Here now is Tyler Davis (aka NousWanderer) with his in-depth thoughts and analysis of the Game of Thrones season 3 premiere episode, “Valar Dohaeris”.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Freedom and Duty in Westeros

by Tyler Davis

Charlie Kaufman: [voice-over] I am pathetic, I am a loser…

Robert McKee: So what is the substance of writing?

Charlie Kaufman: [voice-over] I have failed, I am panicked. I’ve sold out, I am worthless, I… What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here? Fuck. It is my weakness, my ultimate lack of conviction that brings me here. Easy answers used to shortcut yourself to success. And here I am because my jump into the abysmal well – isn’t that just a risk one takes when attempting something new? I should leave here right now. I’ll start over. I need to face this project head on and…

Robert McKee: …and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.

-Adaptation (2002)

Game of Thrones is the technicolor descendant of A Song of Ice and Fire, the imposing series of epic fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin. It avoids voice-over narration.

Once thought unadaptable, Martin’s tale of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros is a psychologically intelligble reworking of the fantasy genre characterized by a distinctly modern dedication to moral ambiguity. Because GRRM has eschewed many of the wizardporn tropes overassociated with fantasy in the public’s imagination, our experience of Westeros more closely resembles an intense journey through forests of dark historical fiction alongside ethically confused and supremely dangerous powerwhores than, say, an escapist jaunt with upstanding elven sidekicks. Although it’s undeniably the product of admirable creativity and mythmaking, Westeros isn’t really a place you’d want to couchsurf your way through. Even the gentlest inhabitants of Martin’s world see life’s finer points through the sepia tones of painful nostalgia for what once was and will bloody likely never again be. The worst of the lot just want to wear your face as a mask.

This source material is the show’s greatest asset. The source material is also the show’s greatest potential liability. By now we’ve been charmed by the eyewitness accounts of showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss spontaneously bursting into song and dance with Martin in reciprocal enthusiasm over the prospect of HBO handling the series, and history has validated their fine taste if not their a capella gifts. We can’t imagine a proper adaptation on another network. But in greenlighting GoT, HBO committed itself to a faithful rendering of an elaborately branching narrative dotted with hundreds of unique characters webbing across seven novels (two unwritten). Even for the company that carried the sociopolitical tangle of The Wire into our lives, birthing Thrones must’ve felt something like diving headfirst into a burning pyre with fingers crossed.

The challenge of adapting ASoIaF was compounded by Martin’s use of point of view chapters; Martin isn’t a fan of the omniscient perspective, and each segment of the story is bounded by a single character’s vision. Where Martin nonchalantly opens brain-windows to expose private interiority, the showrunners need to translate these inner details in visual or aural terms. This means that reams of expository detail which might’ve formerly been delivered by a character quietly daydreaming about her past must now be expressed in the interplay of actors engaging one another on-screen. Let’s be honest on this point: the wealth of backstory, the historical complexity, the romance for faded memory, the panoply of morally grey characters weaving independent paths through the song’s tapestry—these elements uniquely color ASoIaF‘s fabric, and define Martin’s magic as a worldbuilder. This intricate quality pronounces the show’s unfilmability and declares the show’s raison d’être in the same frightening breath.

Honoring the spirit of GRRM’s work without sacrificing the unique advantages of the medium or oversimplifying the colossus of a plot has presented Benioff and Weiss with their own epic challenge over the past two seasons, and I’m happy to report that they’ve met it with success. In terms of size and spectacle, Game of Thrones is to episodic television drama what Olympus Mons (for the astronomically uninclined: a ginormous fucking space mountain) is to bumpy geography. Audiences were ready for the climb, and the show has achieved an unprecedented degree of cultural saturation. It’s a demographic-assimilating crossover powerhouse. To illustrate by way of example, it’s 2013 and your grandmother currently cares at least a little about who sits on the Iron Throne. Two years ago, your semipro athlete of a brother publicly wept like a mewling toddler at the close of season one, episode nine. You have the vague suspicion that your dog pays closer attention to the screen whenever the show is airing.

