Monthly Archives: June 2014

Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones Recap: Season 4, Episode 10 “The Children”

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So, wow. That happened.

“The Children” is another episode of Game of Thrones at its worst AND best. Unfortunately, while there was some great stuff in the episode that I really loved, it’s not enough to make up for what I think are some serious, serious problems.

Spoilers under the cut for the episode and for book-related complaints and speculation.

“The Children” picks up right where last week’s episode ended, with Jon Snow leaving the Wall to walk, unarmed, into Mance Rayder’s camp. Mance is, quite understandably, not terribly happy to see Jon, but he is willing to talk. Mance doesn’t want to keep fighting. He insists that his people just want to hide behind the Wall, and he knows that the Night’s Watch doesn’t have the men they need to hold the Wall against his forces. They drink to Ygritte and to Grenn and the giant Mag the Mighty who died in the tunnel under the Wall. Then Jon twitches as if to go for a knife to kill Mance, but before either of them can kill the other they hear war horns.

Mance thinks at first that the Night’s Watch is attacking, but Jon admits that Mance was right when he said they didn’t have the men for it and they walk outside to find that Stannis has arrived with the army he managed to buy with the help of the Iron Bank. The overhead shots of Stannis’s cavalry are truly impressive and lend an epic feel to the scene, although I wish these first ten minutes had been included in last week’s episode to leave more time for some of the other stories that were tackled in this one. The conversation between Mance and Jon and Stannis and Davos is excellently done and could have been left for this episode, but I definitely think the arrival of Stannis’s forces would have been a much more impressive and dramatically satisfying ending to episode nine than Jon walking out the tunnel, which was basically the most anticlimactic cliffhanger they could have done last week.

That said, I mostly loved this sequence. It’s fairly close to how it happened in the book, which is nice to see considering how far the show departed from the source material earlier in the season. Hopefully, this means that they’ll be adhering closer to the books going forward. The only problem I have with this right now is that they still haven’t introduced Dalla and Val, which I suspect means that we won’t be seeing them. I understand, I suppose, that sometimes characters have to be cut, but Val in particular figures pretty prominently in future events at the Wall, and without Dalla there’s no son of Mance’s to switch with Gilly’s baby later on, which will significantly change the future character development of Jon, Sam and Gilly.

In King’s Landing, Cersei is watching while Pycelle and Qyburn examine Gregor Clegane, who is mortally wounded as well as poisoned after his duel with Oberyn Martell. Pycelle claims that there is nothing to be done for the wounded man, but Qyburn seems somewhat more optimistic. After banishing Pycelle from his own laboratory, Cersei encourages Qyburn to save Ser Gregor, even after Qyburn rather creepily warns her that the “process” will “change him”–although Qyburn also assures her (even more creepily) that it won’t weaken him. This is a short, but necessary scene, and it more firmly establishes Cersei’s favor for Qyburn over Pycelle as well as setting up the return of zombie Clegane later on. I’m glad to see it in this episode, although I wish we had gotten a similar scene in episode ten of last season to set up Lady Stoneheart–but I’m getting ahead of myself, and I’ll complain about that (probably at length) later.

Next, we get to see Cersei arguing with her father over her impending marriage to Loras Tyrell. She’s now flatly refusing to do it, and Tywin isn’t in the mood for it. This isn’t a scene from the books, and I’m not really certain what this and the following scene will mean for Cersei and Jaime’s relationship going forward, but I love it. Of course Tywin didn’t believe the rumors about Cersei and Jaime. But Cersei is here to set him straight and to make it very clear that she will destroy every hope Tywin has ever had for his family before she’ll marry again.

