Game of Thrones: The Rains of Castamere

I read A Storm of Swords about nine years ago, in a public library, because I had to start reading immediately, to find out what happened next. So there I was when I reached That Scene – when the drums began to beat, and the dread began to mount. And who are you, the proud lord said, that I must bow so low? As you can imagine, maintaining library silence after that chapter was a bit of a struggle.

And because I am a big stinking nerd, and because so much of what I read & write was informed by ASOIAF, I have had that scene playing in my head for nine years. So approaching “The Rains of Castamere,” while there’s other scenes that happened, and some of them were very good – good enough that “Rains” is in the running for Game of Thrones’s strongest episode ever – there’s really only one thing to recap, review, analyze, explain, and relive.

Seems legit.

Early in the show’s production, just after the pilot was picked up, I believe, Benioff & Weiss went on record with a spoiler-free version of “We just want to film the Red Wedding, and we’ll be satisfied if the show makes it that far.” Obviously they’ve exceeded that, but it’s easy to understand why; the Red Wedding is one of the defining moments of the series, where George RR Martin, having pulled the rug out from under his readers once with Ned Stark’s death, doubles down and cements, once and for all, that Westeros is a place where awful things happen to good people.

So with all that weight of expectation, and all that power in the source material, how did Thrones undertake this task? Well, I’m going to take the boring middle road – it lived up to expectations. It did not disappoint, and it did not attack me in an unexpected fashion. Saying that the Red Wedding was “adequate” is kind of damning with faint praise, but when you’re talking about one of the most powerful moments in the history of speculative fiction, adequacy is a high branch to grasp. To put it this way, I knew it was coming, and yet when those strings began to play I still found myself sitting on the edge of the couch, hands clasped, twitching at every word, in dread anticipation.

Just…just cover her in awards.

In the books, we see everything through Catelyn’s eyes. There’s a more undertone of horror to it, but by then, everything in Catelyn’s life is shadowed by grief and dread. Catelyn Stark, the only sad woman at a wedding, is right to be grim & suspicious – story of her life, really – but without her as a textual filter, the show had to take a different take. Benoif & Weiss, and director David Nutter, chose to dial down the creeping horror and turn up the shock, and while it loses something, the episode was certainly not without a sense of foreboding. Roose Bolton’s out-of-character humor (he, of course, was in on the joke), the Hound’s cleverly spoileriffic remonstrance to Arya about the paucity of hope, and of course that damn song all subbed in for the continual sense, in Catelyn’s eyes, that something simply wasn’t right.

There were essentially two big things missing from the stirring shaggy-dog story of Robb Stark, the Young Wolf. One, of course, was the portrayal of Catelyn, briefly talked about on Dorkadia. There’s no taking away from Michelle Fairley’s stirring performance, but screen compression stripped away some of her agency, which is a sad thing for one of the strongest characters. A more explicable inevitability, is the reduction of Robb’s supporting cast. In ASOIAF, the Northern lords are some of the most colorful and well-loved bit characters in the book – the Greatjon sticks around with Karstark & Bolton, and they’re joined by the woman warriors of the Mormont clan, House Manderly’s dudes of gravity, continual Hey-Those-Guys the Glover brothers, and a whole cast of gallery Riverlands tributaries. Obviously something had to be done, but even still, much of the tragedy of the Red Wedding came from not only the death of the immediate Stark family, but their loyal bannermen.

And “Rains of Castamere” faced both of those and did, again, as well as it needed to. Let’s start with the latter; standing in as an audience emotional surrogate was Talisa Maegyr, the woman apparently worth losing a kingdom for. Talisa’s inspired a lot of hate, or at least annoyance, from book readers, and it’s fair to say that her & Robb’s love story wasn’t the most compelling thing that GoT ever invented – but boy, did this boost it up the list. The murder of the mother may be an old trope and a potentially cheap turn – all it missed was Greatjon Umber having one more day till retirement – but for a group so concerned with the bonds of blood and family, there was no better topper to the tragedy than Lothar Frey’s brutal trimming of the line of succession. I think going to the slasher-movie well to stab a pregnant woman was the riskiest move in “Rains,” and, well, I don’t want to say it worked or do anything to give the impression that my initial reaction was anything besides “OH SHIT THE…GOD NO WHY.” But Talisa’s fate was the one thing that would shock the entire audience, and Thrones doubled down on that card to impressive results.

So we’ll wind it up with Catelyn – Catelyn Tully Stark, daughter of one lord, wife to another, sister to a third, and mother to a king, and in her own right the most discussed, debated, supported, and reviled characters in the books. The show’s done an interesting job of playing with her diluted agency, acknowledging it in-universe while still, frustratingly, pulling matters further and further out of her capable hands. It’s easy to read one of Talisa’s last statements – “Your mother is less in need of rescuing than any woman I’ve ever known” – as an eleventh-hour apology to the character and the fans. And so, too, was Catelyn’s final act herself. Her murder of Joyuexe Frey was another clever use of cliche; in the books, it’s one of Lord Frey’s many sons, but using his wife instead was a necessary act of compression that became a cutting parallel.

Roose Bolton is terrible at hugs.

Catelyn keeps her word, like a good Tully, but in her final extremity she abandons the progressive, merciful ethos that she spoke for. Joyuese Frey didn’t deserve to die, likely had no part in the slaughter of the Starks, and her death accomplished nothing but adding one more body to the pile. And it was Catelyn Stark, another wife and mother, bound by Westerosi custom, who carried it out – as broken as Winterfell. I’m always going to believe that hers is the central tragedy of the first three books (with a close second place to poor Arya), and the show manifestly captured that. Catelyn may not have gotten the story she deserved, but she got the ending, and good lord, was it heartbreaking, no matter how I prepared for it.

Quick wrap, then: can’t say enough good things about Michelle Fairley. The Freys were appropriately vile and Michael McElhatton’s Roose Bolton is going to make a great archvillain for his section of the plot.  Hope we get some Edmure reaction next week.  Great action direction in the sewers of Yunkaii, in which GoT broke down and delivered a fanservice-y “heroes being badass against mooks” scene, but pulled it off with aplomb. (And really, you can’t complain about unrealistic heroism in this episode.) Life is hard for Jorah Mormont, and I have a feeling it’s not going to get much better next week.

It was the Red Wedding, and after nine years of picturing it, it broke my heart just as badly as it did the first time, sitting in the library, thinking “You son of a bitch, you did it again!” And maybe that’s what’s going to keep me coming back to the page & the screen; the knowledge that no matter how ready I think I am, George & his new cohorts will probably keep on surprising me. You bastards.