Game of Thrones – The Mountain and the Viper

The task of adapting A Song of Ice and Fire to the small screen brought cast and crew any number of challenges, most of which we plebs probably haven’t even considered. But the one that sticks with me is adapting the iconic scenes, the ones whose on-page impact stayed with readers for over a decade. It’s one thing to capture the slow burn of character development, stretched out over episodes at a time; it’s certainly not easy, but they can always reset and redirect between seasons. But there’s only one Red Wedding, only one Sept of Baelor, only one “Only Cat” (or not!), and only one “The Mountain and the Viper” – and for my money, this is Game of Thrones’s best “iconic” scene since Eddard Stark’s head rolled.

Let’s back up a little bit. When last we met, I talked about the sense of chaos underlying this season of GoT, and how the cast is shown to struggle with it or, rarely, thrive off of it. Much of “Viper” was table-setting, turning all those cogs and gears that we see in the intro to get Westeros to function like it’s supposed to. But where the episode did linger, it was with the theoretical pillars of stability, load-bearing elements of both Westeros’s structure and our own assumptions as viewers. Right from the get-go, a wildling raid within carousing distance of “the shield that guards the realms of men” leaves said shield sitting on its collective ass mourning its losses. Daenerys Targaryen dismisses her first and most loyal counselor when one of those things turns out not to be true. And the lords of the Vale, the proudest and least war-damaged power group remaining in Westeros, are plucked, roasted, and devoured by a coin-counter and a teenage girl.

Vance Corbray (R) didn’t say shit, cause he knows he’s made up for TV.

The last, of course, is really no surprise. We’ve seen Littlefinger do this before; he tells you not to trust him, and that’s how you end up trusting him until you see the knife. This segment compresses a good deal of scheming from the books, involving a minstrel pegged with Lysa Arryn’s murder, a mole among the assembled Vale lords, and another Arryn heir likely to outlive little Robert/Robin, but the core’s the same. It’s the same with Sansa’s involvement; while her page counterpart takes longer to fully adapt to being Littlefinger’s apprentice, she develops the same facility with half-truths and necessary omissions, and these proud lords and ladies buy in just as easily. It’s a strong choice on the show’s behalf to promote Sansa to Assistant Schemer so quickly, and one I’m sure will draw some fan backlash. The fact is, Sansa’s a survivor, just like her sister, doing what she has to do to survive a brutal world under the tutelage of an older teacher with unclear intentions. (We’ll get back to Arya in a bit).

The Night’s Watch’s collective haplessness might be a little overplayed – in the books, there really is no leadership structure at this point, with Alliser Thorne and Janos Slynt yet to reach the wall, and Styr’s band of wildlings makes a beeline for Castle Black as opposed to coordinating with Mance’s larger force. But the essential problem remains the insufficiency of the Watch’s traditional methods and role. Team Snow is likely the best of the bunch, but all they have at this stage is gallows humor and a species of optimism founded on the inability of things to get much worse. If they’re going to survive the tide of barbarians and the much worse things coming after them, they’ll need more than a brotherhood forged out of all being in the same shit together.

Daenerys continues to handle chaos a little better, or at least, with more aplomb and style. I’m kind of disappointed in the show’s handling of Jorah, shunting him well to the background for most of the past season and a half only to give him a quick hope spot before the inevitable happened. Part of it’s the lack of Daenerys’s interior monologue, but her dismissal of her oldest friend lacked the impact of the book scene, or really, the depth of his betrayal. I think part of it is that book-Daenerys spends a little more time ruminating over the loss of her child; on-screen, we haven’t heard one word of poor Rhaego since the vision in Season 2, and so Dany’s accusation that Jorah endangered her son rings a little hollow. On the other hand, given Iain Glen’s credibility and skills, it’s a sure thing that we’ll be seeing him again, and without going into detail I expect they’ll beef up his level of material a bit from his book counterpart. (Stupid handsome Jorah.)

