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10. A Ghost in Harrenhal (Season 2)

Recap: Arya, Gendry, and Hot Pie make their way to the Wall, but Yoren's party is beset by Lannisters. The recruits instead find themselves under the care of the Tickler, Ser Gregor Clegane, and Tywin Lannister. Arya's wits help her to win the favor of Lord Tywin, while her courage wins her the service of Jaqen H'ghar. Arya tasks Jaqen with killing two sadistic members of the Mountain's horde and finally with helping her to escape the castle before the Starks take it.

A.k.a., Arya is f***ing amazing: The Series. Arya and Tywin's scenes are some of the greatest in the show's run, revealing a paternal side to Tywin that ironically goes missing when he addresses his 'ill-formed, spiteful thing' of a son and his daughter still ripe for 'breeding.' Arya is sharp-eyed, cunning, and just a little too bold addressing a clear superior.

And of course, Arya's taste for blood develops further here. The atrocities that the Mountain's people put their prisoners through are horrific, and furthermore, they seem mainly to be doing it for fun. Given the power bestowed to her by this genie of death, of course you want Arya to leverage Jaqen's assassin skills. And it's a pretty damn dirty trick she pulls to ask for so many other people's deaths in order to escape the castle when the chance is provided. But she's not a master strategist - the big picture move is seemingly to kill Tywin, but this never winds up becoming the play.

It's an extraordinarily dreary storyline shot in monotonic grimness. The only things that shine here are the principal actors: Tywin, Arya, and Jaqen. But their quiet charisma somehow manages to be enough to elevate this arc to one of the greatest of the series. A man has no name, just the second most iconic words of the show's run: Valar morghulis.

Book notes: The books stretch out the first piece of this arc dramatically - the parts with Yoren's party questing northward. They're slow and meandering, and for some reason they take up multiple chapters, but they give a great insight into the already-war-torn Riverlands. The show does a really effective job of capturing the devastation while trimming the length, focusing more on Arya and her friends, and the like.

That's also the theme in Harrenhal, largely. Arya's sojourn in Harrenhal in the books is long. And detailed - there are tons of points about how the washer-women are treated, about the one poor girl that gets raped by a hundred Lannister soldiers, the women who bully Arya into doing her work. And then there's the final chapter, in which Arya has to escape from Roose Bolton - full of foreshadowing for the Red Wedding, and loaded to the gills with pure eeriness.

The show gives Arya to Tywin instead of Roose, and I think it's a huge win. The Leech Lord Bolton of the books is practically a vampire, which is awesome in its own right. The show's no-nonsense Roose is more like a Northern Tywin who gets the short end of the plot stick. Having the actual Tywin winds up working better.

What is missing that I miss - Arya's inner monologue. Some of GRRM's psychological insights come from repeated phrases in a character's mind, and none to me is as memorable as Arya's feeling that she's a mere mouse in Harrenhal. It's a beautifully vulnerable sentiment. Yet when she discovers the power of her twisted genie in her Faceless Man, she begins to feel powerful, like a ghost... and then she loses him and is once again a mouse. This sort of empowerment and disempowerment is lost in the show.

The books also see Arya commit her first cold-blooded murder at the end of ACOK. Her escape is formulated personally rather than by leveraging Jaqen, and she uses his coin to distract and kill a guard. I prefer the show's take here by a bit - it smooths out the journey from badass chick to shameless murderer when the executions don't start 'til late-Season 3, after the Red Wedding.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness