Emmy Spotlight: “Game of Thrones”

The fourth season of Game of Thrones is wildly, frustratingly uneven. On the one hand it features series highlights such as “The Lion and the Rose,” “The Viper and the Mountain,” and “The Children,” but on the other, the premiere is excessively dull, and outside of these jam-packed episodes, there is not very much that happens. Call it a problem of adaptation; after all, this season adapts roughly a third of A Storm of Swords, while also incorporating elements from A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, while also inventing material for the show (a phenomenon that, as George R. R. Martin himself has noted, compounds itself with each new episode).

There’s another problem of adaptation this season, as well, one that has become steadily more pronounced at the series wears on. A Song of Ice and Fire is massive and sprawling, and it is structured in such a way as to expand, seemingly exponentially and infinitely, from the inciting events of the first novel. Even on the page, this continued unfurling of the narrative, expansion sideways rather than momentum forward, is tedious. On the screen it can be downright plodding. There are now so many characters, locations, and schemes, so many subplots to keep track of, that it becomes difficult if not impossible to track it all. The series does very little to mitigate this, and in the still overwhelmingly positive reviews, you’ll find most critics making excuses for this quality of the show.

There are successes of adaptation, as well. One of the biggest has been with Sansa Stark, who on the screen becomes vastly more interesting than she is in the source novels. This owes in part to some effective streamlining in the writing, as well as the dramatization of emotions that are largely internal on the page. But it also owes a tremendous debt to Sophie Turner, who has grown the most of the child actors on this show, and who gives a phenomenally nuanced and subtle performance throughout the season. Whether it’s her grim, tortured silence at Joffrey’s wedding, or her blossoming as a schemer under Littlefinger’s tutelage, Turner fully inhabits this character in a way that Martin is never quite able to.

And of course we must also give credit to Pedro Pascal for his lively, exuberant, memorable turn as the Viper of Dorne, Prince Oberyn Martell. Despite his limited presence in the novels, the character is a noted fan favorite, and Pascal’s performance delivers on this and then some. His death is crushing (no pun intended), and carries with it the appropriate emotional heft that keeps it from seeming like another shocking death for death’s sake.

When we have a mere scene or two per episode at most, with only a handful of primary characters, screen time becomes a valuable commodity, one that cannot be wasted. This season the writing team has played with structure in some useful ways, allowing large set pieces, such as Joffrey’s wedding, Lysa Arryn’s death, or Oberyn’s fight with the Mountain, to take up large swaths of screen time within episodes. Generally this has been to great effect. But it has also backfired, spectacularly, with the incredibly misguided “The Watchers on the Wall,” a special effects extravaganza that failed to have any dramatic heft to it. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have a story like Bran’s, which is both lacking in material, and which is spread over far too many episodes, with such long gaps between appearances that any attempt at building momentum is doomed to failure.

To wit: Bran appears in just four episodes. Jaime appears in nine, which may come as a shock, since the character is all but forgotten throughout most of the season. Episode counts aren’t a foolproof way of tracking this sort of thing, but they can be rather informative, and the fact that no character appears in all ten episodes of the season is certainly a sign of a disjointed narrative.

Now, there’s an argument to be made that Westeros is itself in a period of messy, formless chaos, now that the war is over and the Lannisters are proving poor stewards of the throne. It’s a good argument. But the series could do a better job putting this over in the storytelling itself. In fits and bursts, there sustained sequences of excellence, but even these require the viewer to connect dots across multiple episodes, and even the best stories amount to no more than forty or so minutes across the entire season.

I’m being perhaps more negative than I mean to be. When the season is on point, it truly is excellent. The episodes I call out above all feature series best scenes and performances. Take Joffrey’s wedding in “The Lion and the Rose,” a masterfully written, staged, shot and directed exercise in building tension that swallows up nearly half of that episode’s run time, yet leaves you demanding more time with each and every character in attendance. The big event is of course Joffrey’s long awaited death, but that’s not what you’ll want to watch again for. No, the real reward of repeated viewings are the many, many small moments that director Alex Graves packs in. Lena Headey alone is an endless source of entertainment, reveling in Cersei’s own delight at the extremely awkward proceedings, before unraveling totally upon the realization that her oldest son is dead.

“The Lion and the Rose” also excels where so much of this season fails, by unifying its many other characters and locations under a singular theme. I wrote at the time about Melisandre’s conversation with Shireen, which casts the world of the show in binary tones, light and dark, that are in eternal struggle with each other, and speculated that the season would hinge on this framework. But I did not pay enough attention to her following assertion, that there is only one hell: the one we’re living in.

