Anatomy of a Throne: “Mockingbird”

HBO’s Game of Thrones brandishes a consistent and high degree of fidelity to the nearly 5,000-page-long source material of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but there still, of course, are differences. While most of these gaps from the page to the screen are small and detail-oriented, it is nonetheless the case that the most subtle discrepancies often hold the biggest insight into the adaptation process, into the demands of filmmaking, and into the rigors of the literary narrative.


This, then, is the anatomy of a key scene of Thrones – not because of its dramatic importance or visual effects whizbangery, but because of the telling nature of its realization.

Episode: “Mockingbird” (407)
Scene: Sansa bitchslaps Robin

The scene where Lady Sansa Lannister (or is that Stark now?) physically accosts little Robert Arryn may be interesting in and of itself – the audience gets a fleeting but nonetheless crucial insight into Robin’s psychology, which is entirely insulated by the remoteness of the Eyrie and reinforced by his ability to execute anyone who “bothers” him – but it is almost entirely expositional in nature, setting the stage for Lord Petyr Baelish to kiss her and Lady Lysa Arryn to nearly kill her.

The original version couldn’t be any more diametrically opposed.

There is, of course, a whole raft of superficial differences. On the page, it is Littlefinger who appears on the scene first (after Lysa observes her niece for a time from her balcony), watching Sansa construct the snow castle that eventually emerges as Winterfell. He expends a great deal of effort in helping her finish the ancestral home of the Starks, rolling towers and reinforcing snow bridges and tying twigs together to create an elaborate latticework for the castle’s greenhouse – and then, when she’s breathless and snow-encrusted and smiling for the first time in probably (and literally) years, he moves in close to kiss her.

The awkward scene, in which a suddenly frightened Sansa attempts to figure out an escape route, is broken by the sudden, raucous appearance of Sweetrobin, the future Warden of the East. “A castle!” he exclaims in a way that is even childish for an eight-year-old, setting into motion an inexorable chain of events:

Sansa said, “It’s meant to be Winterfell.”

“Winterfell?” Robert was small for eight, a stick of a boy with splotchy skin and eyes that were always runny. Under one arm he clutched the threadbare cloth doll he carried everywhere.

“Winterfell is the seat of House Stark,” Sansa told her husband-to-be. “The great castle of the north.”

“It’s not so great.” The boy knelt before the gatehouse. “Look – here comes a giant to knock it down.” He stood his doll in the snow and moved it jerkily. “Tromp tromp I’m a giant, I’m a giant,” he chanted. “Ho ho ho, open your gates or I’ll mash them and smash them.” Swinging the doll by the legs, he knocked the top off one gatehouse tower and then the other.

It was more than Sansa could stand. “Robert, stop that.” Instead he swung the doll again, and a foot of wall exploded. She grabbed for his hand but she caught the doll instead. There was a loud ripping sound as the thin cloth tore. Suddenly she had the doll’s head, Robert had the legs and body, and the rag-and-sawdust stuffing was spilling in the snow.

Lord Robert’s mouth trembled. “You killlllllllled him,” he wailed.

And this is where the more substantial changes come into play, the most immediate of which being just why the television show’s Robert is so incredibly different from the novels’. When it became necessary to cast older actors in the roles of the children (thanks to the nature of the material and the increased dramatic range of young adults [not to mention the far-older-than-in-the-books ages of the main cast, such as the 55-year-old Sean Bean and the 44-year-old Peter Dinklage]), it therefore also became necessary to (somewhat) mature their characterizations. Carrying around a doll was, presumably, at the top of that list.

There’s another, far pricklier complication at work here, one that has occasionally-but-resolutely made its presence felt since Game of Thrones’s first episode: the cultural differences between the modern-day viewer and the pseudo-medieval setting of the story makes for a world of difference in everything from socio-political contexts to cosmogonical subtexts; children of both sexes playing with a doll, for instance, is an entirely different animal in, say, 1455 than it is in 2014, and it can be an altogether insurmountable challenge to try and convey the necessary cultural explanations and/or differentiations. (Hell, even when there is room for such considerations to be delivered, there’s still an annoyingly consistent habit for individuals to either ignore or refute them – such as the business of President Abraham Lincoln being gay simply due to his having shared a bed with another man for several years, a commonplace occurrence in a time period before the advent of personal bedrooms.) This is why, in just two examples out of a veritable cavalcade, in the series mummers are referred to as actors and “truly” is rendered into “really.”

Still, being so woefully and profoundly under-developed is an integral part of Robin’s character, and it is, indeed, dutifully conveyed to the audience at home – between Robert’s continued breastfeeding (despite his being several years older in the show) and his aforementioned psychological need of feeling removed and protected, viewers can’t help but cringe at his extreme age-inappropriateness. His essentially throwing a hissy fit when Sansa “confronts” him, then, is a spruced-up-but-still-proportionately jejune response.

But there’s still more at work in this scene. Immediately after the shock of seeing his favorite doll be decapitated right in front of his eyes fades – giving him a strange parallel to Sansa, who had witnessed the execution of her lord father (“Baelor,” episode 109) – Sweetrobin immediately falls into one of his shaking spells.

Then he began to shake. It started with no more than a little shivering, but within a few short heartbeats, he had collapsed across the castle, his limbs flailing about violently. White towers and snowy bridges shattered and fell on all sides. Sansa stood horrified, but Petyr Baelish seized her cousin’s wrists and shouted for the maester.

The guards and serving girls of the Eyrie are, of course, accustomed to the boy’s apparent seizures; they restrain him, while Maester Colemon pours half a cup of dreamwine down his throat. The next step is the height of medieval medicine: leeching, to get the “bad blood” out. As they carry the young Protector of the Vale out screaming, he exclaims how much he hates his bride-to-be. At least Joffrey, Sansa’s previous betrothal, was sound of body, she thinks resentfully.

The complete removal of Robin’s “shaking sickness” is, of course, a far bigger and potentially more consequential alteration than either advancing his age or retracting his childlike tendencies. Although not altering the very core of the character, removing the most obvious sign of his weakness – particularly when coupled with the actor’s lack of splotchy skin and perpetually runny eyes – paints him in a subtly-but-unavoidably-different context; he is less a sickly and frail child and more an obnoxiously spoiled and ridiculously petulant brat – which is to say, he is now far more like all of Thrones’s villains, from King Joffrey to Ramsay Snow to Lady Lysa herself.

Seeing as how there is no budgetary reason or production concern to change the material in this fashion, one can only assume that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are making a (further) statement regarding the relationship between human nature and the proclivities of power.

Previous Installments

Episode 201: “The North Remembers”
Episode 203: “What Is Dead May Never Die”
Episode 207: “A Man without Honor”
Episode 209: “Blackwater”
Episode 210: “Valar Morghulis”
Episode 304: “And Now His Watch Is Ended”
Episode 305: “Kissed by Fire”
Episode 309: “The Rains of Castamere”
Episode 401: “Two Swords”
Episode 402: “The Lion and the Rose”
Episode 403: “Breaker of Chains”
Episode 404: “Oathkeeper”
Episode 405: “First of His Name”
Episode 406: “The Laws of Gods and Men”

Marc N. Kleinhenz is the features editor for Tower of the Hand and a freelancer who has written for a total of 23 sites. Some of his non-Game of Thrones work includes theme park analysis and interviews with Batman writers and artists.

• Published on 05/30/2014 at 12:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:41 PM CDT