Straight from giving a big “fuck you” to her dad, Cersei goes to Jaime to tell him the news. Jaime is still pissed at Cersei for wanting Tyrion to be killed, but he seems to soften towards her as she makes out with him. This all feels a little out of nowhere, considering that Jaime and Cersei’s relationship has been sort of constantly deteriorating ever since he got back to King’s Landing and in light of him raping her in the Sept after Joffrey’s death. I’m also really just not sure what it means. The show has cut out all of Cersei’s infidelities except with Lancel, who we haven’t seen since “Blackwater,” which is really kind of a big deal for events in A Feast for Crows, and it seems like we’re really nowhere near that stuff anymore. It’s not that I can’t see them still doing some version of the Cersei/Margaery AFFC rivalry and the complete estrangement of Cersei and Jaime, but at this point I just don’t see how it’s going to work. In many ways, I like show!Cersei better than book!Cersei, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable with GRRM’s treatment of Cersei in her POV chapters in the books, but it’s getting really hard to predict anything about these storylines where so much is changed and left out.

In Meereen, Daenerys is holding court. which continues to not be as rewarding as she hoped. First, we see her approached by an old man who claims that he was a respected teacher but is now living on the streets since Daenerys “freed” the slaves of Meereen. He asks for her permission to sell himself back to his old master, which Daenerys reluctantly grants. After he leaves happy, the next petitioner approaches weeping and with a small bundle in his arms, which turns out to be his 3-year-old daughter who has been burned alive by Drogon. I expected this to make it into the finale, but I actually didn’t expect to see Daenerys’s imprisonment of Rhaegal and Viserion in this episode unless they made it the final scene of the season. But they put it at the halfway point, which I thought sort of diminished the moment. This is really too bad because this was the first time in ages where I felt any kind of emotional connection to Daenerys, and the door being closed on the dragons, leading to a black screen, would have been an amazing final shot since they didn’t do Lady Stoneheart (which I’m still not ranting about just yet).

Back at the Wall, Maester Aemon is giving a eulogy for the fallen men of the Night’s Watch who are to be burned before they turn into zombies and kill everyone. We get to see both Pyp and Grenn’s faces before they’re set afire, and I’m really pleased that we got this closure. We get a shot of Melisandre creepily eying Jon Snow through the flames before we move along to a great conversation between Jon and Tormund, who’s been patched up by Maester Aemon. I loved everything about the Jon/Tormund talk, and I loved that Jon took Ygritte north of the Wall to burn her by himself, although I thought it strange that she was posed with her shoulder bared kind of sexily. I mean, I know she’s dead, and he’s going to burn her, but I’m kind of confused about how she got into this state of undress after being so sensibly bundled up all the rest of the time. As in the book, I still feel like Ygritte has been fridged so Jon Snow can evolve, but I’ve kind of started to like Jon in the last couple of episodes, and if they stick pretty close to the books his story gets much more interesting from here on out.

Even farther north, Bran and company have reached their destination, which is apparently the set of the 1985 film Legend. As they move toward a suspiciously beautiful tree, skeletons pop out of the ground and attack them. In another pretty major departure from the books, Jojen is killed in the fight with the skeletons before a fairy comes out and rescues the rest of the party with special effects from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Then we finally get to meet the three-eyed raven, who looks–no fucking joke–like Tim the Enchanter.

Elsewhere, Podrick has apparently hobbled the horses wrong, and Brienne is grumpy about it. I love Brienne and Podrick, but the more I see of them together, the less I like the way their dynamic is being portrayed on the show. Brienne was gruff with Podrick in the books, but she was also awkward and unsure really of what to even do with a squire; in the show, she’s just mean. In the books, Brienne comes to like Podrick and ends up teaching him to fight and helps fill in the gaps in his knowledge that were neglected when he was Tyrion’s squire, and we haven’t gotten to see any of that in the show, which is disappointing.

After Brienne is mean to Podrick, they start to continue their journey towards the Eyrie when Brienne comes across Arya, who is practicing her water dancing. This is another enormous change from the books, but there’s some interesting stuff going on in both Brienne’s short exchange with Arya and then her argument with Sandor Clegane when Podrick recognizes him. As soon as Brienne realizes that she’s been talking to Arya Stark, she tells Arya that she was sent by Arya’s mother to look for her and offers to take Arya to safety. Sandor points out that there is no safe place for Arya and says that if Brienne doesn’t know that she’s the wrong person to be looking after Arya. Between Sandor’s calling Arya his traveling companion (rather than prisoner) two episodes ago and his admission here that he’s been looking after her, it seems pretty clear that he’s come to, in his way, care for the girl, which makes what happens next really terribly sad.

