Alas, our watch is continuing in The Wars to Come, the Game of Thrones rewatch project seeking to review the earlier seasons of the show back when we had earnest engagement. Yet we’re finding that difficult this time around. Last week, we marveled at how quickly some of Benioff and Weiss (D&D)’s classic storytelling crutches seeped into Season 3, while this week, we’re back with the boys for “And Now His Watch is Ended.” Kylie, Julia, Musa, and Bo are here to break it all down.
Episode Recap
Things are taking a turn north of the Wall. Though the remaining Night’s Watch who went on the ranging mission made it safely to Craster’s, they’ve since stalled there, waiting for their wounded to build up strength. Grenn and Edd try to make the best of it, but Rast points out that Craster is clearly hiding food from all of them. This is not made better when one of the wounded brothers dies. Gilly, meanwhile, is distraught about the birth of her son, and tells Sam that unless he can help protect him, he should leave her alone. Later that night, several of the brothers openly insult Craster under his roof. It seems like Jeor Mormont had calmed the situation, but Karl Tanner ends up provoking Craster into attacking him. He manages to kill the wildling, while Rast and others mutiny against Mormont and kill him. Sam manages to grab Gilly and run, saying they have to leave to survive.
Bran is still headed to the Wall, meanwhile, and has yet another raven dream. Yet when he climbs the tree to pursue it, he finds a frightening version of his mother there, shaking him and warning him not to climb. When he wakes, Jojen is watching, implying that he had this dream too.
Arya, meanwhile, is still a ‘prisoner’ of the Brotherhood without Banners. They put a hood over her head during the travels, because it’s safer for her to not know where they are, apparently. However, they soon arrive at a cave, where Beric Dondarrion is revealed as their quasi-leader. They try to lay charges before The Hound, though Sandor points out it’s his brother who’s been doing Tywin’s dirty work for him. However, Arya volunteers the information that Sandor rode down Mycah, so the brotherhood sentences him to trial by combat—where he’ll be facing Beric himself.
Speaking of prisoners, Jaime is in rough shape after losing his hand. He falls off his horse, and when he asks for water, Locke brings him horse pee. Jaime attempts to fight everyone when he manages to get his hands on a sword, but the group easily beats him down. Later, Jaime seems to be not eating, until Brienne shames him for giving up and whining, causing him to quickly devour the food in front of him. She then asks why he lied about Tarth to Locke for her, since it earned its nickname due to the color of the water, not the presence of actual sapphires. Jaime has no answer for her.
Elsewhere, Theon is in the middle of his “escape.” The man who helped him get away tells him that he was on the Iron Islands when Theon was taken away as a boy. Theon follows him to where he believes Yara, on the way finally breaking down about everything he did at Winterfell. He admits that he never killed Bran and Rickon, and then tells the man that his real father died in King’s Landing. The man seems sympathetic, but it’s soon revealed that he led Theon right back to the same room he was tortured in, and tells the guards there that Theon escaped.
Down in King’s Landing, Tyrion visits Varys asking for proof that Cersei tried to kill him with Ser Mandon Moore. Varys, however, tells him he has no proof, but offers a story about how he always manages to get his own revenge. He talks about how a sorcerer is the one who “cut” him, and chanted something into the fire, making him loathe all magic. As he talks, he soon reveals that he has located and procured this sorcerer, and directs Tyrion to look into a box where he sits, bound and gagged.
Varys later pays Ros a visit, inquiring about what Littlefinger is doing. Since Littlefinger is planning on leaving the city to go to Lysa Arryn, Varys asks if this means that he lost interest in Sansa. However, Ros tells him that on this boat Petyr plans to take, he arranged for two feather beds. In an attempt to foil Littlefinger’s plans with Sansa, Varys goes to Olenna to suggest a marriage be arranged between her and Loras.
Olenna already had a busy day however; she had been in the Sept of Baelor with Cersei, Joffrey, and Margaery. The King spent his time happily telling Margaery gruesome stories of the Targaryens buried there, while Cersei and Olenna commiserate about the lot of women in Westeros. Margaery then encouraged Joffrey to wave to the smallfolk gathered outside along with her, much to Cersei’s chagrin. Following that, Cersei tries to tell her father that she believes the Tyrells are a problem, but he tells her that he’s at least happy that someone managed to figure out how to control Joffrey.
