Rhapsodies

This week along with my weekly viewing of season three I also finally got a copy of season two from the library. I hadn’t seen it before, or more accurately I hadn’t seen most of it. I’d seen all of the cool bits on Youtube which probably ads up to about three hours of material. Enough to know what’s going on but not enough to understand the context. I’d read episode summaries and  the books but it’s still not the same.) So now after a Saturday marathon I am officially and completely caught up and now that I’ve seen the whole thing in it’s entirety I am not disappointed at all.

There are lot’s of big changes of course the most notable being the use of Tywin Lannister no problem there Charles Dance is one of those actors I can’t get enough of and the way they use him makes him come off far more intelligent and dangerous than he is in the book. In a matter of fact I have trouble imagining Dance’s Tywin committing the blinding acts of hubris his equivalent does in the book. There are only two bit’s that I have a problem with both involve Petyr Baelish aka Littlefinger. Now like Charles Dance, Aidan Gillen is another one of those actors I can’t get enough of and Littlefinger is one of my favorite characters but having him show up on opposite sides of the continent was kind of pushing it.  On a similar note I’m having a little bit of trouble with the amount of visibility they are giving him in Sansa’s subplots certainly he is behind many of them but we don’t know that for some time. All of the material with Ser Dontos has been removed to the point where I wonder why they bother to introduce the character at all (other than as an example of Joffrey’s sadism that is.)

But all of this is just nitpicking and I’m glad we have a show that allows us to have standards this high.

The newest episode keeps the pace going well. As always I’ve found it all interesting not about what is going to happen but how it is going to happen. For me this was the episode that diverged from the source material the most. For most of last week I’d been throwing around some assumptions based on the book most of them involving what they planned to do with Loras Tyrell. A good number of them were shot down last night but at the same time had me asking myself many questions about how the pacing of the rest season will go and just how are they going to divide Storm of Swords into two seasons as they have said.

But i’ve said many times about Game of Thrones it’s not what is going to happen that makes it interesting. I’ve read the books I know. It’s how it happens.