Brienne and Sandor get into an actual sword fight, which turns into a brawl, over which one of them will get to continue looking after Arya. This is not even remotely in the books, but it’s definitely cool (if brutal) to watch. It’s not often that we get to see a woman warrior treated so equally as a man in this sort of fantasy story, but Brienne and the Hound are pretty evenly matched. I really appreciated that there was no threat of rape or any sexualized attacks in the scene–just two pretty much the same size people beating the shit out of each other, and Brienne’s gender never feels like a factor that affects the fight at all. In the end, Brienne manages to win, sort of, although Arya has slipped away during the fight.

We leave Brienne and Podrick searching for Arya and return to Arya herself. She makes her way down to where Sandor has fallen, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s horribly injured. Arya watches impassively as he tries to goad her into killing him by reminding her that he killed her friend and talking about how he wished he’d raped her sister. Unfortunately for the Hound, this has basically the opposite effect on Arya, and she quietly takes his money pouch and walks away as he begs her to put him out of his misery. Rory McCann has done some truly fine acting as Sandor Clegane this season, and I am sad to see him go, but I’m glad to see Arya’s journey finally moving along.

Back in King’s Landing, Tyrion is languishing in his prison cell when Jaime shows up to release him. My complaints about this:

  1. Jaime choosing to release Tyrion seems a little at odds with his seeming reconciliation earlier in this episode, although I suppose it does fit in with the idea expressed by Cersei that, ultimately, they choose their family. I suppose that if Cersei finds out that Jaime is responsible for Tyrion’s release, she will see it as even more of a betrayal after that conversation, but I kind of think she would see it as a betrayal regardless, which makes the earlier Jaime/Cersei scene unnecessary. It just seems weird that we’d see Jaime so clearly reigniting his relationship with his sister only to turn around and choose his brother over her twenty minutes later. It feels confusing.
  2. In the books, Jaime uses this opportunity, thinking it may be the last time he sees his brother, to confess to his role in the abuse and banishment of Tyrion’s first wife, Tysha. Jaime lied to Tyrion at the time, saying that Tysha was just a whore he had hired for Tyrion, which is the only reason that Tyrion allowed Tysha to be gang-raped (and participated in said gang rape) and sent away from Casterly Rock. The groundwork for this revelation was even laid all the way back in season one when Tyrion told Bronn and Shae about Tysha, so I don’t understand why they’d skip that here. I don’t like to make excuses for what Tyrion does after this, but this revelation would have made his homicidal rage feel at least a little more justified.
  3. Along with skipping the Tysha revelation, we also don’t get Tyrion telling Jaime about Cersei’s infidelities. This is also huge. I know that in the show we haven’t gotten to see most of it, but I thought for sure that we’d see Tyrion spill the beans to Jaime about Lancel at the very least. In the books, this accounted for a great deal of the further deterioration of Jaime and Cersei’s relationship in AFFC, but without that being known to Jaime on the show, I expect that the pulling away from the relationship will be more one-sided, which pisses me off because I think we’ll see Cersei being painted even more as the villain than she was in the books, with Jaime being shown as her victim. This especially sucks after the rape scene in the Sept, which is of course probably never actually going to be treated as a rape within the show.

After a brotherly hug, Tyrion and Jaime part ways, with Tyrion taking a quick detour through the secret tunnels to the Tower of the Hand and his father’s chambers. In the book, he was guided by Varys because these are supposed to be secret tunnels in the walls of the Tower, but here he seems to know right where he’s going, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Apparently he’s not even a little disoriented after sitting for weeks in a jail cell.

