We’ve been waiting for it, people. We’ve been filling our days with Sons of Anarchy, or Castle, or The Walking Dead. We’ve been mildly sidetracked by movies and books like The Hunger Games and season or series premieres of new shows like Person of Interest, Alcatraz, The River and cartoons like Ultimate Spider-Man, Green Lantern and Young Justice. We’ve even been tempted at the eleventh hour by stuff like the brief return of Toonami and Wrestlemania. But despite all of the waiting, hoping and wishing it’s finally paid off. Game of Thrones has finally returned to the air and the first episode of the second season is just as good as it needed to be.
It’s actually pretty interesting. I don’t like the Song of Ice and Fire books. I almost finished the first one, but I just couldn’t do it. Something about it came off as far too long winded for my tastes; like the Lord of the Rings series, it wasn’t the kind of experience I was after. That isn’t to say either of those series are bad — far from it. They just weren’t for me. The difference, though, is that I also didn’t really like the Lord of the Rings movies. Those movies, to me, were equally as long winded and generally uninteresting. I expected the same reaction to Game of Thrones, and was delightfully surprised to find I loved the show.
When I read fiction I’m usually looking for a story that starts off small and evolves into some kind of massive scale war between kingdoms. Lord of the Rings never really had that. Sure, it had battles, but it was always about a group of dudes who were already about as badass as they needed to be dropping a ring into a volcano. I just didn’t care enough. But sitting down to watch Game of Thrones and by the end of the first season we already have some pretty epic fights and war brewing everywhere, with the additional bonus of some crazy shit happening elsewhere and then some more crazy shit happening on another continent.
It’s epic enough in scale, and interesting enough to watch that it has me reconsidering taking another run at the novels — a very rare thing. I don’t like watching television shows based off other properties without having devoured them already. With the first season of Game of Thrones I had read most of the first book, so I had a general idea of what to expect. But now we’re in uncharted territory, and it doesn’t need to be like that, especially if we’re going to be talking about the show for the next few months.
It’s always preferable to have a point of reference to call back to.
When I decided I needed to see what all the fuss was about The Hunger Games it was a few days before the movie was set to release. I opted to set aside a few days and read the entire trilogy, and then went and saw the movie (twice). having read the books I was able to get way more out of the movie than the friend I saw it with — his lack of knowledge from the books made a lot of the movie feel superfluous. Where he saw pointless scenes I was mentally reciting the internal monologue of the main character, and that is something I’m currently unable to do with this season of Game of Thrones.
But man, that season premiere. It’s thrown out Joffrey coming into his own as a King, defying his own mother and taking steps toward doing stuff his own way. It’s got Robb leading men to war and so far being undefeated. It’s got other factions with other kings stepping up, and it’s got dragons and direwolves. One episode and it’s handed out the promise of a season full of grisly deaths, hard won victories and bitter losses. One episode has set more up than most other shows can cover in an entire season.
Sure, it’s pretty cool that The Undertaker is still undefeated at Wrestlemania, but Game of Thrones is going to have more awesome moments in one season than there are Tombstone Piledrivers in the entire WWE.
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