That someone (Marg) later seeks out Sansa to tell her about the possibility of her marrying Loras. She points out that once she marries Joffrey, she’ll be the queen, so she can decide who Sansa marries instead of Cersei. Sansa gets very excited about the idea of wedding Loras and living in Highgarden.
Finally, in Astapor, Dany makes good on her promise to trade Drogon for all Unsullied and Unsullied-in-training. Yet as soon as this deal is finalized, it becomes obvious that Master Kraznys cannot control Drogon, or make him come with him. Dany tells the slaver that a dragon isn’t a slave, and then commands Drogon to breathe fire, while also ordering the Unsullied to kill every master and strike the chains off every slave. Once this is done, she tells the Unsullied that they’re now all free, though if they want to fight for her, they’re welcome. They all agree.
What will Dany do with this new army, will Sandor win his trial, and does Littlefinger know anyone else who sleeps on a feather bed? This will be answered next week, but for this week, let’s dive into the implications.
Initial, quick reaction
Kylie: Well, the best I can say is that *stuff* actually happened this episode. I mean, not honey bunches of stuff, but compared to last week, there was actual progression. Otherwise, I’m just seeing that this show is getting very comfortably into its own bs. The Tyrells are just super anachronistic in all aspects, Poor Carol is beginning to fully emerge, “you sound like a bloody woman”, sorcerer in a box, the continuation of Pod’s magical cock… It really just feels like the train is breaking off the tracks here.
Musa: I’d say this episode was on the high end of decent quality for me, aside from the final scene which I love and am probably going to gush about a lot in this write-up. The rest of it is fine, it works for what was by the time season 3 rolled around, a standard Game of Thrones episode.
Bo: It’s funny, last week Kylie mentioned how that episode felt like the GoT we know, and this week is where it really hit me. You could have transplanted at least half these scenes into any post-season 4 episode and I wouldn’t have noticed. I suppose what ultimately happens at this point (the first time around, anyway) is that you forget the nonsense because you only remember the highlights. The good is really good. The bad stands out so much more now.
Julia: It’s true, it’s definitely easier to see the bad than the good in the show for me. I agree with Musa that it was decent. There was cause and effect, most people were behaving mostly human. On the other hand, there were multiple scenes where I was like, “why does this scene exist!?”
Musa: If we were to chart the quality of GoT seasons on a graph, this would be around where it would start to slope downwards, never to come back up forevermore.
Highlights/lowlights
Kylie: Astapor was my highlight, and I say this as someone who has only ever been a tepid fan of Dany to begin with. It was a well-constructed sequence, the language reveal felt earned, and there were actual stakes. Sure it was rushed, but I’ll take it.
My lowlight was the sorcerer in a box. It’s not that it’s super egregious or unpleasant to watch in any way, but it was just so badly done. Tyrion comes in asking for one thing, and Varys literally goes, “well I was going to tell you about when I was cut.” Then we get some slightly warped version of what he says, so that he can super explicitly be like, “this is why I hate magic,” and we cut to…the sorcerer in the box. What the hell?? Was this his version of “chaos is a ladder”, and D&D were trying to give both him and Littlefinger a platform to explain motives and methods?
Julia: This is a weird highlight, because it’s Alex Graves, but I think I really like the direction this episode. There was a lot of visual variety and dynamism in the shots and they were often meaningful. Blocking was happening. Maybe it’s just in comparison to season 7 where people are standing around in silence and shot-reverse shot.
I’m leaning towards the Sorcerer in a Box as a lowlight too. Only because the scene was so badly shoehorned into the episode. I guess Tyrion is really bored being an accountant, so he’s still on this “who tried to murder me” thing. Or they were obligated to put Peter Dinklage in this one.