When Tyrion enters his father’s chambers, he finds Shae in Tywin’s bed, and she stirs slowly mumbling “my lion” as she thinks Tywin is returning to bed. As soon as Shae realizes that it’s not Tywin, she grabs for a dinner knife to try and protect herself. Tyrion, however, manages to disarm her and strangles her before whispering that he’s sorry. I just want to say fuck this. After all the effort put into crafting Shae on the show as a much fuller character than she was in the books, she doesn’t even get a chance to explain herself. In fact, there’s no actual conversation at all between her and Tyrion in this scene. He just murders her in a fit of rage before grabbing a crossbow and going to find his father in the privy.

I’m so incredibly disappointed with the way this scene played out. I’d hoped that there would be a sort of element of Greek tragedy to Tyrion’s murder of Shae, which I didn’t really feel here, but I’d also hoped that Shae would be given some amount of dignity in the end, and she wasn’t. The way her murder is filmed doesn’t even really focus on her–her terror or anger or whatever she might have felt in that moment. Instead, it’s filmed so that the viewer is supposed to empathize with Tyrion and his pain. There are some very valid criticisms of this scene in the book, but at least when GRRM wrote it it was pretty clear that this was an act of true villainy on Tyrion’s part, and this is reinforced throughout A Dance With Dragons. Here, we seem supposed to see Tyrion’s murder of Shae as regrettable, but not evil and maybe even justified. Because, see? He feels bad about it! Fuck this scene so much.

Then, of course, it’s off to the privy for some father-son time. Tyrion pays lip-service to being upset about Shae, but what he really seems to be upset about is still Tywin’s rejection of him and Tywin’s willingness to have Tyrion executed for a crime that he didn’t commit. Without the reveal of the truth about Tysha, I really feel like something was lost in this scene, which is unfortunate, and I really just didn’t buy Tyrion’s anger over Tywin’s use of the word “whore,” a word that Tyrion himself used to describe Shae when he tried to send her away before Joffrey’s wedding.

Mostly, I just felt like the messaging throughout this entire sequence, from Tyrion and Jaime to Tyrion’s murder of Shae to Tywin’s death, was left terribly muddled by the omission of the truth about Tysha. In some aspects, the scenes were powerful, but they didn’t have nearly the effect on me that the same (-ish) scenes did when I read the book.

After Shae and Tywin are both dead, Tyrion makes his way to Varys, who spirits him down to the docks packed in a crate to be shipped to the Free Cities. As Varys turns to walk back to the Red Keep, alarm bells start ringing and Varys turns and returns to the ship, presumably off to the Free Cities with Tyrion.

The episode ends, interestingly and to my crushing disappointment, with Arya. She’s made her way to a small port town where she tries, unsuccessfully, to find passage to the Wall. On finding out that the ship is returning to Braavos, however, she fishes out the coin that Jaqen H’ghar gave her, which the Braavosi captain immediately recognizes. The final shot of the episode is Arya sailing off to Braavos, then, with ominously grey skies ahead.

Like the ending of episode nine, this felt really anticlimactic. I was really glad that we’ve finally gotten to this part of Arya’s journey, but as an end to the season it lacked punch. Mostly, though, it just wasn’t the ending that I (and apparently every other person who has read the books) was expecting, which was, of course, Lady Stoneheart.

I’m still not even sure how to deal with the possibility, which seems somewhat and increasingly likely, that we won’t be seeing Lady Stoneheart in the show. I expected, or at least hoped, to see Catelyn Stark’s resurrection in the first episode of season four after it didn’t happen in the last episode of season three. When that didn’t happen, but we knew that Brienne would be starting her quest for the Stark girls this season, I felt certain that Lady Stoneheart would be the final scene of episode ten. Even while watching this episode and seeing how wildly Brienne’s path had diverged from her path in the novels, I still thought they’d somehow get around to Lady Stoneheart. Even, sadly, during this final Arya scene I kept feeling like maybe it would happen–I mean, what better way to segue into the reveal of Catelyn’s undeath than showing it right after Arya has lost all hope of ever finding her family and has left the country? But, nope. No Lady Stoneheart.

The decisions made by the Game of Thrones show runners continue to just be absolutely fucking baffling.

Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones Recap: Season 4, Episode 9 “The Watchers on the Wall”

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Last night was another single-setting episode of Game of Thrones a la “Blackwater,” but while “The Watchers on the Wall” crammed a lot of action into its short-for-Game-of-Thrones length (it clocks in at just 49 minutes) I don’t think it’s as successful as “Blackwater” in terms of actual, you know, storytelling. Because it’s basically one huge event, I won’t do my regular lengthy recap. This week, I’ll just do a list of what I loved and what I hated and what I would have liked to see done differently. I’ll also do some predictions at the end of what I’d like to see and what I actually expect to see in next week’s finale, title “The Children.”

As always, spoilers under the cut for the episode and for book-related commentary and speculation.

What I loved:

  • The long shot moving through the battle. The coordination and technical expertise it must have taken to achieve this is truly impressive. Kudos to Neil Marshall for directing this.
  • The fight choreography was excellent.
  • Ygritte’s death, even after all the character assassination she’s been subjected to this season, made me tear up. Jon’s smile when he sees her just about broke my heart.
  • Kit Harington really excelled as the leading man in this episode. I’m not really a Jon Snow fan, and he’s not a big talker, so Harington often just sits around looking pouty with beautiful hair, but this episode proves that he definitely can act.
  • I liked the giants and the mammoth a lot.
  • Sam stuff. It was nice to see Sam being useful throughout the battle. I also rather liked his scenes with Gilly, although I think maybe it’s not a great decision to progress that relationship farther along than it was in the book at this point. I also really liked the scene with Maester Aemon, who doesn’t get nearly enough screen time.
  • The scythe. That thing was brutal, and a hand and forearm dangling from the wall was one of the most gruesome images of the episode.
  • Tormund Giantsbane. Definitely my favorite Wildling character after Ygritte, and I actually had started to suspect he might get killed in this episode. But he’s not. Just captured. Probably we won’t see him again until season 5, but I’m glad we’ll see him again.
  • Grenn’s death. I knew we weren’t going to get Donal Noye at all, but I didn’t really expect Grenn to die in his place. This worked well, and it was suitably heroic and sad.
  • In general, I liked that there really was a sense of real danger in this episode. I never felt like Jon or Sam was going to die, although that could just be because I know that those two characters at least can’t die yet because I’ve read the books. However, I honestly felt throughout the whole battle that death could come for anyone. I think this sense of real danger is something the show has struggled to convey without it turning into heavy-handed foreshadowing, but the deaths of Grenn and Pyp in particular were almost entirely unexpected and therefore shocking and emotionally moving.

What I hated:

  • Sam and Jon moping at the beginning of the episode.
  • Gilly’s return. I love Gilly, and I love Gilly and Sam, but their being reunited this way was just too predictable. I never liked the whole Gilly going to Mole’s Town story to begin with, and it still feels like contrived drama meant to kill time throughout the season. As with the Craster’s storyline, it doesn’t actually add anything to the story, and all the pertinent characters are basically in the same situation before and after.
  • The ending of the episode. I hate this so much. Game of Thrones seldom does true cliffhanger endings, but this is kind of one of them, and it’s the worst. Being a book reader and sort of knowing how this story should go, this is maybe the most frustrating possible ending to this episode. Especially given that the episode is such a short one, I seriously feel cheated by this episode ending. It means that Jon’s conversation with Mance and the arrival of Stannis will both have to happen in next week’s episode, which will already be jam-packed with important stuff. The arrival of Stannis, in particular, should be a hugely epic moment, and it deserves to be the final scene of an episode, but if it’s actually the last scene of the season I will lose my shit.
  • 49 minutes?! This is absurd. With the sheer volume of source material they are working from, every episode should be 56+ minutes long and bursting at the seams with stuff going on. I understand the desire for these huge, penultimate episodes, and I can see how the battle at Castle Black was a tempting sequence to give the same treatment as the Battle of the Blackwater, but it’s pretty much just a battle. I don’t watch Game of Thrones or read ASOIAF for action. I watch/read it for wonderful characters and fascinating stories. I think the show runners are doing the viewers a disservice by focusing on action and cool CGI at the expense of character and  plot. This episode in particular could have been improved by adding an extra 10 minutes of material to it.

