SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
I found myself asking the question “How do you know that?” throughout this episode. About three times. Just because characters spoke about things that, aside from us never seeing them actually learn about them (which we don’t need to), one has to wonder just how they came to attain said information.
Like with Daenerys and her giving Varys the third degree about his involvement in Robert’s plots to have her assassinated. She doesn’t have “little birds.” Who told her about that? She really grilled him about his past actions against her – selling her off to Drogo, sending the assassins to kill her – and was totally ignoring Tyrion’s defense of him.
For a while there I feared for Varys. I thought she was about to remove him from her service. But as soon as he raised his arguments as to why his actions were justified, I knew that she wouldn’t. His defense was pretty good; he was honest about his trying to preserve his own life, his service to the realm and his refusal to support a ruler who served no benefit to the people. In a way her questioning of him and making him answer for everything he’d done was a test. And he said all of the right things – the kind of things she’d appreciate – to make her pardon him.
A good thing that she did too because he was there to inform her of who Melisandre was and who the Red Woman had previously served. And thanks to Melisandre, Daenerys finally knows about the coming of the White Walkers, the Long Night and the War for the Dawn. It was so satisfying that she’s at last been made aware of it. She doesn’t quite have the full picture as yet, but it’s enough for now.
She also now knows about Jon. Melisandre did say that “Only the prince (or princess) who was promised can bring the dawn”, but I’m not sure if she’s implying that it’s Daenerys. She certainly indicated that both Jon and Daenerys have a role to play and she seemed to have been leaning toward Jon being the prophesied saviour in previous seasons. She could be saying that she now believes it to be Daenerys, that she thinks its both her and Jon or that Daenerys is just another one of the key players in the upcoming war.
Speaking of wars, Daenerys still has one to fight if she wants to conquer Westeros. I loved the plan that Tyrion had for doing just that. He knows his sister so very, very well. She did exactly what he said she would; use the presence of foreign soldiers to play on the nationalism of the Westerosi lords. Using Westerosi soldiers to lay siege to King’s Landing and the Unsullied to capture Casterly Rock is brilliant. But the best laid plans often go awry.
Daenerys hasn’t even properly started her campaign yet and she’s already suffered a major defeat. Her plan literally and ironically went up in flames. The entirety of Yara’s fleet was destroyed by Euron’s and two of her three allies – Yara and Ellaria – have been captured. The fact that the entire fleet was burning by the time Yara made it above deck, that no one came to tell her “Hey, we’re dying up here” just goes to show and swiftly and devastatingly Euron made his move. I kind of want to admire the man…but I don’t like him much.
Perhaps the best part of the entire battle was that the Sand Snakes – well, two of them; Obara and Nymeria – are dead. No one cares. No one liked them. They’re gone and that’s all that matters.
I had to look at a map of Westeros after watching this episode. Just to see how far Dragonstone and the Citadel are from Winterfell because I was confused as to why Daenerys’ letter (via Tyrion) reached Jon before Sam’s. Dragonstone is far closer to Winterfell than Oldtown (where the Citadel is).
Sansa’s mistrust of Tyrion was a tad frustrating. Sure, he was a whore mongering drunk when they got married, but he was and still is a good man. He was the one person in all of King’s Landing who cared about and respected her. Who did their best to keep her safe and looked out for in any way they could. She spent enough time around him to know that he is by leaps and bounds the best Lannister. And she knows better than anyone that he has as much reason as they do, more even, to see Cersei fall.
Jon’s hesitation was understandable; he didn’t spend nearly as much time with the man and doesn’t know him to the degree that Sansa does. I’m happy that he actually went to Sansa about this and sought her opinion. The two of them need to listen to each other more…but not today! Her insistence that he stay in the North and not ally with Daenerys and Tyrion, in the face of the fact that Daenerys has two of the things they need in the War for the Dawn – dragonglass and dragons – is not particularly wise.
No one wants him to leave for Dragonstone. Not even spit fire Lyanna Mormont, who champions him more than anyone. When she’s worried, you know you need to be too. The Northern lords’ (and lady’s) concerns are valid. Every head of House Stark who’s gone South in recent memory has died for it. But I’m confident that Jon won’t.