Despite its success, one familiar refrain in the chorus of Thrones criticism emphasizes the show’s tendency to spread itself thin. With around one season per book (thus far), ten episodes per season, and fifty to sixty minutes per episode, it’s often the case that an episode must flit from one character to the next, touching personalities briefly before the credits roll. Detractors claim that this nimble dance – even if inevitable by virtue of the source material’s breadth – denies the show its chance to generate the kind of dramatic momentum needed for each payoff to viscerally pluck the heartstrings. Benioff and Weiss have replied to this way of thinking with their hope that viewers will eventually approach Game of Thrones as if it were an 80-hour long movie and not episodic television. Having recently noted how season two’s strengths are magnified when marathon-viewing the episodes like an oreo junkie freezing time in the cookie aisle, I’m inclined to agree with their suggestion: watch the show like a book if you get a chance. In Thrones, Benioff and Weiss have stretched The Wire’s ‘novelistic’ dramatic model to a distance audiences were unfamiliar with. The complexity would be a barrier to entry were it not so frequently rewarding (see also: thrilling, sexy, violent, and sad).

Whether you consider the show’s requisite character-hopping as a strength or weakness has much to do with the narrative expectations you bring to each Sunday viewing. While it’s true that a fair assessment of an episode must revolve around its success or failure as a discrete slice of television, this is undercut by the fact that the show’s immensity makes it something of a pioneer in the world of TV storytelling despite its adherence to an older format and release schedule (a format/schedule that’s being increasingly challenged—see the Netflixian House of Cards for an example of a dense, pause-optional thirteen-episode narrative bomb recently dropped on the world to glowing praise). As such, each episode of GoT must pull twice its weight, at once sitting naturally within the scope of an intense arc of ten interlocking segments, while also succeeding as a single work with enough self-propelled dramatic force to grow the audience and please fans.

“Themes are for eighth-grade book reports.” – David Benioff

Setting aside for a moment the ideal viewing recommendation whereby each episode is to be swallowed in rapid, Takeru Kobayashi-like succession, the showrunners do seem to recognize the extant narrative requirements of their chosen medium. For this reason, premieres in the world of GoT suffer unique burdens, responsible as they are for reminding us of and resetting character arcs after each off-season gap. Most of us will someday live in a post-Thrones world, and in this world we’ll finally be given the chance of fuilfilling the Benioffian, Weissian dream: 80 hours of Game of Thrones taken liberally, with or without water, breaks discouraged. In this future world, I suspect we’ll still detect relatively harmless interseasonal seams which mark routine readjustments of pieces on the gameboard.

The distinct function of a premiere doesn’t mean these episodes are intrinsically flawed, but rather that they run the risk of seeming uncharacteristically scattered for a series already overflowing with detail. They can be thought of as the antipodes to episodes like S2’s “Blackwater”—a necessarily rare selection notable for its intense focus on events unfolding in one location, during one swath of time, among a particular group of characters. Lacking this careful attention on a vastly reduced roster of characters, episodes like S3’s “Valar Dohaeris” – this season’s debut – thrive when they find some other consolidative mechanism to wrest order from the chaos of disparate storylines, far-flung locales and unrelated agendas. Recalling S2’s “The North Remembers” is useful, as it made effective use of a mysterious red comet to visually link its locations; the portent overhead gave each character a trigger for reflection upon days past and caution for the days to come.

A typical Thrones episode – like a typical ASoIaF novel – resists being thematically pigeonholed: broad themes emerge and recede over time, but they resemble an aggregated tonal consistency and not central theses being broached through a deliberate authorial focus. The story is character-driven, so while it is about power and betrayal and conquest and love and myth and prophecy and family, these subjects are unearthed rather than forced to our attention through a myopic lens. What matters is how the story is about those things, and not that it is about those things. More importantly, Martin, Benioff and Weiss limit themselves to a distinctly local range of commentary on these themes; the books and the show share a modern sensibility in their refusal to universalize or recommend moral perspectives. Our sympathies for the players of the game are determined by the values we carry with us into Westeros, and not the values imposed upon us by a dictatorial authorial presence.

This “bottom-up” approach to writing which prioritizes the personalized philosophies of characters over a creator’s philosophy about characters (or about the world they populate) is a strength, especially for a genre steeped in moral absolutism. Even so, the natural rhythms of the adaptation and the patterns of struggle in the world of Westeros establish opportunities for the creators to house story segments beneath coherent ceilings, and no insults to eighth-grade book reports can mask a noteworthy internal consistency in S3’s first effort.

