Rhapsodies

Well last night a visit to a friends after spending some time at the Asian Art Museum led to something I wasn’t planning to get to do until sometime next year… See the premier of Game of Thrones season three!!

As mentioned earlier is I’ve been going through the books at a fairly good pace and one of the things I’ve been finding about watching the adaption is all of the little changes that had to be made in order for the show to work. All of the smaller subplots that had to be trimmed away. Minor characters who had to be removed because while it is true a book can have a cast of thousands a television show can only afford a cast of hundreds.

Of course the problem… or at least the challenge is that these changes begin to add up and after a while begin to snowball. While not necessarily a bad thing as long  the creators know what they are doing… But I figured that this season would be where the effects of all of these changes would become unavoidably apparent.

Based on what I saw last night it looks like I was right. I won’t go into any details to avoid spoilers, but it looks like Sansa’s storyline is going to be very different as well as certain details with Daenerys (for example a character who spends a good amount of time in the book in disguise is introduced as himself immediately (though slightly later than he was in the book) for the unfortunate fact that disguises don’t work quite as well on screen as they do in text.

Another thing about this season that interests me quite a bit is the fact that they are going to be splitting the third book, A Storm of Swords into two seasons. I’m very interested to see how they do this, how this effects the pacing and where they are going to make the split  (and most importantly which season shall have the Red Wedding)

But all and all I liked this beginning of the third season a lot. It suffers slightly by having to put down quite a bit of groundwork but that always happens in first episodes. My favorite part so far (Not counting the special effects involving giants and dragons) was the interaction between Tyrion and Tywin Lannister. Peter Dinklage and Charles Dance have some great chemistry together even when the chemistry involves mutual loathing in their two characters and seeing the two argue while the leitmotif of “Rains of Castamere” is played slowly in the background is breathtaking (another example of snowballing I’m noticing is Charles Dance’s version of Tywin Lannister comes off as noticeably smarter than the character in the book and I’m having trouble believing in him performing the blinding acts of hubris that he does in the book.

But anyway based on what I’ve seen so far it looks like it’s going to be a good one and I can’t wait to see what they do with the material next.