A Golden Crown

After last week's episode of Game of Thrones, which featured three or four scenes of significant new content, tonight's installment got back mostly to material featured in the original book. And while I preferred the few small surprises that went with seeing new scenes last week, it's not as though tonight's episode wasn't plenty entertaining.

The hour concluded with one of the scenes I was most interested to see brought to like from the page, the "crowning" of Viserys. It was a gruesome and indelible scene in the book, and I was curious to see if it could be pulled off for the camera without coming off silly or unbelievable. Indeed, it could. You don't feel at all sorry for Viserys -- an even more loathsome character in the book than he was portrayed on the show -- and yet seeing a death like that, you just have to pause.

Other great material in the hour was the entire Tyrion plot line, which allowed him to demonstrate his wit and his words to escape from crazy-town through the least likely of ways -- a trial by combat. It's stuff like this that made Tyrion a favorite character among readers, even though he could easily be considered a villain at this point in the story.

And without spoiling anything for those who haven't read the book, I'll just say that other material in the episode had me wondering if perhaps another major plot development was going to occur this hour. It didn't... though I suspect I'll be able to touch on that next week.

So, until then...