Metro column: Characters fight the status quo in “Kill the Boy”
And Winter Is Coming’s adventure in newspaperdom continues. For our weekly column in Metro, a daily newspaper that may very well be available in your area, we wrote about “Kill the Boy,” last night’s episode. It was an evocative, solid outing that made the smart decision to limit the action to a few select locations. I don’t know about you guys, but I always enjoy it when the show excises a few storylines from a given episode so the other ones have room to breathe. It really benefited Sansa last night, as the extra time spent at Winterfell allowed us to soak up the awkwardness of her dinner with the Boltons, and to tangle with the considerably complex emotions brought up by her reunion with Theon.
Something else that stuck out at me as I watched “Kill the Boy” was how successfully the show is comparing and contrasting Daenerys, Jon, and Cersei, all of whom are trying to muddle through difficult questions of leadership. This is one of the benefits of adapting both A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons in one season. In the books, Cersei’s story was cut off from the other two, but in Season 5, all three can speak to each other.
Better yet, that final scene of Jorah and Tyrion boating through Valyria served as a nice counterpoint to Dany, Jon, and Cersei’s misadventures in ruling. Valyria is now a wild, untamed place. No matter how frustrating ruling over a society can be, it beats living in the primal waste of Old Valyria.
Read the whole column here, or pick up several copies of the newspaper and use them to wallpaper the Game of Thrones lounge in your home.
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