Simply because he’s going to Dragonstone and not King’s Landing. He’s dealing with someone completely different – albeit the daughter of the man who killed his grandfather and uncle. By Daenerys is not her father. At least not yet. And like Sansa, hopefully, he’s seen where his father and brother (or rather, uncle and cousin) went wrong and has learned from their mistakes. I just hope that his choosing to go against their wishes and allying with Daenerys doesn’t end the same way his pact with the Wildlings did for him.
I don’t particularly trust Sansa to rule the North in his stead. Not with Littlefinger around trying to coax her into a coup and into his bed. I don’t think she’ll fall for his efforts (she is having none of his talk at all so far), but aside from Littlefinger’s presence and possible influence, I just don’t think she’s fit to rule at all. Especially not when she is seemingly turning into a little Cersei herself. She has no experience as a ruler and I don’t trust her instincts.
The second time I asked myself how someone knew something, was when Cersei told the court about Daenerys’ punishments of the Masters when she was in Mereen. But she does have her Qyburn led spy unit (the third time questioned how someone got information, was when Qyburn said he heard Drogon was injured with spears).
One of the dragons will die confirmed. here is no way that the dragon slaying weapon would have been shown if that wasn’t going to happen. A weapon capable of taking down one of the dragons is necessary in the narrative. Daenerys and her dragons have so far been indestructible and this final war for the Iron Throne wouldn’t be interesting or fair if that remained true. The weapon balances the scales considerably.
Also confirmed is the idea that Sam will heal Jorah! But not with dragonglass? It didn’t look like the powder he mixed into the salve (at least I think it was a salve) he was preparing was dragonglass and none of his instruments were made of it either. Further, the book he used was not the same one he read about the dragonglass in. So I doubt that, right now, it’s in any way involved.
It was so touching that he was doing this for Jorah simply because he is Commander Mormont’s son. It was so hard seeing Jorah in pain as Sam peeled away the grey scale (disgusting too). Hasn’t Jorah suffered enough yet? That man needs to catch a break at some point. And damn, his grey scale got really bad.
Arya got two reunions in this episode and is headed toward a third (maybe fourth). I never thought I’d be happy to see her and Hot Pie back together again. But his presence was such a reminder of how innocent she used to be and how much she’s changed. He’s more or less the same Hot Pie he’s always been; charming, sweet and a lover of baking. I didn’t like how cold she was being to him, but her response to his advice on baking pies was hilarious given the context. Thank the Old Gods and the New that Hot Pie is still as talkative as ever because now, Arya knows that Jon is the King of the North and is headed back home to Winterfell.
With Jon headed South to Dragonstone…maybe they’ll run into each other? One can only wish. Her cluelessness about Winterfell made me realise that she really doesn’t know anything about where any of her family is. She wouldn’t know about Sansa or that Rickon is dead and no one knows about Bran. I love that she chose going home to be with her family over going to King’s Landing and killing Cersei. I honestly thought that she was going to kill those Lannister soldiers and expected it to happen in this episode, but I was very wrong. That she didn’t kill them coupled with this goes to show that all is not lost for her at all.
Nymeria…got huge. I think she’s actually bigger than Ghost. And we finally got to see her wolf pack! For a second I thought that she was going to attack Arya, but she recognised her! I wish that she and Arya could have stayed together. They’ve spent too much time apart, however, and Nymeria has changed just as much as Arya has. She has a life where she is and she’s doing well. Arya’s goodbye to her direwolf – “That’s not you” – was a nice call back to when she told Ned “That’s not me” when he told her she’d grow up to be a lady.
Random thoughts:
- Never do what Viserys would do.
- I wonder how Davos will react to seeing Melisandre with Daenerys.
- Don’t accept Jamie’s offer Randyll. I was just admiring you despite not liking you.
- I trust no solution Qyburn comes up with.
- Yara and Ellaria!
- I agree with the sentiment of what Olenna is saying but…no?
- Grey Worm and Jon share a talent!
- I guess they did take the pillar with the stones.
- Disappointed in you Theon. I mean Reek.
Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 PM on HBO.
I was surprised to see Baxter show up in this episode. I thought that, with his arrest, Will would be safe in the mean time and that that would be the end of that. But there he was, at the beginning of the episode, being tortured by Topcliffe. Seeing Baxter again made me think that he and/or this little narrative thread was more important than I had initially assumed.
