Reviewer Kieran Mathers returns to examine HBO’s new epic fantasy series. Have things improved after last week’s disappointments? Read on to find out! Once again, we’re issuing a mild spoiler warning. If you missed Kieran’s review of Episode 1, you can find it here. New to Game of Thrones? Check out our primer!

It’s very much an episode of two or possibly three halves this week. While Bran lies unconscious in the tower, looked after by Lady Haversham Stark, the rest of the family plan to leave the boy and head towards King’s Landing.

Meanwhile, we’re treated to the on-going trials of Daenerys Targaryen and her marriage to Khal Drogo. This is depicted very graphically in the books and I like how the show manages to hint at the difficulties she is facing without being overly graphic. The strongest scene of this episode is probably the conversation between Daenerys and Ser Jorah, which ends with his line, ‘It gets easier’. You really get the impression that the actors are beginning to find the meter of the language and, although the show still has a tendency to deviate into strange moments of exposition, some naturalism is beginning to creep into the performances.

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Reviewer Kieran Mathers brings us the first of his episode-by-episode reviews of the year’s biggest fantasy series. This review comes with a mild spoiler warning. There will be some comparisons between the events of the book and the show.

New to ‘Game of Thrones’? Check out our primer!

For those of you who live on Mars and may not have heard, HBO have adapted the first novel in G.R.R. Martin’s ongoing fantasy sequence, A Song of Ice and Fire, into a ten part mini-series: Game of Thrones. The word they are using in much of the press is “epic”. That’s a big word to be throwing around, even in our age of superlative inflationary pressures but the opening scene is suitably cinematic in scale. In a visually stunning sequence, the brave rangers of the Night’s Watch have their first deadly encounter with the white walkers at the Wall, a seven hundred foot high barrier of ice.

While the imagery is brilliantly rendered (and deserves to be seen on a big screen in HD) the scene does not mirror the book and I don’t think it is any stronger for it. The fighting is suitably brutal – a gory gallery of severed limbs and heads, which certainly reflects the violence of Martin’s prose – but I found it difficult to care for the characters because, at this point, one of the episode’s two major issues raised its head; the script is not as Shakespearean as it wishes it was.

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