May he enjoy the rest of his life unbothered by people telling him how evil he is. And goodbye Gleeson, who has announced he is quitting acting. Goodbye then Joffrey: as boy tyrants go you were the best at being the absolute worst. That vulnerability coupled with Lena Headey‘s bravura turn as the distraught Cersei, desperately scrabbling to save her dying son, aroused pity when least expected. Although there were several outstanding performances, extra credit must go to Jack Gleeson – from the very beginning, he tempered the young king’s hideousness and made him, as Tyrion suggested, a oddly vulnerable monster. From the moment the action switched to the wedding, everything kicked up a gear, leaving me on the edge of my seat and struggling for breath, almost as intensely as the choking Joffrey.įrom Joff’s ill-tempered dismissal of both the wedding band (hey, Sigur Ros, nice to see you) to his appalling decision to re-enact the war of the five kings with dwarves, the wedding feast was a catalogue of slow-mounting disaster during which no one dared stop the king from ritually humiliating his uncle. Scripted by George RR Martin (a tipoff that something big was likely to happen) this was another well-paced episode topped off by 15 minutes of exceptional (and exceptionally excruciating) viewing. So it should have come as no real surprise that Joffrey‘s extravagant wedding to Maergery Tyrell (known to book fans as “ the Purple Wedding”) ended with the boy king dead on his weeping mother’s lap, glassy eyes fixed on the distance and blood streaming from his nose. Weddings are to Game of Thrones as the appointment of a new Defence of the Dark Arts teacher is to Harry Potter: never a good thing. What sort of monster would do such a thing?’ ‘War is war but killing a man at a wedding, horrid. As ever, we are going to (hopefully) avoid book spoilers as well.Ĭlick here to read Sarah Hughes’ season four, episode one recap Do not read on unless you have watched season four, episode two (which airs in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Monday at 9pm). Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Game of Thrones airs on HBO in the US on Sunday.