Looking forward to next week:

  • We will definitely see Mance. I will be fucking furious if we don’t see Dalla and Val.
  • We will definitely see Bran and company arrive at the creepy tree. I am still feeling sore about the omission of Coldhands from the show, but this is finally when Bran’s story starts to be interesting to me in the books.
  • We will definitely be getting some more of Arya and the Hound. Arya needs to be on a ship to Braavos before the end of the episode, in my opinion. As much as I love Arya and the Hound, I think they’ve put off their parting for long enough.
  • We will definitely see Jaime spring Tyrion from jail.
  • Which means that we should also definitely see Tywin’s death and Shae’s death and Tyrion’s flight across the Narrow Sea.
  • Hopefully we will see Brienne and Podrick. I’ve seen some speculation that they will cross paths with Arya and the Hound, but I hope that’s not the case. The Lady Stoneheart reveal absolutely needs to happen in 4.10, and if it doesn’t I think it will be an enormous failure on the part of the writers/show runners.
  • Judging from the synopsis available of the episode, we will be getting some Daenerys next week. I don’t really know what that will be. Yawn.
  • Honestly, I think 4.10 needs to be a two-hour episode to cover all the material they seem to be trying to shove into it, but I don’t think that will happen. I expect it to be frantically paced and to not give any of the storylines the time/attention/care they deserve. We’ll see.
Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones Recap: Season 4, Episode 8 “The Mountain and the Viper”

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The third episode in a row without a rape scene and maybe the only instance ever of Game of Thrones giving a female character MORE agency than she had in the books, “The Mountain and the Viper” might turn out to be the best episode of this season, and it definitely felt more evenly paced and more consistent in tone and quality than some of the previous episodes.

Spoilers under the cut for the episode and for book-related speculation/criticism.

The episode opens in the Mole’s Town brothel for our weekly dose of contrived drama and character assassination. Also, our obligatory weekly brothel scene, although this one is very light on boobs and is actually focused on women characters. I actually sort of love the we get to see prostitutes being kind of gross here instead of prancing around and contorting themselves in order to satisfy a male gaze. Instead, an unnamed prostitute is belching out “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” (because apparently there are only two songs in all of Westeros) and then mocks her client’s manhood before going off to bully Gilly.

And then the wildlings attack. Ygritte marches through Mole’s Town slaughtering peasants, but when she finds Gilly hiding she doesn’t kill her for some reason. I’m not sure I can even express how furious the character assassination of Ygritte (and to a lesser extent ALL of the wildlings currently south of the Wall) makes me. I feel like Ygritte’s sparing of Gilly is supposed to redeem her somehow in preparation for her death, which will almost certainly occur next week, but it really doesn’t. You can’t send Ygritte on a murderous rampage and then take it all back with one ten second shot.

In the books, the wildlings head pretty much straight to Castle Black after Jon escapes from them, and their objective is to open the gates so the rest of them can pass through because they are fleeing for their lives from the zombies and shit that have woken beyond the Wall. They aren’t particularly noble, but they definitely weren’t evil, either. More importantly, the actions and strategy of the wildlings in the books made sense. In the show, the Thenns have been made into cannibals purely for shock value, and they’ve spent all of season four so far senselessly marauding south of the Wall.

I think I could deal with this, though, if it wasn’t all such an enormous disservice to Ygritte. It’s bad enough that in the books, she basically exists as a catchphrase to be fridged as a source of some of Jon Snow’s extensive and much whined-about man-pain. In the show, however, Ygritte was brought vividly to life by Rose Leslie in seasons two and three, her relationship with Jon Snow was portrayed wonderfully, and Jon’s abandonment of her at the end of last season was absolutely heartbreaking. I originally predicted that we would see Ygritte’s death by episode four of this season at the latest, and I fully expected it to be one of the saddest moments in the show to date. But instead, we’ve gotten a season of Ygritte straight up murdering innocents, which, even if the details of her actions remain unbeknownst to Jon Snow, definitely makes the audience much less sympathetic toward Ygritte. The destruction of any kind feelings the viewer may have for Ygritte means that when her death does finallycome, it will end up being entirely about Jon and his feelings to an even greater degree than the same event was in the book.

