BLOGGING GAME OF THRONES, S4E02: Just Desserts

Now that was a party, huh?

I think Game Of Thrones should employ occasional title cards, like Parks and Rec does. Because while sometimes you don't need to advertise your title, when it's something like "Flu Season 2" or, in this case, "The Lion And The Rose," you just KNOW that some shit is about to go down.

And down it does go, with blood spurting out of its nose. But let's not eat the pie before the rest of the meal.

Ramsay Snow, that old chestnut, is still hanging out with our old pal Theon--or, most of him. They while away the hours playing the Most Dangerous Game until Roose Bolton rolls into town with his big dumb Frey wife and his creepy eyeballs and his friend Choppy McHandremover. What's the deal with Ramsay's lady friend with the bow and arrow? Dark Timeline Arya, I guess? I like her! Anyway, nothing new about the Boltons--they're still evil as fuck. Moving on!

It seemed like Stannis and company were ready to set sail for the north at the end of last season, but it turns out they're still hanging around on Dragonstone, burning family members and having the most awkward dinner parties in the world. Am I the only one who started to sympathize with Melisandre? She looked SO uncomfortable. I mean I'm still not necessarily Team Mel but I am definitely Team Mrs. Stannis Is A Psychopath. Again, no major movements here.

We don't check in with Mr. Ice or Ms. Fire, but we do pop in on Bran above the wall, where he has a vision that shares a lot of imagery with Dany's acid trip at the end of Season 2. That shot of the Iron Throne with snow falling on it is some striking shit, even if it is very Sucker Punch.

In King's Landing, where we spend the majority of our time, the long-pending Tyrion/Shae breakup finally happens. It's only grim because Tyrion and Bronn seem so bummed about it. Remember when the three of them had slumber parties during the war? It was a simpler time. Whatever--she had to go. The more significant coupling and uncoupling happens at what will come to be known as The Purple Wedding (I don't really remember why--maybe because that's the color of Joffrey's corpse's face at the end? Sorry, I keep getting ahead of myself!).

Joffrey and Margaery get hitched, and it's as grim and awkward a spectacle as you might imagine, though there are some delightful conversations between Tywin and Lady Olenna as well as Jaime and Loras Tyrell (we finally meet his father in this episode, too--Lorax Tyrell, who speaks for the trees, as you well know). Also, Ricky Martell continues to live la vida loca all around town, and everyone is happier for it.

And then Joffrey finally fucking dies, apparently poisoned at his own wedding feast. I hope you enjoyed it, you blood-thirsty monsters. It was pretty sweet, right? HAHAHAHAWWW YEAH.

Lotta recurring images in this episode which echo each other with no particular thematic significance. Pouring out wine, destroying books. I'm not saying you can't do Wire-style parallelism, but if you are going to bring it, you've got to bring it, you know? Which isn't to say that the last five minutes of this episode are not Zapruder-film-like in their rich potential for dissection, but I will let you all speculate wildly until next week. WHODUNIT? We owe them a beer, obvi.

BLOGGING GAME OF THRONES, S4E01: You'll Never Believe What This Little Girl Does When She's Reunited With Her Friend's Killer

Welcome back! It's so great to see our friends again in the lovely kingdom of Westeros, right? And everything is the same as it ever was.

Not a lot really happens--what this episode is really about is what's NOT happening. Cersei isn't fucking Jaime, Tyrion isn't fucking Lisbeth Salander, and nobody is daring to fuck with the Hound and Arya. HOW MUCH FUN WAS IT TO WATCH THAT POLLIVER DICKHEAD SIT THERE WITH NO IDEA HE WAS ABOUT TO GET GOT!? Oh man. I'm getting ahead of myself.

We start with Tywin Lannister, gleefully and symbolically melting down Ned Stark's old sword and making two new ones out of it--a phallic imbalance that he's apparently comfortable with. Then we hang out around King's Landing for a while. Tyrion and the Swagger Gang await the arrival of a royal wedding guest, who sends his sexually experimental and aggressively violent weirdo brother in his stead. Tyrion is like, "Oh, cool." Plus, his new wife Sansa won't open her mouth to eat, and his former lover Lisbeth Salander won't close her mouth to have some fucking discretion. There's a lot of bad moons rising around our man T. 

Out in the fields, Dany's dragons fight for their meals, and she prepares to invade yet another slave city. Kudos to the casting department for varying the skin tone among Dany's adoring followers, by the way! I see you, crackers! Good on you! 

The battle for Jaime's soul wages rhetorically and expositorally (that's a word!) throughout this episode. Tywin disparages him, Joffrey mocks him, and Cercei won't even give him like, at least a quick handy. He's been on the road for a long time, sister. Help a brother out. But anyway it's pretty clear that Jaime is a good dude now, but what he's going to do with his good dude-ness is an open question.

Who else is even still alive? Up North, Jon Snow comes clean to the dickish Night's Watch council about all of his sexy sins. Maester Aemon is like, "I'm into it, we're cool." But I take it our boy Jon is going to have some trouble with those other two (you notice that the two asshole Night's Watch guys look like alternate WoolyWilly examples?) in the future.

