REVIEW: Game of Thrones Season 3: Mhysa (Spoilers)

REVIEW: Game of Thrones Season 3: Mhysa (Spoilers)

There won’t be Tumblr posts devoted to audience reactions to the episode. No national newspaper will decide to ruin the ending. But while this finale of a third, increasingly confident season of Game of Thrones won’t have horrified millions like last week’s episode, it was an engrossing, epic and intelligent instalment. Just in case you had started to move on with your life after last week’s traumatic events, the final outing of season 3 made sure to remind you of the horror straight away, as Arya got close to her brother for the first time in years. Well, his body. Which now had the head of his wolf Greywind stitched in the place of Robb’s own. Not the most cheery of opening scenes. As showrunners, David Benioff and DB Weiss are now so familiar with the universe, so in control of the look and tone of Game of Thrones, that they’re perfectly content to offer up largely miserable narratives to their audience. When a show sells so many DVDs and inspires so many column inches, viewers aren’t going to suddenly abandon ship because one of their favourite characters has been offed. If anything, the Red Wedding confirmed that no-one is safe and viewers will now be crossing their fingers that their heroes make it through unscathed while the villains get what’s coming to them. But we all know that Benioff, Weiss and George RR Martin don’t play the game like that. As a season closer, Mhysa was slightly workmanlike, necessarily. Character arcs need rounding off and setting up for the next series, and so we zipped from The Twins, to the Nightfort, to Theon’s torture chamber and as far afield as the Iron Islands and Yunkai, with even minor characters like Shae and Pod given screen time. Peter Dinklage’s return as Tyrion brought some much-needed levity to the episode – anything to keep the Red Wedding out of our minds... – but even his scenes were largely melancholic. Though with actors of the calibre of Dinklage, Lena Headey and the peerless Charles Dance, it’s no wonder Benioff and Weiss craft such soul-bearing sequences for the Lannisters. While Joffrey’s petulance became increasingly problematic, King’s Landing is facing some extra drama with the comeback of Joff’s biological father’s Jaime, with matted hair, only one hand and a worldview irrevocably changed. The future for the powerful but hated Lannisters remains unclear but two of the surviving Starks embraced their destiny. Bran, with Isaac Hempstead-Wright more imposing by the week, knows his future lies in the dangerous, magical lands north of The Wall. As for Arya, her utterance of the Braavosi motto ‘Valar Morghulis’ (‘All men must die’) after ruthlessly killing a Frey suggests the little lady is on her way to becoming a hired gun. Or, more appropriately, dagger. Daenerys grows more powerful than ever - copyright WENN/PR Their scenes have been the most unpleasant and gratuitous of the season, but Iwan Rheon and Alfie Allen knocked it out of the park, as Ramsay Snow and Theon, the latter finally beaten into submission and transformed into the sub-human Reek. Even audience members who thought Theon needed his uppance to come will be hoping his sister Yara can get a move on with her rescue mission. She could do worse than to mimic the bravery and self-sacrifice of Davos, who by saving Gendry and convincing Stannis of the danger beyond The Wall, might just have given the Seven Kingdoms a fighting chance against the White Walkers. And if dour old Stannis can’t save the day, maybe Daenerys can. After all, she’s got dragons, a eunuch army and now a city population so indebted to her that they dubbed her ‘Mhysa’, or ‘Mother’, inspiring the episode’s title. Benioff and Weiss have been careful to remind us that, in George RR Martin’s world, hope and happiness are rare commodities. But after the soul-destroying events of the Red Wedding, they needed to give viewers something to believe in other than death and darkness. As David Nutter beautifully crafted the closing Davos and Dany scenes, there was a hint that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel in Westeros. Then again, if you think this saga has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention... Either way, Monday nights are going to be a little less interesting, or gory, or peppered with torture and gratuitous nudity, for the next nine months. Season 4 can’t come soon enough. Best scene: Tyrion dubbing his and Sansa’s coupling as the ‘disgraced daughter and the demon monkey’ raised a chuckle, but for sheer drama and emotion, the highlight had to be Jon and Ygritte’s tearful parting. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that he loves his wildling girl. Random moment: Davos querying why there is a ‘g’ in ‘night’ was a lovely touch but after being told to ‘stop Hodoring’ last week’, we had to laugh as the giant got all excited by an echoey well, screaming ‘Hodor!’ into the darkness.


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