Game of Thrones Season One Ultimate Unofficial Guide: The Game of Thrones Season 1

slices it clean off the man’s body. The scene closes with this ranger running scared.
    Next we travel to Winterfell, home of the Starks, where a strikingly contradictory scene is taking place. The young men are teaching a young boy, Bran, archery while his parents look on. The young ladies are in a room practicing their needle work. As Bran attempts to hit the archery target, an arrow comes from behind him and sails into the bull’s eye. It is the boy’s slightly older sister, Arya, who shows him up because she had grown bored with sewing. A lighthearted chase ensues. Interrupting the play is news that a deserter has been found in the territory and must be dealt with. Ned Stark, head of the House, insists his young son come along amidst protests from his wife, the boy’s mother. The group of men rides out to where the deserter is being held and we see that it is the ranger who had fled from the woods in the previous scene. Although the man tells what he had witnessed and warns of the return of the White Walkers, he takes responsibility for deserting his post nonetheless. Ned sentences him to death and beheads the ranger himself, explaining to Bran that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
    On their return to the Winterfell castle, a deer and dire wolf are found dead in the wood. Five motherless pups are discovered and just as Ned is about to kill them out of mercy, his eldest son Jon, who is a bastard, interjects and convinces Ned to keep the pups, pointing out that the direwolf is the sigil of the Stark House and there are five, one for each Stark child. As they are leaving, a sixth pup is found for Jon to have, an obvious symbol of his inclusion in the Stark bloodline. Upon their return, word is received that King Robert intends to visit Winterfell.
    We leave Winterfell and enter King’s Landing, the Capital of the seven kingdoms and home to the Iron Throne. Here, we meet the Queen and her brother conspiring about the dead body in the background, who was the King’s Hand, John Arryn. The Queen is paranoid about whether or not Arryn told anybody and what they are to do if he did. We are left wondering what the secret is for the time being.
    After the brief introduction of King’s Landing, we are taken back to Winterfell for King Robert’s arrival with his entire entourage. His first order of business is to visit the Stark crypt, where Ned’s sister, Robert’s beloved, is buried. We learn that the Targaryen family was responsible for her death and that Robert had already avenged her killer. We learn Robert’s intentions in visiting the Starks when he asks Ned to take place as his Hand and to unite their two houses by marrying his daughter Sansa to Robert’s son Joffrey, heir to the throne. Ned is left with much to consider.
    Later the same night, Lady Stark receives a note from her sister, the widowed wife of Jon Arryn, suggesting that her husband was poisoned by the Lannisters, the family of the Queen. She has fled the Capital out of fear for her and her son’s lives and has returned to her husband’s home in The Vale, another of the seven kingdoms. Realizing this information means Robert is in danger, Ned is obligated by loyalty to Robert to take the position offered him as Hand of the King.
    We are next introduced to a third realm of the kingdom, called Pentos, which lies across the Narrow Sea from Westeros. Here we meet Daenerys as her brother Viserys prepares her for marriage to a Dothraki king. After seventeen years of exile from his home, Viserys is plotting to take what he considers to be his rightful place on the Iron Throne by wielding the Dothraki army as his weapon. Daenerys is reluctant to be used as a pawn in his scheme, but has no choice in the matter. At the Dothraki wedding ceremony, Daenerys appears shocked and disturbed by the brutality of the culture that has been forced upon her. She is tended to by Jorah Mormont, a man who had served her father when her father was king. An array of wedding gifts which includes three fossilized dragon eggs is presented to her.
    The season opener ends at Winterfell with Bran climbing the castle walls to watch his father leave. Hearing noises coming from the window of an abandoned room, he discovers the Queen and her twin brother Jaime erotically involved. The Queen sees Bran spying and Jaime pushes Bran from the window. The screen blackens, leaving us unaware of Bran’s fate.

What We Learn
     There is a horrific race of