Game of Thrones 4.3 - "Breaker of Chains" - Rate and discuss

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

Rate and discuss (with spoilers for the episode, but not for forthcoming episodes) "Breaker of Chains", airing on the 20th April on HBO and on the 21st April on Sky Atlantic.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=KnmQuycZ-Lc[/yt]

 

[EyalM]

An ok episode. The last one was a though act to follow.

Some thoughts:
I do wish we would have spend less time with Sam. Out of all the plots, his was the least interesting.

The scenes with Arya and the hound were also pointless. We already know he's an asshole. I do, however, like the POV of the common people we got. It is very rare.

Jaime is still an asshole too, doing it in front of his dead son.

I wonder if Tywin really thinks tyrion did it. Even if he doesn't, this would be his chance to get rid of him.

Freeing yet another slave city is getting repetitive. I hope that story line will start to progress.

 

[Forbin]

Kaleesi is pretty awesome - that was a fun scene. However, I wonder just how in the hell she's feeding that army. They've been walking across a vast wasteland for, it seems, years. What are they eating, those scrubby little bushes?

I wonder if Tywin knows just how fucked up his kids are.

 

[bbjeg]

Great episode.

So is Baelish the murderer? How the hell did he know Joffrey was poisoned, it literally just happened. I was surprised he killed the Fool but his explanation is totally understandable.

It sucks Tywin and Jamie couldn't care less about Joffrey. Tywin also isn't taking any chances with the new king. Also, Tyrion is fucked.

They covered a lot of bases, except Rickon's and has Sam told John about Bran? Otherwise, the episode was filling. Threats are pouring from all sides, kingdoms are scrambling for allies, and Daenerys is becoming a bigger and bigger threat and everyone is starting to know it.

 

[chrisspringob]

They covered a lot of bases, except Rickon's and has Sam told John about Bran?

I thought that when Sam ran into Bran in last year's season finale, Bran told Sam not to tell anyone that he was alive, even John?

Also, Rickon has only had about 5 lines of dialogue in the entire series. I don't know that we'll actually get any Rickon POV stories this season. I read his separation from Bran last year as a move by the writers to stash the character away for a while, while we focus on the more important characters. For how long? I don't know. (I haven't read the books.)

OTOH, the Greyjoy family scene we had in last year's finale leads me to suspect that we'll get some kind of Yara POV story this year, but not sure when that'll happen.

 

[Rowan Sjet]

So is Baelish the murderer? How the hell did he know Joffrey was poisoned, it literally just happened.

Littlefinger isn't the actual murderer, but he did conspire to orchestrate it, that's how he knows.

Jaime is still an asshole too, doing it in front of his dead son.

Raping the woman he loves/now hates in front of their dead son while she begs for him to stop. Fuck you writers.

 

[Professor Zoom]

I wonder if the slaves thought: "Collars? You sent us collars? Um, we got plenty of those, how about so fucking swords?"

 

[Saul]

Jaime is still an asshole too, doing it in front of his dead son.

Raping the woman he loves/now hates in front of their dead son while she begs for him to stop. Fuck you writers.

I heard it happened a little differently in the books. Does anyone know how?

 

[bbjeg]

So is Baelish the murderer? How the hell did he know Joffrey was poisoned, it literally just happened.

Littlefinger isn't the actual murderer, but he did conspire to orchestrate it, that's how he knows.

I wasn't actually suggesting Baelish slipped the poison in Joffrey's drink and then ran to his ship, I'm insinuating he's the mastermind. Also, I don't think he said he conspired to do anything so I assume your knowledge is from the books. If that's the case, put it in "about the book" spoiler tags.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The sex was consensual and I don't think Joffrey's body was there, but it was in Baelor's sept.

The director is the one who decided to make it into a rape, for some reason. As if the books aren't rapey enough to begin with?!

 

[Forbin]

So is Baelish the murderer? How the hell did he know Joffrey was poisoned, it literally just happened.

Littlefinger isn't the actual murderer, but he did conspire to orchestrate it, that's how he knows.

I wasn't actually suggesting Baelish slipped the poison in Joffrey's drink and then ran to his ship, I'm insinuating he's the mastermind. Also, I don't think he said he conspired to do anything so I assume your knowledge is from the books. If that's the case, put it in "about the book" spoiler tags.

I don't care how it happened in the books!

 

[Stone_Cold_Sisko]

Felt like kind of a weaker episode to me. But Dany is always good when she does the big sweeping epic liberator stuff. I also thought the Tywin/Tommen scene was masterful. I watched it 3 times. The Jaime/Cersei part of it got a big side-eye from me. I reread the part in the book and thought it felt like of 'ambiguously rapey' so I assume they decided they didn't want to film a rape scene to be ambiguous and "no really means yes" so just decided to make it clear and explicit. I imagine the people who really want to like Jaime the child murdering sister-fucker are pretty upset. Oh also the Tyrin/Podrick scene was great. As was the Davos/Shireen scene.

