace in Pentos, where Varys pleads with him to remain a player in the pending wars. These pending wars are finally the good ones, by the way. How exciting is it to imagine Tyrion meeting up with Dany? It will probably only take like, eight to twenty more episodes!

As for Our Lady D, she and her team are dealing with a covert uprising in Mereen from some Eyes Wide Shut-looking motherfuckers. An Unsullied (I think his name was Greyer Worm?) gets murdered in a brothel, and Missandei is too distracted trying to figure out what he was doing in a brothel to really care. I love that Game Of Thrones has two enduring mysteries. First: who is Jon Snow's mother? Second: Do Unsullied still have the dick part, or what?

Like a True Teen, Sansa is entering her goth phase gloriously, and she and Littlefinger spend this week ridding themselves of Bobby "Babyface" Arryn. Hilariously, on the way out of dodge they pass Brienne and Podrick on the road, who are so dispirited after getting ditched by Arya that they barely even look up. SIDEBAR: Did y'all watch the "Previously on" before this episode? I seriously do not remember The Hound taking such a big fall off that cliff. Was that an alternate cut or something?

Up on the wall, both versions of WoolyWilly are somehow still alive and still in power, but there's talk of an election. Technically speaking, the Night's Watch is still in need of a Commander, although for the life of me I can't even remember who used to be in charge. Was it one of those giants? Was it Force Majeure? Whatever.

The leadership crisis is agitated by Stannis and his family, who are wandering around creeping everybody out and occasionally setting Wildling prisoners on fire. One of those ends up being Mance Rayder, despite Jon Snow's (let's be honest) pretty half-assed attempt at talking him into bending the knee to Stannis. Mance's death doesn't feel that momentous, since he's only appeared on this show in five episodes, and for more than 60 seconds in less than half of them. Another king is dead. That's fine! We still have so many of them!

Now, I could say a little about Mance's death in the books, but it's just one of many deliberately confusing and needless decisions in the source material that the TV show is, thankfully, straightening out. Though I've read all existing books, and will certainly plow eagerly through others if and when they are published, I am not someone who was bummed by this winter's announcement that the show will reach the finish line first. That's fine. The books are not this all-fired holy thing that must be respected. Book five kinda sucks! By way of a (non-spoiler-y) example: back in Book 3, after the Red Wedding, it is strongly implied that Arya is killed by The Hound. She turns up again, just fine, something like 190 pages later. That irritating tendency of GRRM's is only amplified as the books go on, and by the time A Dance With Dragons is over pretty much every character could well be dead, but probably none of them are. It's bad writing! And while Benioff and Weiss ain't Shakespeares either, the show has heretofore wholly avoided such fuckery, and for that, I am grateful, and looking forward to taking a Mulligan on the many stories to come. The official position of this blog is "fuck the books," and this is the last you'll be hearing about them from me. Won't that be refreshing?