Monday 2 May 2016

15th January, 1966

My piece on Game of Thrones 6.1: "The Red Woman" is up now at Geek Syndicate.

2 comments:

darkman said...

" In the books Doran’s seeming passivity was a front for the fact he and Oberyn had put together a truly astonishingly intricate plan for vengeance."
The "astonishingly intricate" plan was to ask Daenarys to marry his son which was such a shit plan that the end result was Quentyn burning to death. The Dorne chapters are the worst parts of the books (which is saying a lot considering Martin in one chapter talks about Sam's "pink mast" and writes about Daenerys shitting in the bushes in another).
In my opinion the best thing this episode did was to kill most of the Dornish characters.

SpaceSquid said...

I'm a unrepentant defender of the Dornish sections of the books. And of course what you describe wasn't the plan, but the last-minute rewrite after Viserys died. Which yes, shows the problem with constructing intricate fifteen-year long plans. I'm pretty sure that was a large part of Martin's point here - Doran's mistakes are obvious, but I didn't think a piece on the S6 opener was the place to dissect them.

That said, it wasn't just the marriage pact that was part of the plan; there was also the slow poisoning of Tywin himself, which would've worked out just peaches if Tyrion hadn't shot him in the groin before he could die of constipation.