Complex and rich 'Game of Thrones' returns with death, war, power and an ... - New York Daily News

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Complex and rich 'Game of Thrones' returns with death, war, power and an ... - New York Daily News Mar 29th 2012, 14:00 A week lasts 168 hours. An episode of "Game of Thrones" lasts one hour. That leaves viewers 167 hours each week to figure out what happened. Which is just about how many hours it takes to fully absorb this complex, beautifully produced, splendidly acted and often challenging fantasy epic, set in the mystical kingdom of Westeros. "Game of Thrones" still isn't for everyone, and viewers just arriving Sunday for the premiere of season two should budget extra time to figure out the back story. But for fans of fantasy-world drama, "Game of Thrones" has a coherence on multiple levels that was missing in a similarly ambitious project like "Terra Nova." You just wish sometimes that the players would wear numbers so you could buy a program to help keep them straight. Then, too, the players keep changing, because the show keeps killing them off. Human life is cheap on "Game of Thrones." But even by "Thrones" standards, a death at the end of season one was startling, because the victim was Ned Stark (Sean Bean), a central figure in the drama up to that point. He was beheaded at the order of Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), a teenager who by luck of birth and various coincidental acts of lethal violence has ascended to the kingdom's Iron Throne. Joffrey may be the nastiest teenager on the planet, even including the cast of every show on the CW. He's convinced most of the world doesn't like him, which is true because he's a bully and a jerk, and he's now in a position where he can snap his fingers and have someone immediately killed by whatever means amuses him at the moment. When a good-natured bumbler annoys him, he orders soldiers to pour wine down the man's throat until he drowns or suffocates. Joffrey is hardly the only unpleasant character here. For starters, four or five other folks think they deserve his throne, and they aren't all Mr. Congeniality either. So it's true that Joffrey sometimes has to play rough, though his confidence has risen to the level where he's not even sure he still needs his ruthless mother Cersei (Lena Headey). His adversaries include Daenerys, who is nurturing three newborn dragons in the East and trying to prop up the spirits of her tired and hungry followers. Ned's son Robb is trying to consolidate the North and we hear recurring reports about acquiring ships for an assault on King's Landing, where Joffrey sits. Meanwhile, Cersei's brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) tries to encourage some sort of order amid all this, even as he realizes most of the people to whom he speaks don't understand most of the truth he's speaking. Once you sort out all the teams and players, "Game of Thrones" falls together like a good Western. But you may need all 167 hours, at least at first, to do the sorting. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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