Also a contender, that Jaime Brienne scene by the fire. It was as well acted as always, but even apart from the “you sound like a woman” line, (which was the ONE thing that got him to eat, btw) there was also Brienne being all “revenge!” Varys and Tyrion were blabbing about revenge too, weren’t they? Can we please shut up about revenge, already?
Musa: My highlight is definitely the Astapor section at the end of the episode. It’s one of my favourite scenes of the entire series and the only reason I wanted to talk about this episode at all. I have a lot to gush about this scene and even more to say about it with regards to how it works as an adaptation of Dany’s ASOS plotline. Needless to say that it’s a well shot and executed scene which clearly establishes Dany as a force to be reckoned with in her own right, something that was sorely missing all throughout season 2 of the show. Also can I just take a moment to point out that I’m more invested in Emilia Clarke’s performance when she’s speaking in a made-up nonexistent language. She’s like emoting and stuff and her voice actually sounds commanding and authoritative and intimidating. Also I will take her saying “Dracarys” in that Valyrian accent over her bored mumbling of “Dracarys” in Emilia Clarke’s regular non-Danaerys voice that’ll come in later seasons. My secondary highlight would be Jack Gleeson’s performance this episode. I know we’re all supposed to collectively hate the Marg Boleyn sexual manipulator stuff, but damn does Jack Gleeson play the guy being manipulated so well in this episode.
My lowlight is pretty much all the scenes Varys is in. This includes his conversation with Ros that spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Pod and his magic penis (although I don’t know if it bodes mentioning that it wasn’t his penis that was supposedly magical originally. He just was apparently really good at foreplay. D&D basically bastardized their own joke by watering it down to having a magic penis in later seasons), the scene with Tyrion and Varys where just happens to be having his long sought out revenge that exact day at that exact minute and his scene with Olenna where they spend an inordinate amount of time talking down Sansa. We are very clearly getting the writer’s opinions on Sansa in that last one through the mouths of characters they actually like. I mean, obviously Sansa is dull and boring when you’ve literally gone through great lengths to take away everything interesting about her, Dave and Dan. God!
Bo: I need to pick something besides Astapor. Taking the books out of it, Margaery’s manipulation of Joffrey and Sansa stands out to me. It’s hard to separate her “skill” from the ruination of Sansa’s character, but I can watch this and believe Margaery’s ability to manipulate Joffrey. And all of King’s Landing, really. I see how she became such a beloved figure to the common folk.
On the flip side of the Tyrell coin, I hate Olenna. I’m picking her for a lowlight to avoid repeating about Varys and Pod, and also because I cannot stand what GoT does with her. They miss the point entirely with her book character. She’s not the upfront ruler of the Tyrell family. She’s like Cat; she’s the strong, politically adept voice behind the scenes. Except she’s underestimated even further because she’s just the kooky old grandma of the family. Making her the face of the Tyrells breaks the world this is supposed to represent.
I haven’t even gotten into how they use Olenna as the quip machine. Every other line from her is basically the D&D version of Bojack Horseman asking “do you get it, do you get my joke.”
Quality of writing
Bo: The first line of dialogue in the episode was about fingers in asses. This was a D&D episode, through and through. The random Varys story, Edd and Grenn talking about shoveling shit, “bloody woman” and revenge as Brienne’s motivation for Jaime…
Yeah. Hard pass on the writing this week. The best writing occurred in the made up language ripped assumedly from the books.
Julia: You weren’t compelled by Olenna’s monologue about how much roses suck?
You can totally tell that they structured the whole episode around getting to the monologues they wanted to get to.
Musa: Does Olenna’s ranting about roses being a terrible sigil count as foreshadowing as to the Tyrell’s easy defeat in season 7? Clearly D&D never thought much of the Tyrells specifically because their sigil and house words aren’t sufficiently manly enough.
Bo: Yeah, not like a culture obsessed with knights would put any emphasis on fighting. Who even are Loras and Garlan Tyrell?
Musa: I mean, Garlan doesn’t exist on the show, so he’s literally nobody. I sometimes wonder if D&D even realized such a character existed. (I very much doubt they read the books in any significant level of detail).
