So I have a new theory: I’m just better at watching this show when it’s more talky, less smash bang. Because I thought last night’s episode was excellent–so excellent that perhaps I was wrong about last week. These people clearly know what they’re doing, and maybe I just can’t see it when I’m made all crabby by the nastiness. Or, maybe, this episode was just better.
Anyway, it was definitely a very talky episode, and that gives me a lot to talk about, but I’m under a particular time crunch today so this is going to be brief. There were three main stories of the episode, each of which was handled in at least three scenes (three=a beginning, middle, and end=story, yay!): Theon searching for his lost prisoners, Bran and Rickon; John Snow and his prisoner Ygrette; and mother-son duo Rob and Catelyn Stark dealing with their prisoner, Jaime. “The cages are full of prisoners!,” some under lord tells Rob, and boy, is he right.
The episode, which is called “A Man Without Honor” but which I shall call “HBO Writers Ponder Some Political Philosophy,” uses these plot lines against each other to great effect, exploring the strange falsehood of John’s claim, made to Ygritte, that “You’re a prisoner, so you’re obviously not free” (nb: I am totally not checking these quotations today). Ygritte and Jaime are prisoners, but they claim a freedom that the Starks don’t have—already outside the law, they have little to protect them, but not much to loose. Bran, a prisoner on the lam, is bound less by Theon’s ineffective hold than by his own sense of principle. He loves his people, and—to read his actions by Cersei’s maxim that “loving people makes you weak”—his love for his them impedes his ability to claim the help he needs. At the end of their story arcs, we see John Snow and Catelyn both (more or less literally) made captive by the prisoners they’d held. The episode uses story to make concrete the idea it’s been exploring about how power exists on both sides of the prisoners cage. I just love it.
It gets even better when you put the Stark storylines in dialogue with poor pee-smelling Theon’s. Theon is out exploring his own political philosophy, that “it’s better to be thought cruel than weak,” and although he’s sort of winning, it’s just not going terribly well for him. In the episode’s money shot, as Theon displays the corpses of the two children he’s burned, he seems to also realize that he’s made the wrong move. This display of power will win him no authority; it’s a display of cruelty that seems evidence of weakness, rather than something else. Theon’s been trying so desperately to establish himself as separate from the Starks and the Stark code of honor, but what he actually shows is that they are right. The powerful do have to play by the rules.
And then, my favorite part of the episode is the way that it permeates through the show’s gender issues. Of the many things to discuss (If I were Alyssa Rosenberg I’d be having a field day here)I’ll just point out that these discussions of prisonerhood are shot through with discussions of parenthood, motherhood in particular.
The episode’s three final scenes hinge on ideas about children: Cersei’s wrenching decision that she’s going to have to do something about Joffrey; Catelyn’s anger as Jaime goads her about the bastard she was forced to raise (even as she has to keep; and finally, as I said, Theon’s brutal murder of the orphans. The sequence works to build tension around questions of love, motherhood, responsibility, brutality; the two women imagine committing acts of violence, and then, finally, Theon commits it, in the worst possible way. What has he accomplished? What have his actions taught the viewer about what Cersei and Catelyn should do?
There are powerful mothers in Westeros, but the episode is spot on when it conflates Sansa’s dream of being imprisoned and stabbed with the reality of her menstrual blood. Motherhood, in this show, means being bound to a cruel calculus of captivity. Your womb binds you to power, but not in ways you necessarily can control. Which makes poor Dany’s plotline all the more bittersweet. She is a child, and no where is that more apparent in her sense that her motherhood means she has power or control. “I am the mother of dragons!” she goes around bellowing. Too bad Cersei can’t give her the talk she gives Sansa, and let her know that being a mother sucks on this show.