Again and again this season, that point has been hammered home, and the most effective episodes are the ones that most effectively pull this throughline through each of their stories. We see such success, certainly, in “Mockingbird”, which structures the episode around three separate visits to Tyrion’s cell, while contemplating various other relationships as well. And we see it in “The Children,” by far the strongest episode of the season, as the major plots of the season, such as they are, come to a close, each with a far higher cost than our heroes, such as they are, could have predicted. Arya leaves the Hound for dead, even as we know, or suspect, that he cared more deeply for her than he would ever admit. Jon Snow burns his first love. Cersei is confronted finally with the reality that her father views her as no more than a breeding sow, and does not even credit her enough to believe the truth of her relationship with Jaime. Jojen Reed is killed, and Bran’s dream of walking again is dashed. Daenerys must chain up her dragons, as she slowly realizes she may not be quite so fit to rule. And Tyrion, who has long been perhaps the only honorable man in King’s Landing since Ned Stark lost his head, is a murderer, in cold blood. As befits the episode title, these are all children, victims of this hellish world, doomed to suffer pointlessly and endlessly.

But for all the strength and power of these themes, and of the closing scenes of the season especially, the season overall is ultimately too scattershot, too inconsistent, and at times too poorly structured, to make effective use of them. The show has always told its stories piecemeal, opting to jump around the globe each episode, checking in on a handful of characters here, another handful there, and it’s always been a conceit that has threatened to become problematic. Here, finally, the show’s scope has outgrown its ability. There are simply too many balls in the air, and just as the novels have become increasingly unfocused and unwieldy, so at times has the show.

The problem is easily rectified, and I suspect it will be, but that doesn’t excuse some frankly confounding structural decisions here. In seasons past, the penultimate episode has been a climax of the season, an ultimate statement on the themes at hand that serves to severely raise the dramatic stakes. And it’s obvious that “The Watchers on the Wall,” which occupies that ninth slot, strives to be so, as well. Instead it is by far the worst episode of the season, assuming on the part of the audience far too much investment in a character (Jon Snow) and a story (the stewardship of the Wall) that the show itself has terribly underserved. The idea that an entire episode should be spent on it is absurd. Besides being uninteresting, boring, action for its own sake, it also wrecks the pacing of the final third of the season, which from Tyrion’s excellent trial scene onward hurtled toward the inevitable conclusion of “The Children” with a growing sense of dread and despair.

The season is all to prone to these sorts of ill-advised and pointless narrative detours. Yara’s failed rescue of Theon is circular plotting at its absolute worst, clearly meant to fill time and nothing more, as the characters end up right where they started. Ditto Jon’s detour to take care of the mutineers, which serves only to give Kit Harington a paycheck and deliver an action scene in an episode lacking for content. With scenes like these, and with relatively thin stories spread too thin over too many episodes, the whole season feels as though it is treading water. Each burst of momentum is so welcome in part because it has been preceded by dramatic doldrums. Worse, the poor pacing underserves characters like Jaime, who after becoming such an integral presence on the show in season three is largely reduced to window dressing; or Stannis, whose motivations are needlessly obtuse in order to preserve a false element of surprise.

In a way these complaints are useless, since the source material is there and isn’t changing. With Joffrey’s wedding and Oberyn’s death out of the way, there is frankly very little of consequence left in the remaining novels, especially with Bran and Daenerys’ stories having bled a bit into “A Dance With Dragons” by this point. Perhaps not entirely useless, though; since the producers are slowly pivoting away from the source material, and doing so in ways that are bringing disparate stories together (Brienne and Arya, for instance), perhaps we will see more of this kind of streamlining going forward. There are already several signs of this, with an early introduction of the extent of the White Walkers’ nature, Jojen’s thus-far unwritten death, and the exclusion of Lady Stoneheart, a superfluous and silly character in the novels. As it becomes increasingly less likely that Martin will finish his novels remotely in time to catch up to the show, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss seem to become more confident in their own plan for this story. Except for the curious staging of Jaime and Cersei’s reunion at Baelor, the changes they have made from the source material have by and large been improvements on novels that are often plodding and self-indulgent. So there is hope for the future.

Ultimately the show needs to get to a place where it is greater than the sum of its parts, which it currently is not. That’s a strange thing to grapple with, since for three seasons, the whole has been greater; but as the story evolves, so must the show, and for as much as season four was a transition season for the story, it feels also like a transition season for the creators, as they learn how better to navigate the larger world they’ve built for themselves. It’s not a bad season by any means, and as I say, the high points are better than most other drama on television. Peter Dinklage continues to give a fantastic performance as Tyrion, especially in the season’s final hours, and I can’t wait to see what he does next season. Charles Dance’s Tywin was an excellent villain, and his presence will be sorely missed. All the performances are wonderful, really, and there’s no denying the show is well put together. But it often feels like two or three different shows, stitched together, and not always very neatly. The final scenes of “The Children” are captivating and moving, setting up a true sense of wonderment, and, bizarrely for this show, suggesting the faintest glimmer of hope, for redemption, for a rescue from this hell. I wish only that the preceding season were so consistently, evocatively beautiful. Like our heroes, we’ll get there eventually.