“All men must serve.” – Translation of Valar Dohaeris, the traditional High Valyrian response to the greeting Valar Morgulis (“All men must die.”)

In the finale of season two, Arya and companions are surprised by Jaqen H’ghar, the mysterious assassin who secured their escape from certain death by The Mountain’s gigantic hand. Having walked a line of horrors and earned freedom, Arya declines Jaqen’s offer of an all-expenses paid trip to Braavos where she might train in the art of busting heads, opting instead to seek her surviving family members. Before leaving her to this task, Jaqen offers the gift of a mysterious coin, and the phrase “Valar Morghulis”—the episode’s title and “all men must die” in High Valyrian. Should she encounter a Braavosi, uttering the phrase and presenting the coin will lead back to him, or so he promises. “Valar Dohaeris” – “all men must serve” – is the traditional High Valyrian response to this greeting, and it fittingly serves as the title of season three’s inagurual episode.

Considering season two’s focus on the ramifications of death (Robert’s, Ned’s and Renly’s), the morality of revenge and inevitability of war, it’s clear to see how explorations of servitude, loyalty and freedom from either form the backbone of our reintroduction to the series. In order to situate its characters within this narrative framework, the first episode of season three finds its unifying element in repeated meditations on obligation and liberation, and how characters make choices in favor of either. While this establishing episode relinquishes some of the dramatic momentum earned by the season two finale, it does so in order to clarify the season’s terms. In so doing, challenging questions about service in the name of family, kingdom, order, self or religion are asked, and easy palliatives go unoffered in response. With an ensemble cast as large as GoT’s, unfolding relationships and strained loyalties serve as connective tissue for the plot, and as controlled experiments by which the viewer’s moral compass can be adjusted and compared. Interactions between competing perspectives produce sparks, these sparks give off light, and this light reveals the outline of a kind of ethical map existing beneath each instance of characterization.

“That was your job. Your only job.” – Lord Commander Jeor Mormont of the Night’s Watch

An ice-cold open sends death rattles clattering across a black frame before a time-lapse of a frozen wasteland gets devoured by a ravenous blizzard. Welcome back to Game of fucking Thrones! Sam, the lovable if bumbling Night’s Watch steward, has escaped the clutches of the White Walkers only to happen upon a fellow member of the black who has his hands full. This horrifying revelation is quickly interrupted by an axe-wielding wight’s attempt at making Sam sushi, and this in turn is interrupted by Ghost, Mormont and the survivors of the expedition of Night’s Watchmen (who quite reasonably prefer to flambé their catch). Sam, in his haste to avoid losing his head over the sudden reappearance of mythical snow demons, has failed to send ravens to Castle Black—ravens which would have warned those manning the Wall of the threat descending from the north. Mormont’s stern rebuke of Sam is diminished only by what we suspect is an underlying mixture of already low expectations—Sam is considered a craven—and the slightest hint of sympathy for any general failures of duty whenever the threat of dying frostbitten and alone beyond the edge of civilized existence becomes unignorable. Moments after Sam’s raven malfunction is announced, Mormont refocuses his crows on the task at hand: “We have to warn them, or before winter’s done, everyone you’ve ever known will be dead.” Their job isn’t to survive. Their duty is to stop what’s coming at any cost, and right now that means outpacing the Walkers in the trek southward.

The opening scenes serve to remind us of the larger threat looming over Westeros, but they also function to illustrate the extremes of responsibility held by the men of the Night’s Watch. That the Watch is undermanned and ignored despite their essential duty serves as a more obvious example of the way in which the world has lost a sense of itself, and of its priorities. A world out of whack, out of balance, out of tune—a world where the threat of a perpetual winter grows daily. These first invocations of duty—and the ways we can fail to meet it—establish a current which subtextually flows beneath the episode, as each character is confronted with a challenge to their relative positions of obligation or freedom. Some, like Sam and Mormont, have the gift of a clear objective: they owe service despite the overwhelming prospect of doom. Others trod a more raveled path.

