Five Things I Yelled At The Screen During This Week’s Game Of Thrones

1. “THAT’S NOAH TAYLOR!”

Guys, Noah Taylor! I realise he’s played other roles but it is still absolutely bizarre to see skinny little Danny out of the sharehouse and on a horse, covered in fur, talking about heads being lopped off. Our Noah’s made it all the way to Westeros, and isn’t his casually menacing accent just spot-on? Like a rough type in a London pub who’s decided to mug you after you leave but won’t do more damage than is necessary to separate you from your wallet, even though he could.

For those keeping score, Our Noah’s playing Locke, “a bannerman of House Bolton”. Roose Bolton is himself a bannerman of House Stark – he’s that grim character following Robb Stark around saying vaguely menacing things. You may have noticed, before Jaime pointed it out, that their sigil is the Flayed Man. That is, a man with all his skin sliced off. And upside down, for some reason.

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Their house words are “Our Blades Are Sharp”. Someone in their lineage really, really liked skinning human beings. But I’m sure Robb’s close alignment with this family will work out super well for him in the end – a sigil’s just a sigil, right? It’s not like the Starks actually keep savage direwolves as pe– oh.

2. “THAT’S MACKENZIE CROOK!”

Gareth is sharing his brain with an eagle. Someone please let me know if there are any quotes from The Office that would be appropriate here.

3. “JUST KISS ALREADY!”

Everyone’s favourite odd-couple road movie, Brienne And Jaime On The Lam, has come to an end. Their sniping had an odd kind of mutual respect to it – Jaime is one of the most revered swordsmen in the seven kingdoms, and while Brienne thinks he Lacks Honour for killing the king he’d sworn to protect (Aerys Targaryen, The Mad King whose throne Robert took after the rebellion), she treats him with as much dignity she feels she can afford to a loathed captive. She also watches intently as he pees on a tree. A simple case of penis envy for our favourite tall drink of scowly water, or something more? Only time will tell, as both of their hearts are occupied elsewhere.

Also, Jaime gets in two of the best lines of the episode. His little “we’re not so different, you and I” moment was great – his sincere empathy for Brienne’s verboten love made him instantly more complex and likable, and it also equates chastely loving a dead gay fake king with having a clandestine sex obsession — and children, one of whom is the King — with your twin sister. And as for the comment before that – well, if someone’s not already writing Throne Of Cocks: A Porn Of Thrones And Cocks they don’t deserve to have a job writing erotic parodies.

4. “BUT WHERE ARE THE BOOBS?”

Speaking of, this week was very light on sexposition. In fact, there was next to no nudity, unless you count poor Theon’s whole mysterious foot-screwing situation (which may well have been very satisfying for certain people), or Joffrey’s momentary shirtlessless (which wasn’t so much “Mmmm, break me off a piece of that” as “No, seriously, let me just snap off one of his little twig arms and beat him to death with it”).

5. “THAT DISS MADE ME SNARF, YO!”

What there was lots of was sass:

• Jaime was sassing Brienne all over the place (“It’s wonderful to watch you wrestling with these dilemmas,” he murmurs, like he’s David Attenborough marvelling at a wildebeest).
• Arya was sassing grown men with swords who were happy to sass her right back.
• The Hound sassed their leader, Thoros of Myr, who is himself very sassy.
• And Diana Rigg might challenge Peter Dinklage for Sassiest In All The Land – her Olenna Tyrell is perfectly pitched and speaks volumes about where Margaery’s personable, aren’t-we-special-intimate-friends brand of scheming comes from.

Speaking of Olenna, everybody who’s comparing her to the Dowager Countess can just stop right now, because Rigg couldn’t be further from Maggie Smith’s fruity proclamations of imminent ruin and disdain for impropriety. This is a woman who’s learned not how to live within the constraints of social expectation but to take advantage of them. The twittering court that she and Margaery have set up in the castle gardens is full of women (and a few terrified young men) for a reason: if women are allowed to talk to one another, trust one another and work with one another without men getting in the way – inadvertently or otherwise – shit gets done. Margaery’s been engaged to one king and is about to marry another, and is getting away with it because society, like Joffrey, assumes that like “all intelligent women”, she’s simply doing what she’s told. But Lady Olenna quickly establishes that the Tyrell men are not wise and powerful, and by simple process of elimination, establishes herself as the one with the wisdom and power (witness the way her skilled padawan Margaery plays Joffrey like an evil little violin). And the one-liners. Seriously, go get a big glass of Dairy Farmers’ best permeate-free moo juice and take a big mouthful right before her scene.

NEXT WEEK ON GAME OF THRONES:

We can be sure of nothing, except for what we didn’t get this week: some Daenerys time, and probably a shitload of boobs. Some people who sat through a lot of chicks talking this week for absolutely no reason and do not have the internet are probably quite upset.

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Caitlin Welsh is the acting Assistant Editor of Sydney street press The BRAG. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.