After the attack on Mole’s Town, we’re taken immediately to Castle Black to (of course) find out how the men of the Night’s Watch feel about the Mole’s Town massacre. Sam is distraught, believing that Gilly and her son are dead and blaming himself. Grenn is furious and frustrated that there isn’t anything the Night’s Watch can do but wait for the wildlings to arrive at Castle Black. Pyp and Dolorous Edd are optimistic that Gilly might have survived after all. And Jon stops moping long enough to point out that if the wildlings attacked Mole’s Town that means Castle Black is next. I wouldn’t say that I’m looking forward to next week’s episode, but it will be nice to see literally anything actually happen in the Night’s Watch storyline this season. It’s actually sort of incredible just how much screentime these guys have been given without actually moving their story along at all.

In Essos, the Unsullied are bathing in a river while Missandei and some other women are washing clothing upstream. I’m not entirely certain why Missandei is naked while washing clothes, since the other women in the frame all seem to be wearing dresses, but Grey Worm stops bathing to stare at her. When Missandei notices him, she stands, giving Grey Worm and the audience a lovely view of her body before sort of shyly covering up when she realizes that Grey Worm seems to be lusting after her.

Cut to Missandei having her hair braided by Daenerys, who doesn’t even think that the Unsullied are capable of sexual attraction. Daenerys asks if Missandei knows the extent of the cutting performed on the Unsullied, but neither woman knows. Missandei admits, somewhat sadly, to having wondered.

In Daenerys’s throne room, Missandei is approached by Grey Worm, who has come to apologize for ogling her. Missandei asks if he remembers his birth name or being cut, but he doesn’t. She says that she’s sorry for what was done to him, but Grey Worm replies that if it hadn’t happened he would never have met her.

Outside Moat Cailin, Ramsay is giving Theon a sort of pep talk before sending him in to treat with the Iron Islanders who have taken the castle. When Theon arrives, he finds the men sick and dying and demoralized, but their commander, Kenning, isn’t ready to surrender. One of the other men kills him, though, and Theon returns victorious to Ramsay, who promptly has the remaining Ironmen flayed. Alfie Allen continues to be amazing as Theon/Reek, and I think he’s at his finest as he negotiates with the Ironmen here. I know everyone likes to talk about Peter Dinklage for awards, but it will be a criminal oversight if Allen isn’t at least nominated.

At the Eyrie, Petyr Baelish is not impressing the Lords of the Vale as he tries to explain Lysa Arryn’s untimely death away as a suicide. This scene is definitely changed from the book, where the Lords of the Vale are easily mollified by Petyr as he pins Lysa’s death on the singer Marillion. Here, he’s floundering a bit. Lord Royce quite rightly points out how quickly Lady Arryn seemed to die after Petyr’s arrival, and Lady Waynwood neatly manages to prevent Littlefinger from having the opportunity to coach Sansa before they hear her testimony. Littlefinger’s face when Sansa walks meekly in is priceless, but he manages to keep it together as Sansa delivers, entirely on her own initiative, an incredible lie.

This is literally my favorite thing that has ever happened on Game of Thrones. It’s the only time I can think of where the writers have given a female character in the show more agency than she had in the books, and it’s so, so good. In one speech, Sansa reveals her identity to people who have every reason to protect her, preserves Littlefinger’s life and places him in her debt, and establishes firmly and publicly that Petyr Baelish is her uncle by marriage, which should generate a level of scrutiny that can protect her in the future from his unwanted sexual advances. And she did this all on her own, as opposed to being coached by Littlefinger as she was in the book.

