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Last sunday, another outstanding season of HBO’s Game of Thrones came to an end. This season had everything: Chilling plot twists! Doomed romance! Blood-spurting murders! Sinister revenge! Hodor!

There are plenty of great things you can say about Game of Thrones; that it has beautifully constructed characters, that it’s unquestionably the most successful attempt at a “high fantasy” television series (even that feels like an understatement, to be honest). But the season’s penultimate episode, “The Rains of Castamere”, accomplished something pretty outstanding that may have gotten lost in the “Red Wedding”/season finale shuffle. Specifically, the long game set up/execution of the titular song over the course of the show.

Before I go further: Full disclosure.

• Obviously, Game of Thrones season 3 spoilers below.
• This is purely observation off the show version of GoT as it exists right now and not the A Song of Ice and Fire books.

The song “The Rains of Castamere” (confusingly referred to by Ramin Djawadi on the official HBO track list as “The Rains of Castomere”) first appears on Game of Thrones in episode one of the second season. It isn’t introduced in a big banquet scene or at a especially pivotal moment; Tyrion quietly whistles it to himself as he enters a small council meeting. It’s a small thing, you might even miss it (I didn’t catch it until a second watch through). It isn’t until the penultimate episode of season 2, “Blackwater”, that “Rains” is given any real substance when an inebriated Bron and a gathering of other Lannister soldiers sing the song in the hours before Stannis Baratheon’s army arrives to try and take King’s Landing. A nameless soldier asks Bron how he knows the song, he sarcastically responds that he learned it “from drunk Lannisters”. That scene, along with the haunting cover of the song played by The National over the episode’s end credits, cement “The Rains of Castamere” as a song associated with House Lannister (both in-story and by the viewer). Here are the lyrics.

And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a different coat,
That’s all the truth I know.
In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
A lion still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
As long and sharp as yours.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With no one there to hear.

Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With not a soul to hear.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With not a soul to hear.

In season 3, the song shows up in a bunch of interesting places before we get to the shit and hellfire of episode nine. In “Dark Wings, Dark Words”, Thoros of Myhr sings “Rains of Castamere” while he and The Brotherhood Without Banners make their way through a Riverland forest. When we learn these are the men that the Lannister torturers were asking about last season, you have to wonder if Thoros was singing this song as either a taunt to his would-be pursuers or maybe as a ploy to catch them off-guard. It’s in “Second Sons” (the episode right before “The Rains of Castamere”,it’s important to note) that we finally get an in-story explanation of the song via a particularly nasty Cersei Lannister. The short version: Cersei threatens would-be-Queen Margaery Tyrell by laying out that “Rains” is about how her father, Tywin Lannister, brutally crushed an open rebellion from a Lannister vassal, House Reyne (Whose house sigil is an orange lion). In fact, he crushed them so completely that they’re now all dead, with the only “Reynes” to be found in their former home of Castamere the kind that coldly fall from the sky. Even shorter version: Cersei’s dad is the subject of one of the biggest pop songs in Westeros and it’s about how he executed an entire lineage for challenging his authority. (Pretty metal.)

Oh and, lest we forget, “Rains of Castamere” is incorporated into two different pieces of music for the show: A few bars of it can be heard toward the end of “One Last Drink Before The War” (Which plays following the aforementioned Bron drinking scene in season 2) and a super-melancholy arrangement called “A Lannister Always Pays His Debts” that serves as a moody anthem for handless sister-fucker Jamie in “The Bear and The Maiden Fair” (Season 3, episode 7).

All of this brings us to the episode “The Rains of Castamere” where, in a show first I believe, no Lannister character physically appears. This is a fairly glaring absence until we get to the show’s last ten or so minutes and we figure out why they didn’t need to. As Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark and their bannermen attend a wedding between Catelynn’s brother Edmure and one of Walder Frey’s daughters. For most of the episode, the Stark storyline has been fairly light; there’s an amusing comedy bit with Frey listing off his daughters’ names, a kind of saccharine conversation between Robb and his new bride Talissa where they talk about their unborn child, the almost sitcom-y reveal that Edmure’s bride-to-be is actually pretty hot. But it’s when the camera cuts to the wedding band as they start into a rendition of, you guessed it, “The Rains of Castamere” that all of that washes away. In that moment, not only does Cat Stark notice something’s horribly wrong, the viewer does too. What Game of Thrones has done here is slowly build up one song over the course of almost two entire seasons so that, when we hear it at one specific moment, we instinctively know what it means and what will likely follow. I can’t name another television series, let alone a movie, that has spent that much care developing a musical cue and the end result is that one of the show’s crowning achievements, the tragic slaughter of the Starks and their army, is that much more rewarding. Game of Thrones played us like one of Pavlov’s dogs and we fell right for it. It’s chilling that, when Robb is stabbed in the stomach by a trusted ally or when Catelyn’s throat is unceremoniously slit from behind, we can somewhat relate.

Post By Max Robinson (106 Posts)

Deadshirt staff writer. Conceived by the unholy union of Zeus (in the guise of a corn dog) and ED-209. Has written for City Paper, Courthouse News. Twitter famous.

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