Julia: I’m not going to lie, though, watching Megga Tyrell just sit there holding an embroidery hoop while her kooky grandma rants about nothing was a little enjoyable.
Kylie: I just want to know if she throws this kind of shit fit every time they show her a project. Maybe this is the start of Olenna’s amazing arc though, since she certainly appreciates Marg’s rose doodle in Season 6.
Our 8th grade book report (on themes)
Julia: Revenge!
I’m sure I could actually make a case for it, to be honest, but I think “influence” might be more like it? It certainly feature in Varys and Carol’s plot, and Marg and Olenna too, I guess, but I have no clue how to connect it with anyone else.
Bo: I want to say something involving the inherent violence of the setting, because so much of this episode involves it. Many characters reach volatile points in the story, and they all react with violence. Jaime, Brienne, Dany, the Night’s Watch, Varys and Tyrion—they all want to hurt people because of the things going wrong in their lives.
GoT has reached the point where original scenes dominate every episode, and it’s hard to discern what exactly the show wants to say. It feels like filler conversations in between big moments.
Julia: Oh, 100%. I agree completely. The Varys/Tyrion scene is very indicative of that. They want something to happen, so they just make it happen. It’s only in its beginning stages here, though. I thought other things, like the Tyrell marriage plot, were actually well-developed. Pig-nose stories aside.
Kylie: So…violent influence? Dany certainly is there this episode too, and even to a degree the Brotherhood Without Banners trotting out bs reasons for giving Sandor a trial-by-combat. I think it works.
Julia: We’re too good at this. Deep down, we know this mess has no theme.
The Butterfly Effect
Kylie: That thing with Pod was funny! Let’s chase it into the ground! This is possibly the first, but also one of the clearest examples of the way D&D will begin to incorporate ~humor~.
Bo: Their fascination with sticking fingers up bums began here.
One big thing that stuck out to me; the stealing of agency from female characters. Olenna only thinks to marry Sansa to Loras because Varys suggested it, and Gilly doesn’t want to escape until Sam makes her. Both situations were explicitly opposite in the books, too. They love this “have your cake and eat it, too” dynamic in later seasons. They want the badass female leaders to show Women on Top but they’re always led around by the men.
Julia: Gilly was the worst of both worlds in this respect. She was uncharacteristically assertive with Sam by being all “save my son or shut up!” but also totally useless in doing anything herself to save him. To make it even more hilarious, once they do run away, she takes command, since she’s the one who actually knows where they’re going. It belongs in this category, because they never really do figure out what they wanted her character to be, did they?
Musa: Gilly was never really much of a character to begin with. She was just this woman/mother shaped void that revolved around Sam’s character for him to lust over and act as his central motivation. I’d say this episode was a also a good example of how they like to do the shocky-shocks with the whole Astapor scene. As much as I love that sequence, it is indicative of the kind of audience reaction D&D enjoy garnering and as little as it was properly foreshadowed with regards to Daenerys speaking Valyrian and all that, it was still somewhat set up. The big example of this is obviously going to be the Red Wedding near the end of this season, but this can count as a small microcosm of that larger to come problem.
Bo: Yeah, Gilly never stops being a prime example of the illusion of power for women on this show. She’s always vocal and opinionated, yet she ultimately makes few, if any, actual decisions. She’s just there to influence the men who actually decide her fate.
Kylie: I kind of did like her shoving the thimble back, though.
I think another thing we’re seeing on display this episode is the chasing of the “sass” with Olenna in particular. It leads to wonderful moments like, “a sword swallower through and through,” until she’s somehow the ruler of the entire Reach because she’s just so darn plucky. Growing strong, indeed.
Musa: It’s D&D thinking they’re writing The Reach as a region that’s ruled entirely by strong women, when in reality all they’ve done is broken the underlying structures of the patriarchy specifically in The Reach which is supposed to be Capital-P Patriarchal!
Bo: This habit of making characters and settings in the show entirely opposite of their portrayal in the books is no longer a butterfly. It’s a bigger dragon than Dany’s are right now.
Kylie: Though speaking of that, they still look fantastic.
Julia: The dragons or the scantily clad Reach ladies?
