Game of Thrones A-Z (18 page)

Maisie Williams learnt how to sword fight with her left hand to be like the character portrayed in the books. ‘My mum and stepdad had read the first book by this time and filled me in on Arya’s character, including the fact that she is left handed,’ she told
winteriscoming.net
, ‘It’s not that they wouldn’t let me read the books, I just don’t have time to read much and when I do, it has to be school stuff mainly.

They would read me parts that showed Arya’s character. I started practising with my left hand before we started filming because I wanted to get it right but was not able to use my left hand all of the time because of camera angles, so Arya is now a little ambidextrous!’

POST-ANALYSIS

Despite the new surroundings and a host of new characters that would be integral to the series, the episode moved at a brisk pace, and critics seemed to be back on board following the somewhat lukewarm response to ‘The Kingsroad’ episode.

IGN
 noted, ‘[It] was dense and filled with tons of exposition and back-story, which may or may not have interested those new to this story, but I found myself hanging on every precious word.’

The ratings seemed to back that up as well, boasting a 10 per cent increase from last week – the highest yet of the series. It was given further credence as it aired in the US when news broke that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, and the whole nation was gripped by the live news reports.

Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things

Season one, episode four

Written by Bryan Cogman

Directed by Brian Kirk

‘Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things’ is a line uttered by Tyrion when asked by Rob Stark why he has gone to the bother of designing a contraption for the stricken Bran, which will enable him to walk again. ‘I have a thing for cripples, bastards and broken things,’ he smirks. It’s an a apt title, as the episode, debuting on 8 May 2011 and scripted by Bryan Cogman, has scenes dominated by the series’ ‘broken characters’ – in the more literal sense there are the scenes with Bran, but then you have the outsiders – Jon Snow the bastard son of Ned; Theon Greyjoy’s back-story of being shipped out to Ned by his father after he was defeated in battle; the Night’s Watch’s Castle Black full of outcasts and desperate men seeking to reclaim a place in the world.

There is also more focus on the Targaryen dynasty, with a bravura scene featuring Varys and a prostitute. The insolence is still there, but the actor also shows the character’s pain at having the life that was mapped out for him since he was born suddenly taken away. He believes that he should be king – it’s his right and he wants it with every fibre of his being, no matter who he has to step on to get his way.

The scene is also one of the early examples of ‘sexposition’ – a term that is used for the scenes featuring a lot of dialogue being used to explain the back-story of the characters, but set against a backdrop of sex and nudity.

Another aspect of the story is the murder-mystery subplot, which sees Ned investigating Jon Arryn’s death.

Embarking upon his investigation, Ned begins to follow some of Jon’s final footsteps, with the help of Littlefinger, and he soon finds himself meeting a young blacksmith’s apprentice Gendry, played by 
Skins
’ actor Joe Dempsie.

TRIVIA

Bryan Cogman was originally Weiss and Benioff ’s writing assistant during the pilot episode, but he was eventually promoted to script editor and had the responsibility of looking after the story lore for the season, to make sure the series was doing justice to the book’s mythology. Then, out of nowhere, he was asked to come up with a script for episode four. Thinking it was just a test, and that if he passed he might be in line to write an episode in the third or fourth series, he was stunned to find the day after handing in the manuscript that they would be using it.

Alfie Allen, who plays Theon Greyjoy told 
westeros.org
, ‘You have people around you, like Bryan Cogman, who help fill you in on the histories and the families and what has gone on there. I try not to make it as if I use the books just as the only source material; you have to make it your own things. Obviously getting into costume and so on helps get into character. But once you’re there on set, it’s cliché, but it just happens – you just do it. I don’t have any particular rituals. One thing as an actor that you have to do – for me anyways – is to use the experiences you’ve had in your life and associate them with what you’re doing on the screen.

It can be quite unnatural, like, I’ve done film where I’m being tortured, and of course I’ve never been tortured in my life. But I was watching the torture scene in 
Reservoir
 
Dogs
 and the actor in that did such a fantastic job with the desperation in his eyes, falling apart and still trying to hold it together. So I used that, I thought about it and used that quite a bit to help my performance. So I do draw on other performances, too. Because there’s things that are utterly unnatural and you’d never have happen to you in life, unless you’ve had a very strange life.’

