S4·E2 — The Lion and the Rose

The hour retold

The Purple Wedding is the rare Westerosi celebration where the worst person in the room is also the victim, and the episode makes the audience wait for it in the most uncomfortable way possible: by letting Joffrey be Joffrey at length, with the realm’s dignitaries pinned smiling to their seats. The feast is a gauntlet of cruelties aimed mostly at Tyrion — a war of the five kings re-enacted by dwarfs, wine poured on his head, the cupbearer’s job as public leash — and the hour’s tension is not whether something will happen but how much humiliation the story will bank first. Around the edges, the show seeds the room with motives like a drawing-room mystery: Olenna fussing at Sansa’s necklace, Varys warning, Oberyn fencing with Tywin in gorgeous double-speak.

Then the pie. Joffrey drinks, coughs, claws at his throat, and dies purple and terrified in his mother’s arms — a king poisoned at his own wedding in front of a thousand witnesses, none of whom saw anything. Cersei’s grief goes straight to verdict: her finger finds Tyrion, standing over the corpse holding the emptied cup, and the episode snaps shut on his arrest. The staging is meticulous about what the audience does and does not see; on rewatch the mechanism is all there — the necklace, the stone missing, the cup’s travels — but first time through, the show gets exactly what it wants: relief, horror at the relief, and a frame around the one Lannister innocent of this particular crime.

Structurally, the episode is Baelor’s dark twin: once again a king’s caprice was the board’s most unpredictable piece, and once again the story removes it — but where Ned’s death opened a war, Joffrey’s opens a trial, and the trial will do what trials do in this story, which is measure everything except guilt. Off in the North, the hour makes sure no one mistakes the death for the end of cruelty: at the Dreadfort, Ramsay hunts a girl through the woods with hounds for sport and shows his visiting father what is left of Theon Greyjoy — proof that the realm’s supply of monstrous sons did not die with the king. The wedding got the headlines. The kennel is the forecast.

What happens

• The royal wedding: dwarf jousters, a pie, and a king who humiliates his uncle one last time.
• Joffrey drinks, chokes, and dies purple in his mother's arms.
• Cersei points at Tyrion; the wine bearer is arrested on the spot.
• Sansa vanishes from the feast on Ser Dontos's arm.
• At the Dreadfort, Ramsay hunts a girl with hounds and shows his father what's left of Theon.

The people of the episode

The fallen — spoilers

• King Joffrey I Baratheon — Poisoned at his own wedding feast — the Strangler, in a cup poured by fate and Olenna Tyrell.
• Ser Dontos Hollard — Silenced with three bolts once his ferrying was done.