By Montykins
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Ned wakes up in bed and discovers that he's the Hand of the King again. And King Robert's going hunting, so Ned has to stand in as king for a bit. Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane has been out burninating the countryside, so Ned sentences him to death and also orders his master, Tywin Lannister, to report to King's Landing. If that doesn't make peace between the Starks and the Lannisters, nothing will!
Meanwhile, speaking of Lannisters and Starks, Tyrion has a plan for getting out of the Eyrie. It involves promising his guard a large sum of money to get a message to Lady Arryn, but first he has to explain several basic concepts. He eventually gets it across and is permitted to leave his Sky Cell and appear before the court. He insists on a trial, which takes the form of his favorite scruffy mercenary killing one of Lady Arryn's knights. Tyrion leaves with a bit of a swagger, although he has to leave his coinpurse with the guard.
Up at Winterfell, Bran gets to ride a horse for the first time since he was pushed out of the window. He immediately rides out of sight and gets accosted by three people who are either wildlings, deserters from the nightswatch, or refugees from a community production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Two of them get killed, and the last remaining one is a lady who promises to be a good servant if she gets to live. Everybody wins! Also, Ros (who I've been calling "Rose") leaves Winterfell for King's Landing, leaving Theon Greyjoy bereft of female companionship.
Finally, and most awesomely, Viserys is getting more and more drunk and making a bigger and bigger nuisance of himself among the Dothraki. This culminates in him waving a sword around in their sacred city and threatening to stab Daenerys right in her pregnant belly if he doesn't get his golden crown. So Khal Drogo melts down his gold-medallion belt and pours it over Viserys's head. He makes a very satisfying clank as his dead body topples to the ground.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The thing about recapping HBO shows, aside from the fact that they're usually pretty good and thus don't allow for as much of the vicious mockery that you can unleash on, say, a The Event, is that they don't have commercials. A recapper doesn't get a break. A one-hour show on a broadcast network has like 45 minutes of actual content. HBO shows are packed. And on this show, I even have to pay attention to the opening credits. The credits! For the record, this episode has King's Landing, the Eyrie, Winterfell, the Wall, and Vaes Dothrak. There's an awful lot of land to the north of the Wall. Could be a whole continent. It's probably all covered in snow, but you never know. It could be populated by abominable snowmen or something. That would be a great plot twist in a later book: suddenly, Westeros has a yeti invasion!
Lord Stark, looking kind of sweaty, wakes up. Well, that's not so bad. It can sometimes be nice to wake up kind of sweaty. And he's in a bed, which is also all right. Cersei is looking down at him, which is probably bad, but so is Robert. Which could also be bad, actually. Ned tries to apologize for not being able to rise, but nobody else is in the mood for formalities. Cersei is specifically angry about Catelyn kidnapping Tyrion, especially when Ned claims that it was at his order. Nobody actually believes him when he says this, but it means he's not taking the opportunity to hang his wife out to dry.
Ned now feels he has ground for complaint as well, what with Jaime Lannister killing his men and all. He doesn't bring up the Lannisters allegedly killing Jon Arryn or Tyrion's apparent involvement in the (second) attempt on Bran's life. Robert decides to broker a truce between Ned and Cersei, but his idea of a compromise is telling Ned to make his wife free Tyrion, and also telling Ned not to seek revenge against Jaime. Cersei interjects that Jaime didn't even attack Ned; Ned obviously staggered out of a whorehouse, blind drunk, and attacked Jaime and his men. Robert ignores this story, and Cersei gets angry at him for not being sufficiently bloodthirsty. She tells him that she should wear armor and he should wear the gown, so Robert smacks her across the face, generating another few hundred posts for the "Is Game of Thrones Misogynist?" thread. She claims that she'll wear the giant red mark on her face as a badge of honor, and Robert says that if she doesn't wear it in silence, he'll honor her again. You can tell this show is fantasy, because even when people are apocalyptically angry at each other, they still have clever things to say.