The evening of April 24th found me curled up in bed, newly downloaded HBO Now app on my phone and the Game of Thrones premier loading up through my Chromecast, and it did not disappoint.
We opened straight up on the question everyone’s been mulling over through the break, ‘Is John Snow dead?’, to which I believe the resounding answer is yes. While I’m still holding out hope that he’ll miraculously come back to life and be one of the few Starks to evade death, I think we’re all aware that’s not generally how Game of Thrones treats their main characters. The show quickly moves on to catch us up with the rest of the cast, checking in on Brienne in time to see her and Podrick finally saving Sansa, Cersei reuniting with Jaime and not reuniting with Myrcella; we check in on a still blind Arya Stark and the weird girl who challenges her to a fight. We find Meereen to be in Tyrion’s hands and looking a little hotter than usual; and Daenerys doing what she does best in the Dothraki Sea, rattling off her titles and throwing serious shade. We check in with Dorne, long enough to see a coup enacted by Ellaria and her daughters; we also get a few moments with Margaery to see she’s still stuck in her prison cell awaiting confession. Lastly we spend some time at The Wall where Ser Davos and some other John Snow supporters are holed up and waiting for Edd who sneaks out to rally Wildling support and of course, we get to see Melisandre without her youth glamour (and am I the only one wondering what happens if someone tries to come into her room while she’s asleep and looking ancient??)
The script work for this particular episode is much like the rest of the show: extremely effective. The scene that stands out to me the most is the conversation between Ellaria and Doran. It’s a short one, but they get a lot of feeling through in just a few moments with the line ‘Weak men like you will never rule Dorne again’. They easily paint the image of a country unhappy with their ruler as the palace guards literally stand there and watch their sovereign bleed out on the floor. With Doran dead it’s a little unclear who will be King or Queen next, though it certainly isn’t Prince Trystane since Obara and Nymeria were sent to take care of him. Ellaria becoming queen does seem to be what was implied, but somehow I don’t see her wanting to rule the country. I believe she’d prefer to be more mobile and involved in the impending war between Kings Landing and Dorne, more as a general or possibly a smaller assassin team of her and her daughters, but she just doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who wants to rule a country.
Aside from political revolutions forming, the Game of Thrones writers infuse some much needed humor in the Dothraki Sea with Khal Moro arguing with his….brothers? friends? flunkies? Let’s go with flunkies since they insulted my favorite girl; the Mother of Dragons. It’s refreshing to see some humorous scenes given to someone other than Tyrion, though I’ll never get tired of seeing him deliver one-liners and thoroughly putting people in their place with all that wit.
The acting, as always, is great; especially with a tear-jerking performance from Lena Headey as Cersei. The scene where she sits down with Jaime to talk about their mother. Let’s be honest, we’ve seen scenes like this before in other shows, where someone laments their dead loved one and blames themselves or fate or whatever for the death while the other person provides a shoulder to cry on, we’ve seen it a million times, however Headey and Coster-Waldau manage to pull it off in a way that had me tearing up. How can you not when Cersei realizes it’s only a matter of time before her last child Tommen is killed?
One of the things that fans seem to love about Game of Thrones is the dark, gritty tone, often lauded as being realistic for the time period and setting the show takes place in, however I’d like to point out one of the more hopeful tropes on Game of Thrones, and that’s the concept of Life After.
We see so many of the characters hit blocks that should have been the end of them, Brienne sees Renly Baratheon die, the man she swore to protect and serve, and she fails in that. She fails in protecting Catelyn Stark, she can’t even find Catelyn’s two girls to protect them like she’d promised to do. In any other show she’d probably have watched Renly die and maybe helped Catelyn out of the camp, but after that I doubt we ever would have seen Brienne of Tarth again.
Same goes for Sansa. She was promised to, arguably, the most hated blonde teen since Justin Beiber, watched her father die, spent years being tortured by Joffrey in Kings Landing only to be married off to Tyrion as a joke, then carted off to the Veil to live with her loon Aunt and had an affair?? With Little Finger?? Then she was given to Ramsay Bolton (the penis amputation enthusiast)! And yet she’s still going. She jumped off a wall with only the promise of some super soft snow to break that fall and got out of there! In any other show, or in real life for that matter, I think Sansa Stark would be a sobbing heap on the ground, not graciously accepting Brienne’s offer of service.
Lastly is my favorite character (sorry, I’m not even going to pretend not to be biased) Daenerys Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the…you get it. My god, this girl has been through some things. She’s sold off into marriage to Khal Drogo, falls in love with him finally only to have him die, forcing her to lose most of the khalasar and feeling a newfound responsibility to the ones who stayed. She does finally gets some momentum again after crossing the Red Waste only to have her dragons stolen. Then she manages to take over Meereen only to find that ruling is way more complicated than she’d thought and their slave-owning ways are deeply and stupidly entrenched in their culture. Yay. And now she’s going to be shipped off to the widow’s home?? DAENERYS HAS SO MUCH STRENGTH. Once again, in another show she might have watched Khal Drogo die and she’d have her baby and maybe he’d come into play later on, but I doubt we’d see Daenerys ever again.
So, is Game of Thrones an extremely dark show with massive violence and many dark linings? Absolutely, but it’s still nice to see characters moving on, continuing when normally we might say they have no more reason to. It’s interesting that even in this dark world, there is Life After for characters, no matter how difficult their lives get.
I rate this episode Energy Optimized (4.5), since the only thing I can really criticize is I’d have liked to see some more of Tommen, he is Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and he can’t just be hiding in his bedroom forever.