“We’ll need to find you a new cloak.” – Mance Rayder, the King Beyond the Wall

Elsewhere in the far north, Jon Snow has the limits of his dutifulness tested by Mance Rayder, the King Beyond the Wall, and seemingly the next of Jon’s many teachers (Ned, Tyrion, Benjen, Aemon, Jeor, Qhorin – Jon, like Dany, is one of the show’s star pupils). “Why do you want to join us, Jon Snow?” Mance holds his position of power not because he was born into greatness, but because he was capable of directing a truly free people toward a single endeavor. That circumstance played a role in Rayder’s ascent is beside the point. That his followers willingly gathered beneath his banner is everything. The man made the office; the office did not make the man.

Unlike many of the show’s characters, Jon Snow’s ambition lurks quietly. While he grew up among lords, he wasn’t destined to become one. Snow’s world has defined him by his bastardy, and the Night’s Watch tempted him away from a bastard’s life with the promise of meaning. Throughout seasons one and two we watched Snow’s disillusionment with the Watch mount, first after he learned that his brothers in arms were rapists and thieves, and second after he learned of Mormont’s uneasy alliance with Craster, sacrificer of innocent babes. In his confrontation with Rayder, Snow uses these legitimate emotions – buried but quickly dug up – to convincingly sell his traitor’s act. Because we were given the privilege of witnessing Qhorin Halfhand’s sacrifice on Jon’s behalf in season two, we understandably frame Jon’s explanation as an essential part of his ruse. He’s clearly establishing plausible motivations for his desertion…right? At the same time, because these emotions come from an authentic emotional register, we’re brought to the brink of questioning Jon’s ultimate loyalties as he does the same: how sacred does he hold his vows? What motivates him? (Ygritte provides a fiery backdrop to these considerations, as Tormund reminds us that “this isn’t the damn Night’s Watch where we make you swear off girls.”)

We do know that Jon’s first response to Rayder’s question – “I want to be free.” – is a convenient falsehood. Rayder sees through this Ohio Players invocation immediately, and warns that what Jon truly wants is heroism. There’s a complicated truth in this observation. Like Ned, duty and obligation are not far from Jon’s heart, but unlike Ned, Jon is driven by a correspondingly greater desire to enact change on a broad scale. This requires self-definition, and this definition is necessarily limiting; to be one thing is to not be something else. As a bastard, Snow’s former alienation within the scope of his upbringing gave him a powerful desire to make a new name for himself—one which might erode the shackles of his bastardy in the eyes of others. The Night’s Watch shocked Jon with its bitter lessons in self-effacement, lessons crystallized in Halfhand’s reminder to Jon that any sacrifice he makes for the world will go unseen by that very same world. To die a hero on the Wall is to die forgotten. The independence of Mance’s “kingdom” offers Jon promise of a true – if harsh – meritocracy. But old habits die hard. If this realm is to provide Jon with a path to the heroic greatness he desires, he’ll need to quell his pesky kneeling compulsion first. Honoring greatness stops short of avowing inferiority north of the Wall.

“She freed Jaime Lannister. The Lannisters robbed them of their sons; she robbed them of their justice.” – Robb Stark, the King in the North

Where Jon Snow feels a greater obligation to recreate himself on his own terms, Robb is more immutably encumbered by his obligations to family and kingdom. In this sense, the comparative remove and anonymity of the Night’s Watch (and now the far north) offers Snow, the bastard and sworn servant, with a truer liberty despite the technical limitations of his vows. A war campaign launched in the name of justice is not so easily deserted or ignored, especially by a king.

Our brief glimpse of Robb places him in pursuit of Lannister forces. He enters Harrenhal only to be confronted with devastation left in Gregor Clegane’s wake. A courtyard littered with recently slaughtered northerners and northern allies does little to assuage the spirits of his battle-starved men. Though Robb’s shock is enough to delay him from sending his mother away (they reflect upon the corpse of one of her father’s fallen bannermen together), a glance to his troops provokes the request: Catelyn is to be locked away in whatever melted ruin of a cell his attendants can discover in supremely feng shui-free hell they’ve found themselves in. For Catelyn, this is just one more cell in a series of cells.