Basically, a lot of good two-some conversations and the rest felt like "necessary mechanisms".

GoT's hour consistently feels short. I can't wait till next week!

 

[davejames]

Great episode. The scene where we see Tywin already beginning to get his claws into the other son (and new king) was probably my favorite. I loved the way he brushed aside all the noble and honorable traits a king should have in favor of "wisdom", which of course meant listening to advisers like himself. Yet at the same time what he says about the other kings actually makes a lot of sense (even if you could tell what he really meant by wisdom was deviousness and ruthlessness).

And as usual, just when you start to sympathize with a character like Jaime on this show, he goes and does... what he does.

As for Cersei, I kinda have a hard time believing she really thinks Tyrion was responsible for the poisoning. As much as he detested Joffrey, it's hard to imagine him ever conspiring to kill a kid. And poisoning doesn't really seem like his style anyway.

 

[CaptainCanada]

The staging of Sansa’s escape was godawful. One of the worst-staged moments on the show. After 2+ years of being a prisoner, her escape ends up as a twenty-second montage that makes it look easy, followed by a jarring smash cut to the middle of the night. Yeesh. The following scene with Littlefinger was decent, at least. But it would be nice if Sansa’s plot could get more than three minutes at some point.

I liked a lot of the details in the Arya/Hound scene, especially the farmer’s loyalty to House Tully, but the Hound robbing the guy afterward kind of felt out of character to me (especially as in the book the Hound chops wood for some villagers for several weeks for pay; he’s been a cynical killer-for-hire in the past, but I kind of thought he was supposed to be in a bit of a moral crisis at this point, and having him brutalize commoners like the knights he’s supposed to hate was a bit much).

The Tywin scenes were very good, and I liked the Tyrion/Pod bit.

I liked the Dany scene at the end a lot too, though I was kind of distracted during her speech by wondering how anybody could possibly hear her.

They covered a lot of bases, except Rickon's and has Sam told John about Bran?

I thought that when Sam ran into Bran in last year's season finale, Bran told Sam not to tell anyone that he was alive, even John?

No, that didn't happen in the show.

 

[bbjeg]

Dumping a few pictures.

The end of another reign.

"Winning!"

"Nice town, I'll take it."

They look important.

 

[davejames]

The staging of Sansa’s escape was godawful. One of the worst-staged moments on the show. After 2+ years of being a prisoner, her escape ends up as a twenty-second montage that makes it look easy, followed by a jarring smash cut to the middle of the night. Yeesh. The following scene with Littlefinger was decent, at least. But it would be nice if Sansa’s plot could get more than three minutes at some point.

I agree it flew by a little fast, but between the chaos surrounding Joffrey's death and Littlefinger engineering the entire escape to begin with (presumably by paying a lot of people to look the other way), it's not hard to imagine it being pulled off successfully.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Haven't yet graded it as I think I'll need to rewatch to decide. Coming after two exceptionally strong episodes,this one had a hard act or two to follow.

My first thought is that I still really, really dislike Aiden Gillen's performance. He is, if anything, getting worse and is basically a pantomime baddies at this stage. It's strange, as I've liked him in anything else I've seen him in. I'm also not sure that the writers have a solid grasp on Jamie's character.

On the other hand, I loved the Tywin/Oberyn scene and the Tyrion/Pod one. Rory McCann continues to shine as the Hound and new-Daario still beats old-Daario in my book. I also liked the ambiguity of the final scene.

 

[Brendan Moody]

The director is the one who decided to make it into a rape, for some reason. As if the books aren't rapey enough to begin with?!

It wasn't just the director; writer and executive producer David Benioff said of the scene “You see that Cersei is resisting this. She’s saying no, and he’s forcing himself on her. It was a really uncomfortable scene and a tricky scene to shoot.” The intention was apparently that she ended up consenting, as she does (rather more quickly) in the similar scene in the books, but the way it was edited spectacularly fails to convey that.

 

[davejames]

You know, more and more I have to wonder why Daenerys even wants to bother taking over gloomy, war-ravaged Westeros when she's got all these beautiful, sunny, and luxorious kingdoms in the East that she could live in and rule.

I mean, at least judging from how things are presented in the TV series, I would much rather want to live over there where she's at.

 

[CaptainCanada]

I agree it flew by a little fast, but between the chaos surrounding Joffrey's death and Littlefinger engineering the entire escape to begin with (presumably by paying a lot of people to look the other way), it's not hard to imagine it being pulled off successfully.

There was no chaos, though. Everybody was totally stationary apart from Sansa and Dontos, and Cersei started screaming about Sansa when she was like fifteen meters away. Where were all the guards?

In the books she vanished well before anybody noticed, the whole wedding crowd was in complete pandemonium, and they snuck out of the castle through a secret passage before scaling down a cliff.