We're blissfully free of Theon Greyjoy and Stannis Baratheon for the whole hour, and so we end rather spectacularly, with Arya and The Hound very charmingly killing a room full of bad guys. I'd be perfectly happy if these two just wander around bickering and having adventures for a whole season. They will fill the Rust and Marty-sized hole in my heart.

Between The Hound's Wire line and the Pulp Fiction joke in Captain America, it's been a great week for badass intertextuality. 

How psyched are you that we have a whole new season stretching out in front of us? This is so great. I'm happy to be back. Hi!

I just read an early draft of the True Detective pilot episode, then I re-watched it.

So let's talk about the differences. Some of them are almost certainly just due to production practicalities, but others are interesting when we think about re-writing, which is something I should do more.

• First off, the title. The draft is "The Long Red Dark," as opposed to "The Long Bright Dark." All of the thematic, synesthetic color stuff involving yellow isn't in the script at all, so maybe Nic Pizzolatto was going another way with it at first. Or maybe somebody at HBO just misheard and the final title is a typo!
• The draft is set in Arkansas, not Louisiana, and the Dora Lange murder happens in 1988, not 1995. The “present day” timeline is 2010 in the draft, so in the end the overall timeline was also shortened. (In the draft, Hart mentions being partners with Cohle for 14 years, not 7.)
• Papania and Gilbough are neither seen nor heard in the script draft. In their interrogation scenes, Cohle and Hart speak directly to the camera and respond to unheard, off-screen questions. It's kind of weird to imagine. I once saw a production of Hamlet where they did that with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, though, and it mostly worked.
• The vast majority of the the one-liners (“He’d pick a fight with the sky…” “Just a regular-type dude with a big ass dick”) aren’t in the draft. And Rust’s nickname is The Banker, not The Tax Man. Tax Man is much better, right? 
• In general Hart is much snappier in the final show. Maybe when they got an old sitcom vet like Woody Harrelson they decided he shouldn’t just scowl at Cohle while he McConalogues away but rather should repeatedly and colorfully tell him to shut the fuck up. 

• In the draft, Lange’s body has a crown of thorns and taxidermied wings glued to her dead body. (Pizzolatto also mentions that her body should be depicted “as mercifully as possible.” I guess he didn’t know this would be an HBO show, eh?) The spiral symbol and the stick-sculptures are not mentioned, so all that imagery came in later. 
• The basic idea of every scene is about the same, but a lot is moved around. Early on in the draft, it’s heavier on Hart monologues and the chronology-jumping is steady and frequent. The final product switches up both tendencies, balancing the Cohle/Hart speeches and waiting to REALLY throw us around the calendar until at least the ten-minute mark. 
• At the crime scene, in the script, Hart tells Cohle not to jump to any conclusions. In the final version, he says a lot more, about the dangers of attaching an idea to a piece of evidence and prejudicing yourself. It’s a complicated concept that is important later, when Papania and Gilbough’s suspicions about Cohle become clearer. 
• There’s a little bit of visual description in the draft, and Pizzolatto calls attention to certain visual details, but most of the visual wit and mis-en-scene isn’t in there. Cary Fukunaga maybe deserves a little more credit! 

•  There’s a thread in the draft about the CID higher-ups being suspicious of Cohle’s past, but it seems mostly like a delivery system for the information that his undercover records are all sealed. Instead of that scene, Hart just mentions it in passing in voice over, and Cohle overhears someone speculating that he might be from IA. It’s a lot quicker and cleaner. 
• Added character relationship moment! In the final version, Hart actively chooses to keep Cohle on the Lange case with him. That’s not in the draft. (There are a lot of intra-departmental scenes in the draft, full of extra cop talk, which have been trimmed down and supplemented with material that feeds the emotional threads of the story.) 
•  There’s an actual visual flashback to Cohle’s daughter’s death in the draft, which is probably best left implied.
•  A prostitute’s name is changed from “Precious” to “Destiny.” Presumably because the Sapphire estate is litigious? Also when Maggie wakes a sleeping Hart, she calls him “Baretta” in the script and “Lone Ranger” in the final version. 
•  Marie Fontenot is not in the draft at all, so nobody says the name Childress or Tuttle. The threat of the Christian Task Force doesn’t materialize, nor does Tuttle. 

• Because of the absence of Tuttle/Fontenot, basically everything in the 31-37 minute range of the final episode isn’t in the script at all (canvassing, talking to Clarke Peters). And then we see Papania and Gilbough for the first time 37 minutes in. In the draft version, that seems like it was going to happen in a future episode. 
•  Without the Fontenot/Childress stuff, the ending of the episode comes up a lot faster. In both the draft and the final, it’s about the same, but Rust’s last line, “Start asking the right fucking questions," which was really essential to setting up the tone of the way future episodes would end, isn't in there.

So there's that! It's a great script, and Cohle in particular really jumps off the page. I don't know at what stage of the game this draft was created, whether the show was greenlit before or after. But it was very interesting to see and compare. For me, anyway. Maybe this bored you to death, but fear not: Game Of Thrones returns April 6th, so this blog will return to normal on...April 8th or so. 