We see that Robb has little choice in the matter, and though we suspect he grieves over his mother’s betrayal – the decision to free Jaime Lannister without his consent – he cannot risk further incensing the men who would follow him to their deaths. In the midst of carnage, it is sensible that Robb would turn to his mother instinctively, and yet recognition of this familiarity by his supporters would weaken him. In Robb and Catelyn’s relationship, we see an immediate familial bond getting displaced by the overwhelming task of exacting justice from a corrupt crown, and thus satisfying the demands of kinghood—a broader endeavor spurred forth by service to family in the first place. Robb and Catelyn are equally committed to the Stark name, but the choices they’ve made in expression of this shared dedication have driven them apart.

“…the truth is always either terrible, or boring.” – Sansa Stark

Sansa, a political prisoner, peers across Blackwater Bay and vainly attempts to invent stories for the sailors she sees leaving port. Like each vessel departing from King’s Landing, gone are the fragile delusions she once clutched to her heart: the dream of a kind and handsome king, the belief that knights protect the weak, the conviction that goodness and charity have strong roots in the world. Here Sansa performs the routine of her shattered childhood not because she’s capable of deceiving herself, but because the nostalgic escapism conferred by her motions, however shallow and transitory it might prove, is preferable to an unbroken acceptance of her captivity. While watching Sansa’s ineffective attempt at staving off the grip of cynicism, I’m reminded of why Catelyn made her choice to free the Kingslayer. The little bird is unable to extricate herself from the cage that is King’s Landing. She helplessly watches the fish swim to freedom from her stationary perch. She pretends to dream since the dreams are gone, but memories of time spent dreaming are not.

The weakly beating heart of Sansa’s naïveté does not serve her well, and an attentive viewer cannot help but ask whether it would have been better for her to leave with Sandor Clegane, The Hound, at the close of season two. Despite his alarming demeanor, Sandor was doggedly honest. Inasmuch as he palpably dispelled Sansa’s false notions of knighthood, her innocence instilled in him the willingness to protect her (and thus become the truer knight for it). This is a paradox of their relationship for which we cannot blame Sansa. In choosing reliable captivity over an uncertain and potentially deadly freedom in the protection of dangerous man, Sansa’s gaze suggests that her decision still roils.

Littlefinger, ever the conspirator, arrives to squelch the dialogue in Sansa’s mind and replace it with a new hope: her mother is alive, her sister is alive, and he can get her to them both. To emphasize the risk he’d adopt, he reminds her that she’s the “property of the crown.” Stealing the crown’s property is treason. It is unlikely that Littlefinger would ever initiate a scheme without first securing favorable odds, but how he frames the offer is enough to prompt a desperate Sansa’s compliance. A brutalized beast of a man offering the promise of freedom seems less trustworthy than a cleanly-lined deceiver who indirectly killed her father, and it is in this facet of Sansa’s character that we see the last vestiges of her youthful prejudices holding sway over her destiny.

“It’s not easy for girls like us to dig our way out.” – Ros, the Redheaded Whore

Littlefinger is more than a scheming Master of Coin—he’s also a pimp. Not unrelatedly, this scene is also remarkable for the brief exchange between the show’s two most prominent prostitutes, Shae and Ros. Having each risen from humbler beginnings, these women experienced life trajectories at stark odds with Sansa’s, and yet both now occupy positions of some importance. They do not rest easily. Their circumspection implies that rising is dangerous: Ros owes her employ to Littlefinger (not someone you want to owe), and Shae, Tyrion’s secret love and Sansa’s handmaiden, is in perpetual danger of being discovered.

True Westerosi autonomy is in short supply. The most powerful can act with impunity, but are targets for conquest. The anonymous are free, but weak. Having a little power is sometimes worse than having none…until it’s not. This danger casts whatever fortune Shae and Ros have acquired in a precarious light. That these women have such sympathy for a noblewoman like Sansa is testament to both the fact that women are anything but privileged in Westeros (“anyone can be controlled” is as true as Arya’s assertion that “anyone can be killed”), and that their privileged roles as intimate outsiders have provided them with a perspective on the court’s deadliness.

