SPOILER WARNING: All events that have occurred in the TV show up to and including yesterday’s episode are fair game. I have read the books but I will not go any further beyond small hints that only fellow book-readers will catch on to. You’ve been warned.

I don’t think there’s any question that “Garden of Bones” is the best episode of the second season so far. There’s so much to discuss, so let’s just get right into it.

“Game of Thrones” has the best opening sequence on television. Not only is it awesome, it’s educational. We all know that the show has the potential to be very, very confusing. So it’s only fitting that its intro shows a map to help get our geography in order. Each week, any new locations are added into the sequence. This week there was Harrenhal and Qarth, “the greatest city that ever was or will be.”

This intro lets all us fans know that after a week-long wait, it’s finally “Thrones” time again. Sometimes it feels like it would be more appropriate if this was the show’s opening.

The Battlefield

“Garden of Bones” opens with a fart joke… or does it? There was all that buildup just so the guy could “break wind,” or so we thought until another kind of wind, Robb’s direwolf Grey Wind, pounces on them. We see Robb with a number of his men, the screen fades to black and we hear cries of “The King in the North!”

There will be those who complain that many, in fact most, of the battle scenes occur off screen (we all remember Tyrion getting knocked out before the Battle of the Green Fork towards the end of last season). This is going to be a fact of the show, and I’m here to tell you why the haters are wrong.

In the books, Robb is not a point of view character. All we see of him is through Catelyn’s eyes and thus many battles are not witnessed firsthand. Battles are handled similarly in the show, and it’s not an issue. David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the showrunners, are working on a limited budget in terms of both money and time. Let’s consider how much the CGI for the dragons and direwolves must have cost. Do we really want them blowing that money on every little fight? Plus, Weiss and Benioff have 10 episodes to adapt a 1000-page novel. This show is driven by characters, not action or plot. We can’t be wasting valuable screen time on action scenes. I can promise you this: there is only one battle that you need to see this season, and you’ll get every brutal second of it. The author of the books, George R.R. Martin, wrote that episode and they spent a month (as opposed to the standard 10 days) filming it.

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