The Bear and the Maiden Fair

Once in each season of Game of Thrones, original book author George R.R. Martin himself takes on the job of writing a script for the series. Last season, he penned "Blackwater," the epic battle for King's Landing. This season, it seems he left the hour of "most major plot development" in the hands of other writers, choosing a different episode instead.

Perhaps after "Blackwater," which spent the entire hour only at King's Landing, what appealed to Martin here was that he'd get to write for virtually every character. Cersei, Stannis, Littlefinger, and Varys did not appear, but nearly everyone else did. Well, everyone who was a "perspective character" from the novel did. Well... except for Samwell and Davos. (These books have a lot of characters!)

It's rare, but this time the added scenes were not among those I found most compelling in the episode. Well, more precisely, I wasn't as satisfied as I'd hoped by the confrontation scene between Tywin and Joffrey. Yes, Tywin got in his withering barbs and firmly held the upper hand, but it felt to me like the real pinnacle of "manupulative Tywin" scenes came previously, in his face-off with Lady Olenna.

I do certainly want to see where the business with Melisandre and Gendry is headed, because that story has no connection to the book at all. In a discussion of this development with other book readers following last week's episode, someone floated what seemed like an excellent theory, that Gendry was being combined with another minor character to avoid introducing a new face on the show. He'd thus be showing up at the place where we readers knew Melisandre would be turning up next. As I said, an excellent theory... until this week, when it appears the two are making an unscheduled stop at King's Landing. It's fun to be in the dark on this one.

Ultimately, what I found most enjoyable this week were specific, very clever lines of dialogue. It's been long enough since I've read "A Storm of Swords" that I couldn't tell you whether they were taken from the book itself, or whether Martin came through here and polished up his own writing. Either way, the end results were great. The barbs between Bronn and Tyrion brought a smile to your face. The banter between Jon Snow and Ygritte, along with her genuine confusion about the concept of fainting, was great. And the button on the Margaery-Sansa scene, in which naive Sansa asks if she learned so much from her mother, was perhaps the funniest moment of the season.

Another solid week for Game of Thrones. Only three to go.