BLOGGING GAME OF THRONES, S3E10: Sawdust & Diamonds

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, there's a particularly vile moment in which the Father and Son come across a camp made by fellow apocalypse survivors and discover, of all things, a human fetus roasting on a spit. It is one of those things that makes you immediately angry to have read it. Fuck you, Cormac McCarthy, you know? As such, I was happy to learn that it was not included in the film adaptation of the book. The world already literally ended in that fucking story, isn't that far enough? 

A Storm Of Swords's "dead baby on a spit" moment, for me, is the rumor overheard by our characters in the book that Walder Frey's men attached Robb's wolf's head to his own decapitated corpse and paraded it around the castle. It's a sickening idea, that this character you cared about would be mutilated in such a way. And it is only something you overhear! The show, of course, goes much further, having Arya and The Hound actually witness this vulgar bit of folk art. I seriously could have done without that image. But despite that, and despite a lot of other things actually, this was an enjoyable episode! 

Despite our established hatred for Joffrey, his jubilation at the death of Robb Stark was kind of infectious, was it not? I mean, what's done is done, and we gotta make peace with the storylines we have left, don't we? Also very entertaining (in a scene that was mostly meant to show the Lannisters learning of the Red Wedding and to re-establish the lopsided balance of power between Joffrey, Tywin, and Tyrion) was just how fucking OVER EVERYTHING Varys is at this point. 

Meanwhile, Theon's torturer is revealed to be Ramsay Snow, the bastard son of Roose Bolton, which is only significant because now everybody watching knows who the fuck Roose Bolton even is. "Ramsay Snow, the bastard son of Roose Bolton" was LITERALLY Theon's first fucking guess at who his captor was, six or seven episodes ago. But despite that, his story is a little more fun this time around. I enjoyed Ramsay Snow's little soliloquy about whether or not phantom boners exist, and I think we all enjoyed Theon's penis getting mailed to his father and sister. BABABOOEY!

And weirdly, I enjoyed Yara's hero moment in which she sets off to save her brother, despite the fact that her speech is literally just, "I'm going to get ship, and sail on it, and go to where Theon is, and save him." It doesn't matter how pedestrian the speech is--it is delivered so well! Is Yara Greyjoy the new protagonist of this show, technically?  

And despite the knowledge that in the book, Davos Seaworth's rescue of Robert Baratheon's bastard son from the clutches of Melisandre is a dramatic, Ocean's Eleven-like heist, I enjoyed the simplicity of his scenes with Gendry. They hang out in the dungeons together, they bond, and then Davos literally just walks out of the castle with him and shoves him into a boat and says, "Hey, get out of here." 

And then the most interesting thing in the episode happens. With Stannis and Melisandre in a rage and shouting for his head, Davos tells them about a letter he's received from the Night's Watch. And when they hear about the danger above the wall, both of them instantly drop their petty bullshit and recognize that this is a big fucking deal. For years on this show, we've been watching people in power receive dire warnings about The Others and dismiss them out of hand. Somebody finally listens, and decides to act, and it is fucking Stannis. Who the fuck saw that shit coming? I'm looking forward to watching those three work bickeringly together to fight The Others next season. And I hope Davos continues to learn to read, because his consternation at the idiosyncrasies of English are THE BEST. 

ESL Davos--let's make it a thing!

The only moment that rival's Stannis's Decision is Arya's first stab at revenge. Wandering by a group of soldiers laughingly discussing the aforementioned mutilation of Robb, Arya hops off The Hounds horse and stabs a motherfucker in the face. The Hound bloodily, awesomely dispatches with the rest of them, and rather than tell Arya to NOT hop off his horse and stab motherfuckers in the face, just asks for a warning next time she plans on doing it. 

All our other characters get brief nods, but nothing of real substance. Ygritte catches up with Jon Snow and pumps him full of arrows, but their storyline together seems far from over. Bran and his gang make it to the other side of the wall with an assist from Sam and Gilly, but from there I think they just have to walk a bunch more? Jamie returns to King's Landing, but his reunion with Cercei cuts away abruptly. I mean, I assume because the hot brother-on-sister action commences, but still. Then again, Jamie's looking pretty busted these days.

And it wouldn't be a season finale without a badass Dany moment, right? And despite the fact that the specifics and mechanics of her Yunkai invasion make no fucking sense whatsoever, I was quite moved by the final scene of the episode, in which the freed people of Yunkai swarm Dany, calling her "mother." Dany is the best.

And maybe we could talk about the slightly uncomfortable racial politics of watching a gorgeous blond white lady walk among a sea of worshipful brown people, but you know what? It has been a long season. Let's just sit quietly for a few minutes. 

A few links:

HERE IS AN INTERESTING VISUAL PARALLEL, VIA FUCK YEAH WINTERFELL

A QUICK NOTE TO BOOK FANS UPSET THAT A PARTICULAR THING DIDN'T TURN UP IN THE FINALE