The air is just a little bit warmer. Spring is coming and this is “Game of Thrones” season. It’s a bit ironic since the show’s first family, the Starks, live by the warning that “winter is coming.” Here in the United States, so very far from Westeros, the show’s March/April premieres mark the beginning of what amounts to a 10 week film festival. We get 10 one-hour movies that pretend to be television episodes with massive storylines and even bigger budgets. The following contains spoilers from the 3/31 episode.
The premiere showed us just how huge this season is going to be. The show has always switched between a number of stories presented from the perspectives of different central characters. That continues, but on what seems like a much bigger scale. At risk of forgetting some, the audience gets the perspectives of Jon, Sam, Tyrion, Bronn, Sansa, Margaery, Daenerys, Davos and Robb. Plus we never even got to Arya, Brann and Theon. Over the next few weeks some of these characters will definitely take a back seat to those who prove more important, but there are so many perspectives for our first episode back to the seven kingdoms. I need a bit of time to remember my Dothraki from my dire wolves.
I don’t think I’ll get that time though as conflict is fiercely brewing on many fronts. Tyrion confronts two of his always charming relatives in a pair of scenes that show the imp’s fall from power since the Battle of Blackwater. After attempting to keep pace with Queen Cersei through insults that lacked the confidence of last season, he gets completely reamed out by his father, Tywin. Something tells me, Tyrion isn’t just going to take the insults lying down. Peter Dinklage (Tyrion) and Charles Dance (Tywin) are amazing in the scene, the most compelling of the night.
North of the Wall, Jon Snow meets one of our new characters, Mance Rayder the king beyond the wall. Jon persuades him that he means to betray the Night’s Watch with a fairly unconvincing performance. This is how it goes down.Why would we trust you, Jon Snow?
Um, well because you should.
Okay, let’s give you weapons.
But if the wildlings turned around and cut off the bastard of Winterfell’s head in the first episode of the season the audience would lose our view of what Mance Rayder is up to. So fine, they believe him.
Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys is on a fishing trip with her dragons. The dragons do all the fishing, the Dothraki throw up all over the boat and Daenerys doesn’t do much of anything. Eventually she and Ser Jorah hit dry land and look into buying an army. The seller mutters insults in a different language before arguing the necessity of male nipples with Daenerys. He goes on to cut off one of the soldier’s nipples to show how tough the army is. I bet that soldier went on to die from an infected nipple hole. But we’ll probably never know for sure.
Ultimately the mother of dragons gets dooped by a warlock disguised as a little girl. Luckily Ser Jorah hasn’t figured out they’ve been followed by a very suspicious looking cloaked figure. The warlock lets out a creepy bug or something that tries to kill Daenerys. But she is saved by the cloaked man. He turns out to be Sir Barristan Selmy, the storied knight fired by Joffrey. So that’s where he wandered off to. Good to know. After setting a strong first impression saving the would-be queen from a painful death, he pledges himself to her.
Ultimately, the first episode proves to be a fun return to “Game of Thrones.” There is a ton of information to digest before next Sunday. Plus episode two will probably show us the remaining characters that were left out this week. So it will be like a second season premiere.
Admittedly we haven’t seen much action yet. Sam and Ghost got into it with a white walker and there was the already mentioned nipple cutting action, but I anticipate some fights soon. “Game of Thrones” is always a slow burn though. So they weren’t going to play all their cards in week one. But we saw some dragons, white walkers, a giant!, and got to catch up with all our buddies from Westeros. We find out Davos didn’t die in King’s Landing, Ser Barristan is still fighting, and Robb and Tyrion are mad at their parents. So far so good.