One, because Topcliffe doesn’t seem like the type to just release a prisoner; he’d torture someone until they told him what he wanted to hear and anything but would be nothing more than a lie to him. And lo and behold, Baxter died. Two, because it was so clearly a means to get Will to shut up about it and make him feel better about what had happened. Even so, Will would have known that Baxter was being tortured so he still should have felt as strongly about it even after Marlowe tried to assuage him. The man was being tortured! “He’ll be released soon” shouldn’t have made Will let it go.
I also love that Topcliffe’s superiors don’t like him, find him to be incompetent and don’t take him seriously. The man is vile and he’s doing far more harm to his cause then good. Ewen Bremner – the actor who plays Topcliffe – overacted quite a bit with his facial expressions in this episode. Particularly the first time Topcliffe met with his superiors.
This was a pretty uneventful episode. Nothing really happened aside from Arya’s glorious assassination of all of the Frey men, effectively ending their house (she totally pulled a Tywin: cue “The Rains of Castamere). But it did a very good job of setting up the rest of the season.
As satisfying as it is to see Arya kill all of her enemies, I do worry for her. She may just be a little too far gone now. We know that she’s going to kill Ed Sheeran and the rest of those Lannister soldiers. In the short amount of time they were on screen I really grew to like them and they seem like good people and I think that she can see that they are. But I don’t think she cares. They serve the Lannisters, they have to die.
She raised good points about punishing the Karstarks and Umbers for their treason. That being said, she shouldn’t have challenged Jon in front of everyone. Furthermore, the Karstarks betrayed the Starks because Robb beheaded Rickard Karstark. Sansa herself admitted that he and their father Ned made stupid mistakes, so punishing that house again likely would not have been a wise move.
We get a version of Cersei’s enemies speech that was in the trailer and she names each of them; the Sand Snakes in the South, the Tyrells in the West and the Starks in the North. It looks like show Jamie won’t go the way of book Jamie – even though I still think he’s going to kill her – and disavow Cersei. Despite her blowing up the Sept of Baelor and what she said about their dead relatives, he still wholeheartedly supports her.
Poor Sam is stuck doing grunt work at the Citadel and not actually learning what he went there to in the first place; how to defeat the White Walkers. His montage was quite funny and if I’m not mistaken it was the first time we got a montage like that one the show. It was clever – and disgusting – how the soup he was serving and the contents of the chamber pots he was emptying eventually bled into one another.
I am so glad that I re-watched all of the previous seasons in preparation for this one because I would not have realised that the house the Brotherhood Without Banners stopped at to rest was the same one that the Hound had visited when he was travelling with Arya,
Finally! Daenerys has made it to Dragonstone. After six whole seasons of waiting for her to make it to Westeros, she has. The episode took so long to get to her that I thought we wouldn’t see her arrive until next week. Or that she’d have that battle at sea with Euron before she made it to Dragonstone (both he and Cersei boasted about the Greyjoy’s prowess at sea).
It stars Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, back home in Queens after his trip to Germany and his brief stint as part of the Avengers team. Thrilled to have worked with Tony Stark, Peter is anxiously awaiting their next mission together with the Avengers team, but is hardly able to reach Tony. When he’s not busy being a super hero, he’s a regular 15 year old boy in high school. After he stops a band of bank robbers using super weapons and retrieves a piece of their equipment, he discovers a group of arms dealers selling the weapons and must face his first real threat; Vulture.
Will makes his way to London with his big dreams of being in theatre, leaving behind his wife and three children. He’s immediately duped by the beggar child Presto, who tries to steal his money. I honestly thought that he wouldn’t have been, he seemed to have been totally aware of what was happening. Then Presto seemed to genuinely want to show him where the theatre was once Will mentioned that he was going there. But nope, he took Will to an execution instead and then pick-pocketed him while Will was distracted by flashing back to another disembowelment he’d witnessed as a child.
A scene that didn’t work at all for me was the one in which Presto hid under his sister’s bed as she serviced a client. Up until that point the show had been doing a good job of making him sympathetic but in this scene it just felt melodramatic and forced. The show was trying way too hard to make us feel sorry for him and the acting was painful to watch (his pained expression and thrashing about as he overheard). Presto cutting himself on an arm riddled with cutting scars was the icing on a terrible scene that didn’t resonate in the least.
I do like that the characters speak in a way that at the very least resembles the kind of speech used in Shakespeare’s works. It makes the dialogue more interesting to listen to.
Premiere date: August 18th