Perhaps more interesting still is that the earlier intimations of sisterhood (e.g., last episode's scene with Shae and Ros at the port of King's Landing) are becoming more explicit. Shae lectures Sansa that "Men only want one thing from a pretty girl." Catelyn confides in Talisa, her son's potentially costly new bride. And, of course, Lady Olenna, the Queen of Thorns (played beautifully by Dame Diana Rigg) gets Sansa to say what she really thinks of her rotten little ex-fiancé, Joffrey.
I have a few more thoughts on these last two scenes, beginning with the sitdown between Olenna, Sansa, and Margaery. This is another early-season scene (we cited a few last week) that is lifted directly—and just about perfectly—from the novel, with little changed apart from the setting. I had worried that the casting of Rigg might be largely a sop to aging fanboys, such as myself, who loved her in The Avengers (the British spy show, not Whedon's cash cow) and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But she's terrific here, and never more so than when Sansa reveals that her soon-to-be son-in-law is a "monster," and she replies with only mild disappointment: "Hmm. That's a pity." Natalie Dormer's Margaery, too, is unfolding delightfully as the season progresses. I'd put her on the short list, with Bronn and Tywin, of the characters who've been most improved in the translation from page to screen.
I was less thrilled with the scene between Catelyn and Talisa. I understand Benioff and Weiss's desire to make Robb's wife a more prominent character than she is in the book (in which she's a young lady named Jeyne Westerling who barely registers at all), but I fear they may have overshot the mark a bit when it comes to the screen time afforded Talisa. Also, in changing the match from one made for honor—in the book Robb marries Jeyne because he feels duty-bound to do so after sleeping with her in a moment of weakness—to one made for love, they give the relationship a somewhat jarringly modern feel. (She's even a career woman!)
What bothered me in this scene though was not Talisa, but Catelyn, who explains that she blames all the tragedies that have befallen her House on her inability to love her husband's bastard son, Jon Snow, as her own. This is a bit that's been added by Benioff and Weiss, and while it's nicely written, it rings false to my sense of Catelyn, who is pretty much defined by a kind of righteous obstinacy, especially where Jon is concerned. Perhaps more to the point, it seems a little odd to go looking for distant sins that could explain her family's misfortunes when her own recent actions offer explanation enough: Her arrest of Tyrion did, after all, start the war with the Lannisters and lead to her husband getting stabbed through the leg; and her unsanctioned release of Jaime has already sown dissent among Robb's men. Maybe those bear more blame for the family's predicament than her inability "to love a motherless boy?" Now it could be that Benioff and Weiss are planting a seed with this scene that will blossom into something interesting later. But if it's merely a one-off, it's one I think the show could have done without.