(An aside, Shae offers a potent counterpoint to Sansa’s game, as Shae has no interest in inventing stories. We know little about Tyrion’s companion’s past aside from her fiercely pragmatic character, and as such she serves as Sansa’s teacher and protector, presenting an example of someone who seems to have been through the worst life has to offer without being smashed apart by her trial.)

(Another aside: while Shae’s role began and remains the more intriguing of the two, I’ve long felt that Ros (a character invented for the show) unfairly received a disproportionate amount of fan criticism in earlier seasons. Beyond her function as a point of continuity between Winterfell and King’s Landing in season one, the sexpositions she has featured in allowed socially marginal and displaced characters within the show’s world – people like Theon Greyjoy and Tyrion Lannister – to express themselves in a fashion otherwise foreclosed to them. I’d argue that most of the show’s other sexposition scenes have worked similarly, each serving some character-specific revelation while acting as vehicle for general exposition or context setting. As such, I especially appreciated that this scene allowed Ros to briefly reflect on changes within her own life as opposed to someone else’s.)

“And one more thing: the next whore I catch in your bed, I’ll hang.” – Tywin Lannister, Hand of King Joffrey Baratheon

Sansa isn’t the only member of the court who has declined a chance at escape. After his narrow success in defense of King’s Landing, Tyrion passed up eloping with Shae while recuperating from his wounds. He explained: “I want to go with you. … I can’t. I do belong here. These bad people are what I’m good at. Out-talking them. Out-thinking them. It’s what I am, and I like it. I like it more than anything I’ve ever done.” I think it’s most useful to formalize Tyrion’s existence as being fraught with a tension he usually masks. In this tension, his dwarfism locks him in orbit just outside proper society and well inside the wilds of ignobility. His greatest gift – the mental acuity he inherited from his father and honed on his own – is shaped in every way for success inside the very court his physical abnormality ensures he’ll remain ‘other’ within . He’s defined by a pepertual battle of wits. High society threatens to kill him (as is evidenced by the gash dividing his face, almost assuredly a gift from his big sister), but he’d be in far greater danger outside of it.

Acknowledging his ostracism alone fails to penetrate the core of Tyrion’s character—a center in which paternal wounds fester deep. The opportunity to serve as Hand of the King in Tywin’s stead was not simply the adoption of responsibility for King’s Landing’s protection, but also a baldly naive chance to make his father proud. Tywin’s summary dismissal of Tyrion’s accomplishments (and assumption of all credit for success) takes a knife to that chance. This unresolved pain motivates the episode’s strongest scene, as Charles Dance and Peter Dinklage embody Tywin and Tyrion at their most strained. Defending his position as Tywin’s only son legally entitled to inheritance, Tyrion shrugs off the wounds inflicted by his father’s callous tone and demands what is his by right: Casterly Rock. Tywin’s venomous response is the show’s most brutal act of emotional violence to date—a withering verbal decapitation: “You are an ill-made, spiteful little creature, full of envy, lust, and low cunning. Men’s laws give you the right to bear my name and display my colors, since I cannot prove you are not mine, and to teach me humility the Gods have condemned me to watch you waddle around wearing that proud lion. Go. Now.” Though Tyrion struggles to meet the demands imposed by his name, he is fundamentally and perpetually forsaken by those making the demands. Tyrion’s service is a prison in itself, and from it there can be no escape. The question of how he might control his own destiny is thus central to Tyrion’s existence, yet his family – Jaime excepted – seek to deny him the right to answer it. Should Tyrion find solace in another, his father will root the whore out and have her hanged. If Sansa has had her escapism scoured away by the blistering reality imposed by a foreign world, Tyrion has all hope of an independent existence threatened by those who share his blood. Allegiance is expected but unrewarded, while deviation is invariably punished. The relationship is defined by a unidirectional transaction, and Tyrion – the dwarf who took mother away – will forever be in debt.

Though Tyrion is a Lannister and is thus not without a certain moral greyness, his empathy for cripples, bastards, and broken things inculcates in him a sensitivity to the plight of the weak and disenfranchised. He has no special love for the nobility. He reserves no exceptional judgment for the underclasses. There is an intellectual purity to Tyrion’s longings, and this makes him all the more tragic. It is quite fitting that he seems to peer through the bars of a cell when his sister visits him; he is trapped by the Lannister name as much as he’s trapped by the wooden door, unable to leave King’s Landing or thrive within it. Tyrion’s post-Blackwater disposition is necessarily defensive.