Kit Harington and Bradley John-West, who plays Sam, were stranded after getting stuck in the Castle Black lift for over an hour after it suffered a mechanical failure –a nurse was called on set in case anything happened.

In the books Sansa learns how the Hound’s face became burnt via the Hound himself. However, because of timing, it’s Littlefinger that tells her in the series – a change that infuriated some fans, as they felt it was integral to Sansa’s and The Hound’s latter relationship.

The Hand’s Tourney is not as grand as the one depicted in Martin’s book or in Cogman’s original script, which detailed the event with such lavish scenes that hundreds of extras would have been required for huge singing set pieces and countless lords paying their respect to the Queen. However, for budgetary reasons these scenes were excised.

When Ser Hugh of the Vale is killed, Sansa and Arya’s reaction is real. The actresses weren’t present at the rehearsal, and so they had no idea his death was to be so bloody.

Joe Dempsie originally auditioned for Jon Snow, and a year-and-a-half later he was eventually cast as Gendry – King Robert’s bastard son. ‘I didn’t get very far and then when the series was commissioned,’ he told 
Digital Spy
. ‘I auditioned for another two roles, before eventually being cast as Gendry. It was a really nice process, actually, even though you’re auditioning for these different parts. You’re not thinking, “God, what am I doing wrong? How come I’m not getting these roles? I really want to be involved in this.” It just seemed like the creators, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, had identified people that they wanted to work with, and then it was just a case of which piece of the jigsaw you fitted.

‘It all worked out really well in the end because a couple of the parts I’d auditioned for before aren’t anywhere near as interesting as Gendry becomes, in the end. So I was really lucky to get spotted. Also, at the time of casting, I didn’t possess the physical attributes they were looking for.

I was supposed to be tall, muscular with thick black hair, and I was none of those things! So it was very nice that they saw past that and took a chance anyway.’

The King-Beyond-the-Wall, Mance Rayder, is first mentioned in this episode.

The huge book of lineages Ned reads was prepared by Cogman, who also wrote huge detailed pieces of other family lines that were never shot. He compiled the book through intense research of the books and internet fan sites.

The end scene, when Catelyn arrests Tyrion, was Michelle Fairley’s audition piece.

POST-ANALYSIS

The ratings were higher than the previous week, posting 2.5 million viewers. The episode was also a hit with critics. Despite its heavy use of exposition, ‘Cripples, Bastard and Broken Things’ was roundly praised for just that – critics lauding how the large scenes of character’s back-stories were delivered with invention and skill, making the mythology of the show the central focus in this episode.

The Wolf and the Lion

Season one, episode five

Written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss

Directed by Brian Kirk

First aired on 15 May 2011, ‘The Wolf and the Lion’ is the episode where we are left in no doubt that Ned Stark’s place in King’s Landing is an unwelcome one. He is being watched and manipulated, a pawn in a deadly game he does not understand.

Sean Bean, the actor playing Ned, inhabits a canny sense of world weariness in this episode, playing him like a man that knows he is in a place he can’t understand yet refusing to back down from what he believes is right. The King’s Landing is no place for a man of honour – such men have the same life expectancy as a petty thief. To thrive you must have more than base instinct, and possess the skills of duplicity and betrayal.

He is faced with such duplicitous men in ‘The Wolf and the Lion’ – both Littlefinger and Varys are plotting something in the background that involves Stark. His daughter Arya stumbles into the dungeon and hears of a secret meeting between Varys and a man named Illyrio, and they talk about events that have been set in motion and that war is inevitable.

Ned is faced with a serious problem – Tyrion’s capture by Catelyn Stark is sure to land him in a difficult situation. It doesn’t help that his relationship with Robert is strained after Ned refuses to endorse his plan to assassinate Daenerys when it is discovered she has a baby inside her. Fearing her pregnancy will rally the Dothraki tribe to invade Westeros, Robert Baratheon wants her assassinated.