“Hooray, Dad, you finally discovered Google Maps. Good job.”

So what remains when you start knocking down pillars and dissolving institutions? New ones crop up to replace them, and sometimes, they are unspeakably awful. Roose Bolton, master of geography, might prefer an orderly and peaceful sort of tyranny, but that flayed man on all his flags isn’t just there for show. And no legitimization or Lion King moment is going to make Ramsay a just ruler, not when a quick glance at what’s left of Theon Greyjoy can tell anyone just what kind of people the Boltons are. Say what you will about Theon’s family, but the Ironborn take what they need and go; the Boltons are home to stay, and that’s unlikely to be good for anyone. They might have initially appeared to be Tywin and Joffrey with fur cloaks and flensing knives, but Ramsay appears to have a loyalty and a unity of purpose that Joffrey, whether due to generational separation, age, or just being a different brand of psychopath, fatally failed to grow into.

Not that it harmed his grandfather. At the end of the day, Tywin Lannister is the pillar that cannot be knocked down. The climax of “Viper,” the thrilling, horrifying, stomach-churning five minutes (was it only that long?) that everyone’s going to remember, was an even more audacious gambit than we might’ve expected from Oberyn Martell. We knew he was ultimately aiming for Tywin, and we knew he was a man to take seriously, but GoT had lulled us into the sort of scheming that characterized King’s Landing. People like Varys and Cersei and even Tyrion, setting up dominoes to knock them down, playing the long game, taking necessary risks with a certain amount of insurance. It’s not that they were necessarily safer than Oberyn, a spear’s length from the unstoppable death machine that was Gregor Clegane, but they at least had the luxury of time and distance. The Dornish prince was another smiling courtier playing an inscrutable game, but he was also the Red Viper, waiting for his moment to strike. If he’d extracted a confession from Gregor Clegane, it’s not hard to picture him calling Tywin into the circle; or riding away in the dead of night to raise Dorne’s armies, with Tyrion as his guest and Tywin’s guilt as his rallying cry; or just hucking the spear through Tywin and fighting his way out in the chaos.

But that wasn’t what happened. As quickly as Oberyn acted, he got ahead of himself, and just like all of King’s Landing’s other also-rans he misunderstood the fundamental nature of chaos. You don’t escape it, you don’t control it, and you don’t let it catch up to you. You ride it, from one victory to the next, however small they may be. He had Gregor Clegane dead to rights, he had Tyrion in his debt, he had dissension sown among the ranks of the Lannisters and a gods-given protection in his role as champion – and he reached for more. Oberyn had a plan, and driven by righteous vengeance, as just a grudge as anyone in Westeros could bear, he couldn’t let that plan go. And he died for it, as painfully and gruesomely as anyone we’ve seen in nearly forty full hours in Westeros.

It’s not funny at all; it’s pretty much the worst thing. But Arya Stark might laugh. She’s on board with the hilarity of the world’s basic awfulness. It’s not necessarily that everything in Westeros is suffering, that everyone’s family is dying at the most dramatically appropriate times; Arya probably knows that that’s her particular not-very-funny joke. It’s not that the bad people always win; ask Gregor Clegane, one of the world’s worst people by any measure, if he enjoyed his victory. It’s that good or bad, great or small, anyone can be killed, and it doesn’t always mean that you deserved it. Sometimes, it doesn’t mean any more than the actions of a moron crushing beetles with a rock. Now that’s funny.

Pretty much sums up their entire season, to be honest.

Stray Thoughts

-I referenced Tyrion and Jaime’s “beetles” talk because I felt like I should, but that was one of two scenes in this episodes of which I’m not quite sure of the point. It was well-acted and Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are always a joy together, but as to what they were actually talking about and why…well, that’s my best guess above. Cousin Orson was crushing beetles because beetles get crushed. I’d rather they’d talked about Shae.