“Margaery does a great deal of work with the poor back at Highgarden.” – Ser Loras Tyrell

If it takes an act of malevolent posturing to pretend that Tyrion’s familiarity with prostitutes and drunkards sullies the Lannister name, the Tyrells wafting their Highgarden perfume through the ordinarily corpsified streets of King’s Landing prove legitimately threatening to the red and gold cats. Freshly betrothed to Joffrey, Margaery calls for an impromptu stop while traveling through Flea Bottom in a wheelhouse. It’s a kind of performative altruism as she eyeballs the Westerosi incarnation of Lurch from the Addams Family before skirting over a puddle of shit to consort with a gaggle of war orphans. Joffrey stares through the grating of his royal carriage, shocked by her boldness, confused by the concept of charity, and pissing himself at the thought of his subjects playing round two of Smash the State (he has one life; there are no continues).

Concern further blossoms in what can be conservatively described as the most awkward dinner in Red Keep history. Cersei, having invested the lion’s share of her ambition in a son that makes Patrick Bateman look like Mr. Rogers, begins displaying real signs of fear when her tenuous maternal link fails to umbilically restrain Joffrey from candid defiance. Though Cersei’s warning about the dangers of Flea Bottom is sincere (after having survived a vicious attack on the royal procession just months prior), her son denies the veracity of her account. What’s worse: Joff claims that Cersei’s failure to accurately recollect events is attributable to old age—a bald-faced reminder that Margaery is on deck to play Queen. If Robb Stark must reluctantly distance himself from his mother, Joffrey takes a peculiar relish in humiliating his. Further, this suggests a parallel between Cersei and Tyrion, as each of their attempts to establish security through the open display of familial loyalty backfires. Though they’re the wealthiest family in Westeros, being a Lannister isn’t the soundest investment.

The dinner introduces the question of what comprises a noble’s duty to the commonfolk, as Margaery and Loras wax enthusiastic about their family’s philantropic blood (while Cersei’s goblet of wine begins to spontaneously boil in her hand). For his part, Joffrey has trouble forming the word “charitable” without looking as if he just bit into a lemon, so there’s little question where he stands on the matter. The Tyrells, however, seem gifted in ways the Lannisters are not, especially if it’s through the masquerade of well-intentioned service that they will manage to isolate and correct for weaknesses in the royal image within King’s Landing. Where the Lannisters are preoccupied with dysfunction and in-fighting, the Tyrells casually synergize in a common endeavor. These scenes suggest that Margaery is not beyond seeding her own strain of power—a cultivar raised apart from Joffrey’s malevolent reign, and one which might shield her against a public comeuppance levied in his direction. In this way, there’s a reasonable case to be made for the meaningfully distinct separation of presentation and motivation, or effect and cause, in matters of public good. In the game of PR, you win or you die. Consolidating power can be about more than brashly claiming it, and the Tyrells threaten to patiently harvest their rewards through the manipulation of common opinion.

“The greatest slave soldiers in the world. The distinction means a great deal to some people.” – Danaerys Targaryen

More than the Tyrells, Dany defines the long game. Across the Narrow Sea, she arrives at the slaver’s mecca of Astapor with little more than three rapidly expanding dragons, an exiled ex-slaver-knight-currently-serving-in-an-advisory-capacity-in-slave-matters, a khalasar of seasick Dothraki and Ebenezer Scroogeloads of money justly swiped from the Qartheen for her troubles. Astapor promises an army, and Kraznys the slaver aims to rid his barracks of eight thousand Unsullied—eunuch warriors molded into dehumanized killing machines since youth. Missandei – a slave translator belonging to, you guessed it, Kraznys the slaver – sensibly filters out her master’s accusations of Westerosi whoremonging to inform Danaerys that “only one boy in four survives the rigorous training” and that in the Unsullied “discipline and loyalty are absolute – they fear nothing.” As far as supersoldiers go, Dany could do worse.

