Game of Thrones: Kissed By Fire

Welcome to a Dorkadia review of Game of Thrones! Reuben is writing these from the perspective of a book reader & show watcher, but focusing on the show and using the books to inform his perspective; there will be discussion of previous book moments but no spoilers for future events. 

One of the best moments in A Song of Ice & Fire is right at the beginning of A Storm of Swords. The prologue, set among the enlisted men of the Night’s Watch, is all low-rent intrigue, pissing and moaning, and cold – miserable, nuts-freezing-off, borderline uninhabitable cold. It ends with the arrival of the undead army that ended season 2 of Game of Thrones, heralded by a third, terrifying horn blast; and then suddenly we’re hundreds of miles south, with a warm autumn breeze blowing through the hair of Jaime Lannister, the reviled Kingslayer, and we’re is in his head as he rejoices in his newfound freedom. That transition is one of George R.R. Martin’s most masterful bits of writing, and a great preview for the nonstop rejiggering of expectations that is Storm and therefore Season 3 of GoT.

Jaime, you dingus, you’re supposed to make HER swoon!

In the first two books, Jaime’s page count is fairly low, but he’s still one of the more despicable characters early on, a sneering, haughty jackass whose natural talents & charisma only make the reader hate him more for turning that power to such ends as “banging his sister” and “chucking an eight year-old out a window.” That most readers end up sympathizing with the Kingslayer is one of GRRM’s great triumphs, but he had the advantage of being able to keep Jaime an unseen enigma for a good long while. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s Jaime is a visible onscreen presence, and one of the poster boys for the show – the blond-haired, handsome knight in shining armor who’s also just a real shit of a human being. Turning that around wasn’t going to be easy, even with a bit of a head start just based on Coster-Waldau’s charisma.

This is all lead-in to say that there was a lot riding on the bathhouse scene in Sunday’s “Kissed By Fire,” where Jaime laid bare the truth of his betrayal of the king he was sworn to serve. And Coster-Waldau nailed it, in a rambling speech that can’t properly be called a monologue (Gwendoline Christie’s Brienne was there too, and her mostly-silent reactions were key to the scene) but is probably going to comprise the core of his Emmy submission tape. After two and a half seasons of sly deflection (“People have been swinging at me for years, and they always seem to miss,”) we’ve met the real Jaime Lannister, and like all of Tywin’s children, he is a fucking mess, a boy whose most heroic act sent him down the road to line-item villainy.

Thoros just really doesn’t want to have to polish his resume.

That’s a lot of ink to spill on one scene, I guess, but it’s A) one of the show’s best B) the keystone of the episode, the best of a few revelations of human frailty. Shortly behind it, at least in my estimation, was the home life of one Stannis Baratheon. Stannis is a character who hasn’t always been well-served by the adaptation, his iron-willed dedication to justice coming off as alternately pedantic & downright cruel, but “Kissed By Fire” delivered some badly needed humanization by introducing his wife & daughter. Selyse keeps her stillborn babies in jars and names them, so that’s about all you need to know about her; Shireen, though, is another great child actor in a show that’s just lousy with them, and her scenes were an unexpected bit of awesome. You can just see a modern-day Stannis patiently explaining to his daughter that “Santa Claus” is a falsehood for the weak-minded; if Season 3 accomplishes nothing else in Dragonstone, giving TV audiences a reason to empathize with the last Baratheon would be a good job.

And oddly enough, events hundreds of miles away might do that. It turns out that R’hllor (mostly called the Lord of Light on the show, I guess because they don’t trust the actors to have a consistent pronunciation?) provides his faithful with powers beyond what Melisandre’s so far exhibited on Stannis’s behalf – like, say, bringing the dead back to life. The show opened with possibly the best swordfight it’s had so far, and then after it cost Beric Dondarrion his life, he got another one. (Presumably the Hound was too stunned to chastise him for save-scumming.) The Brotherhood Without Banners material remains a little underplayed, but in this case, it worked better than last week; Beric and Thoros’s campfire banter about the latter’s resurrection of the former might’ve been rife with HBO’s favorite brand of rakish, cuss-heavy snark, but Richard Dormer sold Beric beautifully as a shell of a man just going through the motions, making dark jokes about his own six deaths because he’s pretty sure that’s what he would have done when he was still himself. And of course, there was Maisie Williams, killing it as usual, in a rare sustained stretch of vulnerability for Arya. Do they do an Emmy for “Needs the Most Hugs”?

It was vulnerability all around in Westeros, actually. GoT is often criticized for nudity, moreso since it was disclosed that HBO literally has an executive producer of fanservice, but in an episode that might as well have been Game of Butts, character nudity was used to surprisingly tasteful effect. There was little sexuality but a great deal of openness in the aforementioned bathhouse; Brienne standing up to confront Jaime was a hell of a statement. Loras Tyrell, in turn, displayed his utter transparency (in a scene that deviated somewhat from the books, where his hopeless love for the dead Renly is a key motivator); he’s the Tyrells’ weak link at court, at least until it comes to swords again. And as for Jon Snow & Ygritte, well, okay, that was just delivering on a whole season of sexual tension, but it had to be done and it’s good for the characters. Good job, Jon, bringing oral sex to the benighted barbarians north of the Wall. (Also, not to be crass, but Rose Leslie might just be proof that we live in a merciful and caring universe.)

Let us salute Ygritte’s “Bitch, please” face.

But if “Kissed By Fire” was an indulgence of vulnerability, it’s surely a temporary one. Witness  Robb Stark, surrounded by enemies and losing his friends, following in his father’s footsteps and doing the right thing instead of the smart thing. I’m not sure I’m happy with the show choosing to have him write off going back North so easily, but the replacement plan of a strike on Casterly Rock is the kind of audacious tactic that the Young Wolf, book & screen, has employed to great effect. Robb’s storyline suffered in season 2 with the meet-cute & subsequent cliches of Talisa’s introduction, but the growing trouble at Riverrun has helped; like a good Stark, Robb is at his best when the snow falls and the cold winds blow. It remains to be seen how the rest of his season will handle the grim work to follow, but right now it seems like bastard Jon, for all his inferiority complex, ended up better – he’s down in a hot spring with a gorgeous redhead, and his half-brother has to choke down his pride and dine with the Freys.