Game Of Thrones: 12 Things You Learn Rewatching Season 4

11. Jaime Raping Cersei Really Threatens His Redemption Arc

Jaime's road to redemption is one of the strongest character arcs in the entire show, but they come really close to undermining the whole thing in the third episode, Breaker of Chains.

It's here we find Jaime and Cersei beside the dead body of their son, and here where Jaime ends up raping his sister. Given everything else he'd gone through since becoming a prisoner, opening up about his past, and generally making a turn towards the side of good (yeah, he still pushed a kid out of a window, but at least he's shown real signs of growth), this undercuts things horribly.

Somehow it ended up coming off as rape, despite the director's insistence that it was supposed to be consensual. It... doesn't come off that way at all. In the books, Cersei's initial reluctance at the inappropriate setting is overcome by her desire for her brother; in the show, it's a string of 'no's'.

Jaime's arc still works, which is a testament to the rest of the writing, and even more so to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's performance, and of the fact that, in a narrative sense, they've acted like this moment never happened, because it wasn't supposed to be rape. It's a major f**k-up by the filmmakers, which means in a character sense they've just about managed to get away with it, but they came mighty close - and might well have done so for some viewers - to ruining it.