We first see Tyrion in this episode in the hills of the Vale, surrounded by Catelyn’s ‘army’. The diminutive Lannister realises that Catelyn’s loud declaration at the Crossroads Inn that she will be riding for Winterfell was a decoy. He has little time to admire her cunning, realising that he is being taken to Lady Arryn – the sister of Catelyn and husband of Jon Arryn, the last Hand to the King.

They head into Eyrie’s High Hall, where Lysa Arryn and her nine-year-old son, during breaks from sucking his mother’s breast, hold court before ordering him to the sky cells – a dungeon where one of the walls is missing, and he faces a huge drop to his death.

The highlight of the episode, and indeed one of the strongest scenes of the entire series, features Cersei and Robert sharing an intimate chat. It moves from tactics to shared disappointments about the relationship, before Cersei shows a rare moment of letting her guard drop, and tells Robert that she has feelings for him – feelings that Robert can’t say he shares nor, tellingly, even tries to fake to avoid hurting her feelings.

The episode ends with Ned Stark being accosted by Jaime Lannister’s men outside Littlefinger’s brothel and being stabbed by a Lannister guardsman.

TRIVIA

The title refers to House Stark’s sigil (a grey direwolf) and the Lannister’s lion sigil.

When Gregor Clegane decapitates his horse, it was done via a blend of puppet work and CGI effects.

The scene featuring Loras and Renly as lovers was never so forcefully shown in the novels, with Martin only hinting at it in the book.

Loras Tyrell is played by Finn Jones, who was also considered for the role of Jon Snow.

Robert’s brother Stannis Baratheon, who appears in season two, is first mentioned in this episode.

One of the most intriguing scenes of the season paired Addy and Headey, as Robert and Cersei, as the two talked about what went wrong in their marriage and what could have been. ‘Lena and I got on like a house on fire,’ Addy told 
Access
. ‘We absolutely adore each other, so it was terrific to have a scene where I wasn’t snarling, “Be quiet woman!” at her, and to get – from our point of view as actors – to get to explore a little bit more of what these characters are on a maybe slightly more personal level than the image they presented as the Monarchy was intriguing.

That was a scene that David [Benioff] and Dan Weiss created. It was fantastic to have something like that to play and to really plunge the depths of who these people are.’

The episode is dedicated to animal trainer Caroline Lois Benoist, who died from swine flu.

POST-ANALYSIS

The episode kept with the series’ upward trend, posting more than 2.5 million viewers in America, and was met positively by critics.

Time Magazine
 wrote, ‘“The Wolf and the Lion” is the strongest episode of the season yet. 
Thrones
 has put its pieces in place and is ready to start putting them into motion. It began to let its swords do the talking (with unfortunate consequences for at least one poor horse).

And while there were some very significant scenes of talk, the dialogue went beyond Westeros History 101 to take the story in some 
very
 interesting directions. The most compelling scene to me, though it contained no

bombshell revelations, was the fantastic heart-to-heart between Robert and Cersei, in which they share a laugh at the idea of their marriage – their bitter, convenient marriage – being the one thing that’s keeping Westeros from falling back into civil war: “How long can hate hold a thing together?”’

A Golden Crown

Season one, episode six

Written by Jane Espenson, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss Directed by Daniel Minahan

Eddard is visited by Queen Cersei and Robert, and Robert strikes at Cersei for not doing what he wants her to do.

Bran is nearly killed after he is threatened by wildings, but Theon and Robb arrive to save the day, and they keep a woman named Osha, one of the wildings, as their prisoner.

Daenerys attends a ritual, eating a stallion’s heart, struggling at first with the raw meat but eventually swallowing it all, and it’s declared that she will have a son – dubbed Rhaego in honour of her slain brother Rhaegar.

He will be a great conqueror, it is announced.

Viserys is frustrated by the lack of progress with his plan and, after seeing how much the crowd adore Daenerys, he decides to leave, and attempts to steal his sister’s dragon eggs. He is stopped by Jorah Mormont.

Tyrion is summoned by Lysa Arryn to confess his sins, but he still insists he had nothing to do with the murder of her husband. He demands to be trialled by battle and asks for his brother Jaime to be his warrior – a request denied.