The Avengers have assembled and separated again.
Iron Man 3 has happened and acted as a sort of bookend for Avengers. And now Thor: The Dark World really kicks off the second phase of Marvels cinematic adventures.
And similarly to the original Thor it is the silver lining after the disappointing Iron Man 3 (a very similar situation to Thor following Iron Man 2) and probably the most entertaining Marvel studios film since Thor.
So we have finally arrived at what seems to be a pivotal moment for the story of Game of Thrones. When more and more people started to read the books by George R.R. Martin I started to notice a trend that people who had read book 3 A Storm of Swords would hint at something that seemed to be a devastating character death.
Then I watched an interview with George R.R. Martin he was asked how he felt when killing off major characters and he too had to avoid spoilers but hinted at a major character death in book three and there was a notable sigh from the audience. Which kept me wondering… who would bite the dust in Season 3?
This week will be the moment when we find out and in this spoilerfree article I will speculate which characters might be in for a very rough ride.
We are almost at the end of this year’s season in Westeros and the pieces are starting to fall in place. And as if to prepare us for Episode 9 we only had 3 big stories this week and two short moments at beginning and end.
According to writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss they can’t afford to specifically write a theme for every episode as is convention on television. In a podcast at Winteriscoming.net Bryan Cogman also commented on his episode (Kissed by Fire S03E05) that they don’t specifically set out to write an episode about certain characters. But he said that it can happen that some scenes in an episode correspond to each other in a way so that it seems as if there was a deliberate theme.
This seemed to be the case with The Bear and the Maiden Fair – the seventh episode of this season – written by no one else than George R.R. Martin himself.
Over half the Season behind us and this week’s episode The Climb did some heavy lifting for things to come.
Episode 5 of Season 3 … and this means that we are halfway through with the newest season of Game of Thrones. And written by Bryan Cogman who has written an episode each season (S01E03 and S02E03) and it was probably the most intimate episode of this Season with all the things we learned about Westeros’s inhabitants.
In its fourth episode Game of Thrones continues the descent into the darkness with very few rays of light in between.
Directed by David Benioff and written by both showrunners Benioff and D.B. Weiss this week’s episode Walk of Punishment was an early highlight in Season 3. We got a handful of things to go through and the only truly bad thing about the episode was the song played at the end.
A note on the delay
Due to some intensive therapy to help me cope with my anger issues there have been some delays for this review. Depending on how well the therapy goes the delays might come from time to time.
Once again we are back in Westeros and with Dark Wings, Dark Words we have now finished a two hours reintroduction to the lands of Ice and Fire. Two hours to sufficiently catch up with all the characters! This alone shows how much the scope of this series has expanded and Game of Thrones might have reached the point where it would be better to watch the entire season in one sitting and not in weekly episodes.