Dany is deeply reserved about the purchase. She needs an army, that much is certain. Her dragons, while magical, cannot shortcut their way through pending growth spurts, and Westeros awaits her claim in the meanwhile. But as the former slave of her deranged brother, Viserys, Dany’s self-reproach at the thought of buying human lives is understandable. If this is the path to power, what is the true cost? This also explains why she places such value on the voluntary dutifulness of her remaining Dothraki warriors, chastizing Jorah when he insults them. “Don’t mock them. They’re the first Dothraki who’ve ever been on a ship. They followed me across the poisoned water.”

To purchase a slave is to participate in, and thus endorse, the system which produces slaves. In challenging this fact, Jorah argues persuasively. “Do you think these slaves will have a better life serving Kraznys or men like him, or serving you? You’ll be fair to them. You won’t mutilate them to make a point. You won’t order them to murder babies. You’ll see that they’re properly fed and sheltered. A great injustice has been done to them.” Dany is undoubtedly the best owner the Unsullied are likely to have, and yet would be morally diminished by the act of owning people. With no resolution at hand, “Valar Dohaeris” most explicitly navigates questions of service in the scenes set in Astapor.

“Well, what do knights swear to do? Protect the weak, and uphold the good.” – Margaery Tyrell

When Jorah guides Dany through rationalizations which justify her slave ownership, we can interpret his efforts as those of a pragmatic and loyal companion assisting in the making of a tough decision, or as those of an ex-slaver demonstrating his lack of moral compunction. Either way, we’re reminded that Jorah is a knight – an exiled knight – who fell from grace. Earlier, as Margaery handed the dirty orphan boy a wooden figure of a knight, I was struck by how the episode’s processing of the freedom-duty dichotomy was punctuated by countless iterations of knighthood, each serving as an example of how easily a single title’s obligations can be modulated by the individuals who bear it.

We know from Mormont’s past that his tragic flaw was love; selling poachers into slavery to help pay for his wife’s exorbitant tastes cast Jorah into dishonor. This illegal act sprung from an intense dedication which superseded the limitations of knightly behavior. Davos, the Onion Knight, demonstrates a similar loyalty, albeit to a single man. This loyalty derives from a deep and abiding respect expressed most clearly in the despairing attempt to turn Stannis away from Melisandre: “You are the rightful king. Not only by blood. You are an honorable man. A just man.” Where Jorah sacrificed his honor and renown for one person whose demands existed beyond the scope of knighthood, Davos is only concerned with maintaining honor in the eyes of the person who knighted him.

Ser Meryn Trant of the Kingsguard follows his orders so long as they’re convenient, even if this means beating and defiling an innocent girl before a court of gasping onlookers. Sandor Clegane, adamantly denying his knighthood, once offered his protection to that same girl. Ser Bronn of Blackwater, a newly minted knight, sees his title as cause for doubling his regular rate, even for a friend. Ser Barristan Selmy travels to the far ends of the world in search of the Targaryen descendant he was once sworn to serve.

“As this is the simple truth — that to live is to feel oneself lost — he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life.” – José Ortega y Gasset

The most effective scenes in “Valar Dohaeris” are driven by the sacrifices made by uncertain people struggling against or being demanded upon by greater forces. Framing the episode are the wildlings and Unsullied, the utterly free and utterly enslaved. Where Jon Snow’s clever performance before the champions of independence north of the Wall results in a realization of the fears his vows have awakened, Dany’s consideration of the measures she’ll take when claiming the Iron Throne force her to admit that power does not cleanly exist in a vacuum. How each character selects a path toward relative degrees of service, or freedom from it, reveals something essential about them, and about their destiny within the game. As in the case of Tyrion, tugged in two by the terrifying possibility of self-definition and his hopeless role of family debtor, it is my hope that the season continues its exploration without the provision of convenient answers. Varys once spoke to us of power’s existence as function of belief, or perception. Season three seems to suggest that we are each shipwrecked like Davos upon the rocks. Salted and sunburned we are given choice in a hostile world: stay or go? Crow or wildling? Control or free? Truth or lies? Take or give? Forgive or reject? These choices are the only real power we own. The game is thus: you have no choice – you must choose.

• Published on 04/04/2013 at 2:30 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:02 PM CDT