Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: A- | 9 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Grumpkins and Snarks
By Monty Ashley | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Aired on 04.24.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.In the land of the east, Daenerys makes friends with her new husband via the exotic technique of having sex while facing each other. It's all very romantic, I guess. Also, most of the nudity is performed by Khal Drogo, so, y'know. A little something for the ladies.
Lady Stark won't leave Bran's side, which everyone thinks is crazy. But it turns out to be a pretty good idea when a knife-wielding assassin shows up and she has to fight him off with the power of outraged motherhood before Bran's direpuppy rips out the assassin's throat. She also takes a moment to ask her husband not to have any more bastard children before he heads south with King Robert, Arya and Sansa.
On the trip to King's Landing, Prince Joffrey interrupts Arya as she's fencing with the butcher's son. In the ensuing clash of wills, Arya knocks Joffrey down and her direwolf bites Joffrey on the arm. This results in Arya sending her dog away and Sansa's getting killed even though it is a good dog and didn't do anything wrong. Poor doggie!
Also, Tyrion and Jon Snow go to the Wall. But it's a long trip and they don't quite get there, so they mostly just have character-establishing conversations.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Opening credits? At the beginning of the show? How novel. I thought everyone liked to have at least ten minutes of show before the credits. Not Game of Thrones, though. And it's got actual theme music and neat animation, too. As before, the key places in the credits are King's Landing, Winterfell, The Wall, and a hard-to-read place off to the east called "Vaes Dothrak." By the time the camera gets over to the Dothraki area, it's practically sideways, which makes it hard to read. I guess that's kind of symbolic, though. You know, because the Dothraki are foreign to the rest of Westeros. Let's go with that.
Incidentally, did you know this was directed by Tim Van Patten? He's directed a lot of stuff, but I still unfairly think of him as the guy from "The Master" and "The White Shadow." Too bad for him!
We start with a long procession of horses. This show represents Good Times for horse wranglers, I would think. There are probably whole ranches full of horses just waiting to get their big break in Hollywood. They're the descendants of the horses that used to be in cowboy pictures back in the 1930s or whenever they made a lot of cowboy movies. These horses here are Dothraki horses, although I don't know that they're going to have different horses for these scenes. There are only so many cowboy ranches in Hollywood. [I think the Dothraki scenes are filmed in Malta, these are probably Maltese horses. Ireland stands in for Winterfell, and I doubt they transport them all that way. - Zach] Daenerys is among the riders, and she's moping. Some guy who is neither Dothraki nor the advisor from the last episode advises her to eat some food and drink some water. That's the medieval version of "Girl needs to eat a sandwich." He hands her some horse jerky, which she doesn't seem excited about. He has some stories of the Shadowlands beyond the Shire, and there are ghosts and an end-of-the-world story and I wasn't really paying attention. Tell you what: if there are ghosts, I promise to come back to this episode and find out what he's talking about. He tells Daenerys that things will get easier, which is supposed to be read on two levels. The horse-riding level and the married-off-to-a-barbarian level.
When they get to wherever they're going (that map in the opening credits is not nearly specific enough for my taste) [Here's a better one. - Z], Daenerys is helped off her horse by that guy she was talking to and some young ladies in leather. To be fair, practically everyone is wearing leather. And it's probably horse leather, what with the jerky. Viserys is there, too, because he doesn't have anything to do other than hang out and wait for Khal Drogo's army to go make him King. This new advisor appears to be an exile from Westeros. Or at least an escaped criminal, since when Viserys asks, "What did Ned Stark want you for? Buying from a slaver?" the answer is, "Selling to one." Viserys doesn't mind hanging out with slavers, apparently. In fact, he's very free with the promises of rich rewards after he's king.