Could “Game of Thrones” be planning the unimaginable?
In Sunday’s bloody episode, which aired two weeks before the Season 4 finale, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), the show’s most beloved character, is sentenced to death for the murder of King Joffrey (Jack Gleeson).
Tyrion’s champion, Prince Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), fights Cersei’s (Lena Headey) champion, Sir Gregor Clegane (Hafthor Julius Bjornsson), but Oberyn can’t defeat the man they call the Mountain. Now, Tyrion’s death seems certain.
Despite the Mountain’s mammoth proportions — Bjornsson is 6-foot-9 and weighs nearly 420 pounds — his victory was not a foregone conclusion. Oberyn, who stepped in at the last minute for one-handed Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), battled bravely, seeking to avenge the deaths of his sister and her children, who died at Gregor’s hands.
“Oberyn is the one wild card,” Dinklage has said.
On a dinner break from rehearsing the upcoming production of “Much Ado About Nothing” for Shakespeare in the Park, Pascal tells The Post the fight scene was filmed over four days in a public arena in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
“It’s a big deal in the books,” says Pascal. “So there was the expectation of being up to the challenge, without taking into fact that I was going to be fighting a man twice my size and three times my weight.” Pascal is 5-foot-11. “I’m a normal-sized human being. He is a title-holding strongman who came to the shoot from a competition in China, where he was titled as the third-strongest man in the world.”
Director Alex Graves mostly worked with two cameras, keeping the one on Bjornsson 4 to 6 inches off the ground to make him look even taller.
“You’ve got this one guy who’s a hammer and this other guy who’s a dancer,” Graves says. “Pedro is like a spearfighting Frank Sinatra.”
Tyrion has been one of the focal points of Season 4 of “GoT.” He is the oppressed underdog who defies authority at every turn. He’s risked death over and over, so will Oberyn’s defeat really mark the end for the show’s heart and soul?
It certainly seems that way. Life is very cheap on “GoT.”
This is the show that killed off its leading man, Ned Stark, played by its biggest star (Sean Bean), in Season 1, to the amazement of fans.
Last season’s “Red Wedding” was a bloodbath that took the lives of Robb Stark (Richard Madden), his wife, Talisa (Oona Chaplin), and his mother, Catelyn (Michelle Fairley).
And the murder of King Joffrey, which set Cersei against Tyrion, was another shocker.
We’ve learned to live without all these characters, but surely we can’t live without Tyrion.
“Peter [Dinklage] made him the heart of the show,” Graves says. “He’s the rare actor who’s so intelligent that he underplays it, and Tyrion’s humanity comes through. If you watch the first two seasons of the show, he’s not likable, but Peter’s such a beautiful person, you fall in love with him.”
It’s a testament to Dinklage — the only performer from the show to win an Emmy — that in a cast of dozens, Tyrion is a singular figure.
In one of the season’s most touching moments, Oberyn comes to Tyrion’s cell and reveals that they had actually met once before, a very long time ago, when Tyrion was a newborn and Cersei and Jaime had advertised him as a monstrous hermaphrodite who had claws, one red eye and a tail between his legs. When Oberyn says that, as far as he was concerned, he was just looking at a baby, Tyrion’s eyes fill with tears.
And the brothel-hopping Oberyn, who spent several scenes on this show slapping naked male and female rear ends, acquires a surprising dignity.
“It’s a really, really special scene. [Tyrion’s] an underdog and Oberyn recognizes that,” Pascal says.
“There’s a cunning and a resilience there because so many people have been against him just for being born. That is what was so meaningful to me, playing a character who articulates that.”
Producers are tight-lipped on the plot of the next two episodes, but judging from season finales past, the show’s body count will rise.
Along with Tyrion, could another Lannister take a hit? The rancor among Tywin (Charles Dance), Jaime, Cersei and Tyrion is so poisonous, it is destined to leave a lethal stain.
Cersei in particular is so devastated by her son Joffrey’s death, she is desperate for blood.
“It’s a family of people who are constantly at each other’s throats,” admits executive producer D.B. Weiss.
For now, it’s Tyrion’s fate that hangs in the balance, and fans are dying to know what will happen next.
With Oberyn out of the picture, Tyrion needs a new ally. Will Jaime risk his own life to free him? Will Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) return and tell the truth about the poisoning? Will Tyrion come to his senses and plead for mercy? Or will Joffrey’s successor, King Tommen (Callum Wharry), shock everyone and grant Tyrion a pardon?
With Tyrion, the character with nine lives, anything is possible.