

One thing that is her fault, though, is misinterpreting what she saw in the flames. That didn't really work out so well, but that's not her fault. Stannis was the one who made the decision to leave the priestess behind on Dragonstone, figuring it would look better if he captured King's Landing without her magical help. Seriously, what was up with Stannis choking Melisandre? This scene was totally bizarre and out of character. This subplot is silly either way, but that sort of twist would have been completely ridiculous.ģ) Is Stannis Baratheon gonna have to choke a witch? There was a great deal of fan speculation about whether Talisa was actually somehow Jeyne Westerling in disguise, which seems not to have been the case, thankfully. At least these scenes were short, and we didn't get any more long-winded, improbably aphrodisiacal stories about Talisa's girlhood in Volantis. This just makes him look like a complete idiot, and again contributes to the sense that Robb and Talisa are contemporary Americans rather than inhabitants of a medieval world. In the show, I didn't get the sense at all that Robb feels honor-bound to wed Talisa, but rather that he'd just decided to marry for love rather than uphold his arranged marriage/vital military alliance with the Freys. In the books, Robb falls into the arms of a lord's daughter named Jeyne Westerling after receiving news that his brothers Bran and Rickon have been murdered, and then feels honor-bound to marry her.

I hate everything about this Talisa subplot. We learn later that he was acting as an agent of Littlefinger, so it's a reasonable enough change for Game of Thrones to cut out the middleman, but in that case I'm not sure why Dontos was introduced at all on the show. Dontos arranges to meet with her many times in the godswood - where she is supposedly praying - in order to scheme about her escape. In the books, it's the drunken knight-busted-down-to-jester Ser Dontos Hollard rather than Littlefinger who shatters Sansa's illusions and promises to rescue her. But Littlefinger promises to spirit her away to safety.

In fact, her situation has become even more tenuous, since Joffrey will now keep her as his mistress rather than his queen.

But Lord Petyr Baelish, aka Littlefinger, soon disabuses her of her naive hopes - she's not free of Joffrey. While Sansa pretends to be distressed, secretly she's ecstatic. " Valar Morghulis" opens with a great scene that's straight out of A Clash of Kings, in which Joffrey and his courtiers engage in a bit of choreographed speechmaking so that he can set aside his fiancée Sansa Stark and enter instead into a marriage pact with Margaery Tyrell, daughter of the powerful lord Mace Tyrell of Highgarden.