-The other bit that mystified me was the scenes with Grey Worm and Missandei. Again, good actors, and very cool to see a couple of the show’s few characters of color get a moment in the spotlight, but they’re going to have to tie it to something. With the cast expanding faster than Benioff & Weiss can kill them, the show doesn’t really have the minutes to spare on isolated side characters, most particularly in a dead-end romance. Hopefully this goes somewhere.

-Let’s have a round of applause for Pedro Pascal. Oberyn is a fan favorite, the very definition of too cool to live, and he handled that beautifully throughout the season, right up through the acrobatic demands of his duel. But I’m most impressed with the way he died; after spend all his time as the baddest man on the screen, Oberyn went out in a way that was decidedly not cool, suave, or sexy. And Pedro sold the hell out of it. Take my word for it, you don’t have to rewatch the scene.

-You probably don’t want to rewatch that scene. Take my word for that, too.

-The fight leading up to it, now that’s worth rewatching. It’s easy for medieval pieces, whether fantasy or a given value of “history,” to get bogged down in fairly pointless combat because, I dunno, you gotta have a swordfight! But the cast, crew & stunt team took the challenge of one of fantasy’s most popular fight scenes head-on and succeeded admirably. It’s both a good piece of storytelling and just compelling action on its own.

-Example of said storytelling: Oberyn’s a flashy and crowd-pleasing fighter, doing fancy spear tricks and fucking with Gregor’s helmet. You could say he does it to play to the crowd, nudge them a little for when he makes his play at Tywin. You could also say he does it to motivate himself, a constant reminder why he’s risking his life in the first place. And then of course, that’s also just who he is – look at his smile after he flips away, or the way he mocks the Mountain after spearing him. If he didn’t enjoy shit like this, he wouldn’t be there, sister or no sister.

-Second round of applause for Alfie Allen for his mid-scene Reek-out (lol). It’s actually a good book-to-screen study; in Dance With Dragons Reek pulls off Theon pretty convincingly but we get to see inside his head and understand just how close he is to collapsing. Without that option, the show makes his masquerade more obviously tenuous and it works quite well.

-You know you’re watching Game of Thrones when a close-up of a freshly flayed corpse is a distant #2 in terms of squick factor.

-Yohn Royce (the bald gent who was the primary spokesman for the Vale lords) is a far more formidable figure in the books; the show’s combined him with his cousin Nestor and given him the latter’s characterization. He’s one of those minor book characters with a ton of random popularity, but oh well, more steely badasses where that came from.

-Last round of applause for Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, our third and most memorable Gregor Clegane. I think after tonight that dude is promoted to Full-Thor.

Ellaria speaks for the audience on this one.

-Loved the initial shots framing Littlefinger’s interview with Royce & co. I wouldn’t say it inspired sympathy for Petyr cause, c’mon, but it set off the class differences motivating him nicely.

-Still hope to see more Ellaria Sand. Indira Varma’s too good to be three-shot arm candy. A++ freakout, though.

-I feel like Ygritte sparing Gilly, while perfectly in character, was a touch we didn’t necessarily need. Not bad or anything, just kind of cliche. Let Tormund be the good guy there instead, he needs the audience credibility. (Or he could just talk about his wang some more.)

-Looks like All Wall next week, reminiscent of Season 2’s “Blackwater.” I am ready.

-”You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children.” Been waiting ten years for that. Chills.

Power Rankings

5. Gregor Clegane, on a technicality. I mean, he won. But man, fuck winning.

4. Ygritte of the Free Folk. Moment of mercy aside, she is a woman on a mission both personal and sociopolitical. Don’t get in her way.

3. Ramsay Bolton, heir to the North. “Oh good, he’s not a bastard anymore, he’ll be a productive and moral member of society!” -Westeros, stupidest place ever

2. Cersei Lannister. Like Gregor, won; unlike Gregor, didn’t get speared through the torso.

1. Sansa Stark. Finally levelled up enough to equip the Black Dress of Doom, and more importantly, is taking agency for the first time in a long time. Careful with that axe, Petyr.