Winter is Coming

Or, "let's not waste seven whole minutes dicking around with three guys who will all be dead before the second chapter ends."

Whoopsie, I kind of gave the game away there.  And then I made an awful awful pun. Shoot me now.

Speaking of shooting, the first important scene of the episode sees seven ten-year-old Bran Stark trying to shoot a target while two older boys look on.  One is fifteen seventeen-year-old Robb Stark, heir to Winterfell, and the other is Jon Snow, Lord Eddard Stark's bastard son. (Do not ask about the last names. Just... don't.) The fact that one of them gets a withering look from Mrs. Stark is probably a pretty good hint as to who's who, but then you have Theon Greyjoy riding around, and he's not even named, nor is his presence explained in this episode.

Anyway, the target is eventually hit, spot-on, by Bran's sister Arya (who I think is finally named about halfway through the episode), who's a) also aged up, b) not an archer in the books, and c) standing about twice as far away from the target as he is and could very easily have wounded him.  Ah well, I'm sure that's the entire quota for danger that Bran can be put in during this episode, right?

All joking aside, while I like how the titles laid out the geography, how about spoon-feeding us the rest of the backstory while you're at it?  Hey, remember the movie Serenity? The entire 'verse's backstory was told via a classroom instruction (which then turned into a nightmare for the character backstory, but that's a whole different can of crazy). How about, rather than start with Waymar Royce (not named) and his band of merry, unnamed, and soon-to-be-dead men, start with somebody giving Bran a history lesson?  "Fourteen seventeen years ago, your father rode out with Robert Baratheon to end the reign of the Mad King," and so on and so forth. 

If you'll permit me to go off on this tangent, Will's death had a much larger impact in the book than it did in the show.  That's because we're dealing with separate mediums here.  Generally - not always - viewpoint characters aren't expected to bite it. In contrast, you put three guys played by actors nobody recognizes in a show you know has Boromir as the main character (because Sean Bean always lives... right?) and you can kind of assume those guys aren't going to last very long.  And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Others White Walkers are not the central focus of this season.

Now, yes, Eddard Stark personally executing the deserter is an important moment for his character. But it doesn't matter who that deserter is.  So ultimately what I'm saying is this: save the reveal of the Wall for when Jon finally sees it, and spend those seven minutes instead explaining who everyone is. And maybe why the Starks and Lannisters hate each other.

Meanwhile, Son-of-Mine from one of the better Doctor Who Series 3 episodes is busy whoring his sister out to a barbarian king. The knight protecting her is Father Octavian from a Doctor Who Series 5 episode, so go figure there.  His sister is thirteen sixteen and also the reason why all the kids are aged up; her nipples are visible more often than not.  Are you surprised?  This is HBO, which I assume stands for Hot Boobalicious Orgies.  So she has to be aged up to avoid a little thing called child pornography, and that means all the other kids have to be aged up too in order to fit the new timeline.

All right. This is one of the things that frustrates me about the book.  Dany doesn't actually get to Westeros in the book. It's a bit odd to have a TV show where three main cast members never interact with the rest. Even Battlestar Galactica got Helo off Caprica within the first 20 episodes, and they were making it up on the fly. Now, yes, some of her scenes are being used for exposition, that's certainly true.  But at this point I don't think there's any justification for putting the wedding scene in this episode instead of the next (unless Episode 2 was way over the titty quotient already and this one was not).

Okay, okay, I'm griping. The main players are all introduced, and they're all well-written and well-acted enough that you can figure out who they are and what's going on provided that you pick up on every clue and every bit of "as you know" dialogue sprinkled throughout. 

I'm having trouble comparing this to anything else. Battlestar Galactica had a much less complicated backstory. Babylon 5 had fewer characters. The Lord of the Rings put most of the introductions on hold until the second half of the first movie.

Final verdict: as it should be obvious, this is not how I would have done it. (Then again, I wouldn't rehabilitate a character whose first contribution to the story is to chuck a seven-year-old out a window after boinking his sister.) However, all the really important details are at least mentioned (some more clumsily than others), so in that respect it does its First Episode duty.