Game of Thrones: The Bear and the Maiden Fair

We need to talk about Theon Greyjoy.

Well. That’s not entirely accurate. We don’t need to talk about Theon Greyjoy. I just feel compelled to bring him up, because there has been a lot of screen time spent on the misadventures of Balon Greyjoy’s baby boy and at this point, it’s not really taking us anywhere. One of the downsides of book-to-screen conversion is that unlike ink-and-paper creations, characters with actors attached to them can’t really be shuffled offscreen for years at a time. Sometimes that’s  yielded dividends for Game of Thrones, as with Jaime Lannister’s invented Season 2 material and the unexpected prominence of the Tyrell family. And sometimes, well…

Sometimes you get six minutes of gratuitous NSFW. Have Tyrion & Bronn bantering instead.

It’s not that any of the Theon material has been bad per se; Alfie Allen is doing his usual stellar job and many of the scenes are compelling in isolation. But seven episodes into the season, Theon is literally back where he started, eating up 5 or 6-minute chunks of time getting physically, mentally and emotionally tormented in increasingly creative ways, with no end in sight. “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” was a spotlight example; a vicious, crafty ruse that played on Theon’s weaknesses and took karmic punishment to a sick extreme. It was a great idea, well-acted, but in the end what we actually saw was six minutes of naked writhing and then the promise of some hideous torment. Viewers still don’t know why this is happening to Theon or who’s doing it, and while that’s compelling storytelling, it works better in theory than in practice.

From a reader perspective, knowing the identity of Theon’s tormentor, there’s some importance in building our nameless bugle-blower up as a villain, and pacing out reveals across the season. (Attentive viewers have gotten a few hints already, actually.) But the fact remains that the Passion of the Prince is just not particularly interesting television, and now that I’ve spent three paragraphs talking about it, I’m looking forward to not spending any more. Allen, and the gleefully vile Iwan Rheon, both deserve some momentum.

Offscreen: Tormund Giantsbane, running around naked with an axe for some reason.

Momentum, sadly, was not the name of the game in this season’s GRRM-penned episode. I liked “Bear” a great deal on first viewing, but thinking back, not a great deal actually happened; the big strength of the episode was George’s excellent ear for dialogue. ASOIAF’s mix of medieval  gravitas and fluent longshoreman-ese is a delight on the screen, where portentous lines such as Melisandre pointing Gendry to “Your father’s house” can come off just as naturally as Yggrite’s endless, endlessly hilarious trolling of Jon Snow. (“Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot,” and how much fun is Rose Leslie having with that? Also, big ups to Kit Harrington on some of his best acting thus far.)

But beyond that, this was really a run-of-the-mill setup episode for GoT – check-ins with various characters, a loose theme (the interactions of the various romantic pairings), and a big exciting set piece. It hit the usual high notes but wasn’t particularly extraordinary, and honestly, it was only George’s writing that saved “Bear” from being one of Season 3’s weaker efforts. It was good, but not the kind of sublime television that we got from “The Pointy End” and “Blackwater” in previous seasons. Still, there were strong moments – witness George getting to do his take with our weekly “Tywin Lannister ruins someone’s self-esteem” moment, in this case, a tremendously satisfying confrontation between Tywin and Joffrey I Baratheon, First of His Name. It’s a rare author who gets a fully justified, if not required opportunity to rewrite his own books, and I would love to see George write a couple scenes in every episode if he didn’t have, you know, a couple more novels to write. So this works well enough, and hey, Tormund Giantsbane talking about sex and yelling “HAR!”

“Actually, Ms. Of Tarth, I just wanted to say I’m a huge admirer of your work.”

And then there’s the big set piece of the title, the culmination of Jaime Lannister’s moral journey this season. In the books, living inside his head, the same events are portrayed more gradually, and with a dream sequence of the sort the series has sadly but understandably foregone. Here, on-screen, his return to Harrenhal to save Brienne’s life is less of an inevitability and more of a dramatic turning point, and while the bear fight itself was a little underwhelming (I’d almost have preferred a ferocious CGI beast to the obviously well-trained but somewhat placid Little Bart), Michelle MacLaren’s direction made the whole sequence a joy to watch. I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get one of Jaime’s best lines (“Oh, good. I only rescue maidens”) but the series improved on the books by directly linking his lie to Locke about the wealth of Tarth, and Brienne’s ensuing doom when her poorly-informed captor refused her father’s ransom. Book Jaime sort of glosses over that; Show Jaime accepts responsibility for the ultimate failure of his clever ploy and, because he’s trying to be a better man, comes up with a new one. Nice touch.

There was some other cool stuff, like the continually improving CGI dragons and great delivery from Emilia Clarke as a confident, enigmatic Daenerys; also an intriguing tidbit for book readers in the form of Talisa’s pregnancy (albeit the only interesting thing about a mostly yawn-inducing sequence of the domestic life of the Royals of the North). I’ll leave that one alone for now, as the actual weight of that fact remains to be seen depending on how the show handles events going forward. Overall this episode was mostly treading water. It mostly did so well, and got a boost from GRRM’s dialogue, but was a bit of a letdown given the potential. With only three episodes left in the season, GoT is going to have to hit the ground running next week, and pack a lot of action & story into three hours. But based on how the climaxes of the last two seasons have gone, I’m feeling pretty confident. Plus, based on the preview, Sam Tarly’s in next week’s “Second Sons”…and I think book readers know what that means. Awwwwww yeah.