After Sansa’s scene, we learn that Littlefinger now intends to take Robin Arryn on a tour of the Vale.

Back in Meereen, Ser Barristan is overseeing the removal of the crucified Masters when he’s approached by a boy with a message. It turns out to be a copy of Jorah’s pardon from King Robert in exchange for spying on Daenerys. Barristan approaches Jorah about it before taking it to Daenerys. Jorah wants to speak with Daenerys is private about it, but Barristan tells him that he’ll never be alone with her again. When Daenerys calls Jorah to the throne room, she refuses his request for privacy and makes him tell her about the pardon and about his spying. She’s so angry and hurt that she can’t even look at him as she banishes him. I’ve never been a fan of Jorah, but this scene was truly heartwrenching. We last see Jorah riding away from Meereen alone.

In the North, Ramsay has returned to his father to deliver the news about Moat Cailin. Roose takes Ramsay to the top of a hill and reminds him of the vastness of the North and Roose’s own new position as Warden of the North. Roose then tells Ramsay that he’s been legitimized, making Ramsay Roose’s heir. We leave them riding toward Winterfell.

Meanwhile, Sansa is in her room sewing when Littlefinger arrives to ask her why she saved him. She suggests that she didn’t know what the Lords of the Vale would do to her if she’d thrown him under the bus. “Better to gamble on the man you know,” he replies, then asks her if she thinks she knows him. “I know what you want,” she answers, which he seems to doubt, but the look she gives him says that she knows much more than he gives her credit for. I can’t stop being totally in love with this Sansa, and I love that she’s able to leave Littlefinger so off-balance.

Outside the Vale, Arya and the Hound are almost to their destination. Arya is unhappy that she didn’t get to at least see Joffrey die, and Sandor is obviously in some discomfort from his no doubt infected bite wound. The conversation they are having now seems much more a conversation between equals than it ever has before, and they seem quite nearly friendly as they approach the gate. When Sandor introduces them, he even, for the first time, calls Arya his traveling companion rather than his prisoner. Unfortunately, they’ve arrived too late. Arya’s explosion of rather mad laughter at the revelation of Lysa’s death three days past is both tragic and hilarious.

Back at the Eyrie, Robin is afraid of his impending journey with his “Uncle Petyr,” and Petyr “reassures” him by pointing out that people can die anywhere–at their dinner tables, in their beds, squatting over their chamber pots. He advises Robin to take charge of his life. Then everything stops because Sansa walks in, seemingly on a sunbeam and very much changed from even just our last sight of her. Gone are the puffy eyes and wan complexion. She’s dyed her hair dark and is wearing a dress apparently made of feathers and she subtly vamps down the stairs in a way that puts Melisandre to shame, giving Littlefinger a look that says that she knows exactly what he wants, at least when it comes to her.

Finally, we’re taken to King’s Landing, where Tyrion is awaiting his trial by combat. Jaime is waiting with him, listening as Tyrion expounds upon his investigation into their simple cousin Orson’s predilection for smashing beetles. I usually love Tyrion speeches, but this one just fell flat for me. I get it, I think, but it just seemed overlong and a little mean-spirited toward poor cousin Orson. The bells ring right a the end of this speech, and it’s time for Tyrion’s fate to be decided.

Oberyn is having a drink before the fight, to Tyrion’s chagrin, and when the Mountain walks out, Ellaria is alarmed at his enormous size. Oberyn is confident that he will win, though, which is a pretty great indicator that this is not going to go well for him. The fight is beautifully choreographed, and Pedro Pascal defines pathos as he becomes increasingly frantic in his efforts to extract a confession (to the rape and murder of Oberyn’s sister, Elia) from the Mountain before killing him. The Mountain’s final burst of strength and his defeat of Oberyn is less shocking than it is simply gruesome, with flying teeth and a truly sickening shot of Oberyn’s shattered head. This is definitely a scene that makes me wish that I was watching the show without having read the books first, because holy shit. Judging from reactions on the internet, poor Ellaria’s reaction was shared by many.