Episode 3 was definitely the strongest of season 2 so far. I found the first 2 eps a little slow, and I think they needed to spend a bit more time on Dragonstone introducing non book people to Stannis and company.
The Iron Islands segments were excellent. I actually think the show handled them slightly better than the book did. You really see the internal struggle Theon is going through, being stuck between a rock and hard place. The letter burning scene said so much with so little, and I loved Theon’s baptismal. You could tell Theon was thinking “Daddy’s finally paying attention to me!”
Not really a spoiler, just a discussion and speculation on how ravens work.
From the maps shown, it seems like towns aren’t terribly far apart. If an army sends a message home saying “We’ll be stopping for supplies at Morristown tomorrow, send ravens there” or even “We’re a half-day quick ride from Whoville, will check in for messages” then that seems to keep lines of communication open. It’s certainly no worse than communication during the Revolutionary War and earlier times, and logistics worked fine then.
Yeah, Theon could just send a raven to whatever is the closest castle/keep/holdfast he has a raven for (probably Twin’s Crossing/The Freys) and they would send a rider/scout out to him. So not as super-fast as a raven going right to you, but only delayed by a day or two.
Though given how far Robb’s army is from places like Deepwood Motte, where Asha/Yara’s army is landing, I doubt he could get there before they attack anyway…the Iron Islands aren’t very far from the west coast of The North.
From the books, the raven system never seemed to make much logical sense to me; there always seemed to be an arbitrarily large number of them that traveled at arbitrarily high speed.
Concerning the “darkness” of so many scenes–I thought so last year, too. (That’s actual darkness, not the grisly & depressing nature of many scenes.)
Then I got a 21st century TV & let Comcast start charging me for HD. The screen isn’t huge but far better than the old one. I watched the first series On Demand just before this season began & marveled at how much better I could see everything…
Over at SFF World, one of the resident SOIAF experts says that Theon had the full drowning baptism as a child. There’s also talk about a character named Damphair (sp?) who will appear later and re-baptize Theon. Or somebody. We should be seeing it.
Damphair’s his uncle. I’m pretty sure that was supposed to be him in that chapter.
One of the men is drowned at Winterfell. That’s probably what happens. I really doubt Theon gets baptized twice, especially only the first four episodes were released to the media.
Does anyone else think that the whole scene with Luwin telling Bran about his Valyrian steel link for studying the old magic is perhaps a good bit of foreshadowing about where Sam’s story arc might end up? Especially with Sam’s “I always wanted to be a wizard” line from last season.
Yeah, that is me right now. Something i have been wondering lately, did Robb get killed twice? We never got a PoV from Robb so we don’t know how “wargy” he was compared to the other kids, but assuming he is like the others that would mean he died at the Red Wedding then got killed again as Grey Wind. Which just makes the whole thing all the more horrible.
I have a vague memory from the books that the hard core Drowned God followers looked down upon the wimpy nobles who only got a bit of water dribbled on them as a baptism. Hence my surprise at Theon’s baptism in the show.
The scene looked like it was supposed to be so intense–Theon committing himself to the Drowned God, his father and sister watching, Theon looking intensely at his father, etc. etc. Then dribble, dribble.
How did Littlefinger know that Cat was in Renly’s camp?
She was with Robb a couple episodes ago when Robb responded to Lannister terms, and asked for Ned’s bones to be returned. So how did Tyrion know where to send Littlefinger and the bones?