Sean & Megan Watch Game of Thrones: The Wolf and the Lion

From the blog that brought you "Lynn Phegley Watches Lost," get ready for another experience that redefines the art of recapping TV shows!

Sean T. Collins is a friend to the Cool Kids and avid devotee of George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series of books, upon which the HBO television show Game of Thrones is based; he is currently chronicling the series on two separate blogs, one with book spoilers and one without.

Megan Morse is Ben's wife who has never read the Martin books and does not typically go in for the fantasy genre but loves Game of Thrones for reasons she doesn't even fully understand.

Each week, Megan will provide her analysis of the show from a neophyte's standpoint and then Sean will interject with his informed reactions and insights, answering her questions and commenting on her observations.

Whether you're a nerd or a newcomer, if you're watching Game of Thrones this is the recap for you!

Megan: I heart this show. This week's episode was good, but it felt kind of expository sometimes, like they were setting up the rest of the season.

Sean: I read a description of the episode that said the season up until now was the roller coaster going up the hill, and this is the episode where it crested the hill and started plunging downward, with the Ned/Jaime fight. That sounds about right to me.

Megan: It was also a really violent episode, which I didn't mind, except I didn't like the guy getting stabbed in the eye or the horse getting beheaded.

Sean: The Mountain beheading the horse had to have been a real HOLY FUCKING SHIT moment for people who didn't know it was coming. Gregor Clegane's a scary dude.

Megan: I missed the khaleesi because she is my favorite character and the scene last episode where she told her brother he would lose his hands was awesome. Also, I like the name Arya and if I have a child it will be named that. Just kidding. Maybe. I kind of want to read the books but I don't really want to get ahead of the show.

Sean: I'm actually quite excited to see how people who haven't read the books feel when all is said and done at the end of this season.

Megan: I had a few questions: First, is Tyrion a dwarf in the books or did they just make him one in the show because they wanted to cast Peter Dinklage?

Sean: Yes, he's a dwarf in the book. He's much, much uglier in the book, almost deformed, and he has mismatching Bowie-style eyes and a beard. I imagine they got rid of the beard to avoid confusion between him being a little person and him being an actual, mythical dwarf.

Megan: How much time passes between episodes?

Sean: It varies? Seems like this week's episode started on the day after the previous one, since the tournament was still going. But Ned said he'd been in King's Landing for a month, so there are some jumps in time, too. And I would guess that later on, you'll see episodes where one storyline will actually have to jump BACK in time and then catch up to the point where the other storylines are.

Megan: Why does Robert think killing Daenerys and her unborn child would prevent a war? Wouldn't Khal Drogo be even more motivated to invade then?

Sean: Ha, people were just asking the same thing on my blog. Here's my answer:

I think the Small Council isn’t worried about that--not even Ned, who opposes the assassination plot and could have raised this concern as a more practical objection than his moral one--for a few reasons. First, they believe Drogo and Daenerys’s marriage to be one of political expediency. It's even better established in the book than it is in the TV show at this point that Drogo has no great desire to take his people in boats across the sea (the Dothraki fear ocean travel) to attack a land he’s never seen and seize a throne he doesn’t care about, so if you remove the Targaryen siblings from the equation, why would he even bother? He might be angry in that assassinating his wife and brother-in-law is an affront to him, but it’s not like he loooooves her and will now stop at nothing for vengeance, at least as far as the Council believes. Second, Drogo alone is much less of an existential threat to House Baratheon’s claim on the Iron Throne than Drogo with a trio of Targaryen heirs. They have a potential legal claim to the throne, enough to give cover to lords who don’t like Robert and need someone to rally behind, and enough to win the hearts of nostalgic peasants too. Drogo’s just some scary foreigner no one will be very happy to see. Plus, if he did come over without the Targaryens for revenge or what have you, that’s the sort of thing you really could sit in your castle walls and ride out, for real this time — he’d sack places and eventually go back home rather than seize the Iron Throne for himself, whereas with Viserys, Daenerys, and little Drogo Jr., he’d stay put in order to keep them in charge.