Kylie: Yes.
Remember adaptation?
Julia: I’m trying to remember when in the books Varys told us this story.
Musa: A Clash of Kings. Tyrion X. It’s prior to the Battle of the Blackwater because he wants to emphasize why exactly he hates magic and therefore Stannis vis a vis Melisandre. Here, it just came across as him retroactively telling Tyrion about it because… Actually I don’t know why he decided to retroactively tell him about his hatred for magic now, apart from the fact that D&D just needed some castration foreshadowing for what’s going to happen to Theon next episode. That’s why this was moved to this season and why emphasis will be placed on the hooked knife Ramsay approaches Theon with.
Bo: I had actually completely forgotten about this, and now I’m even angrier about season 7. Apparently Meli-sans-bra’s real magical power is making the people who hate her guts randomly forget about it. Davos randomly forgot, and so did Varys.
Julia: Varys was still mildly hostile to her in season 7, to be fair.
Bo: I will say something good here. Dracarys was basically exactly how I imagined it. I still think it might be Emilia Clarke’s best moment of the entire show and the one time she pulled off Queen Dany convincingly. Hooray for Emilia Clarke!
Julia: This is beginning to sound repetitive, but I agree with Bo! It’s like the character was trying to do the deadpan frozen face thing and it was hard because he was nervous and terrified, rather than the actor just not emoting at all. It work! It worked really well.
Musa: Okay I’ve already stated how much I loved that scene above. In terms of an adaptation of the Dracarys moment from the book, it largely hits the mark in all the right ways. The major difference is in how confident and in control Dany is in the show version of that moment, whereas in the books, because we’re inside the character’s head for the entire thing, we know she’s inwardly terrified and panicking even as she has Drogon burn a slaver to death. That’s a minor change that doesn’t really affect the overall tone or intent of the scene.
The major thing that changes that I take some measure of an issue with however is in how Dany actively uses The Unsullied to start with. She orders them to slay the masters as a master. She uses the whip to command them. In the book version of this scene, she throws the whip aside, and implores on The Unsullied to take up her cause of their own volition, which they do. They take up the chant of Dracarys and begin wiping the floor with the masters themselves because they WANT to be free. I don’t know why, but I kind of think there’s a little something lost when Dany is portrayed as just using the slaves to turn on the masters before setting them free after the fact rather than setting them free and letting them choose to revolt because fuck slavery and slavers everywhere.
Julia: I agree with Musa. That’s one of those minor things that’s actually a huge thing. And for some reason, I doubt it’s because D&D wanted to make sure they maintained the ambiguity about the Unsullied free will and their ability to make choices like that, given all their trauma.
Kylie: It’s just Part 1 of the crowd-surfing-scene to come.
Remember that one POV character with a magical destiny who travels further north than anyone? Worth pointing out that we’re already seeing D&D just being utterly bored with Bran, and it shows in the writing. They really thought the best way to convey this journey was to have random raven dreams once every three episodes?
Musa: Literally every scene with Bran and Jojen is just going to be Jojen going, “You have to find the Raven. Because the Raven is YOU” (OMG they actually seeded Bran becoming the Three-Eyed-Raven. This is obviously the BEST SHOW EVER NOW!)
Bo: I guess I agree with D&D on one thing, then, because Bran utterly bores me. Maybe the one good adaptational decision made for season 5 was giving Bran the year off. But then they made him even MORE boring.
Musa: I like Bran…. 🙁
Kylie: I’ve always been iffy on him, but it’s worth noting his scenes were some of the highlights of last season.
Julia: They took out anything about Bran post aCoK that would have made him remotely interesting. You know, like his personality.
Carol Watch: who is Cersei this week?
Kylie: Poor Carol is overlooked by the men in her life, and she and Olenna bond over the unfair patriarchy. Her issue with the Tyrells can definitely be viewed as petty, but it’s all framed as concern for Joffrey, which is, you know, legitimate, since we see NatDo giving those ~scheming~ looks. It’s not that I can’t imagine Cersei saying some of this or behaving in similar ways, but the sad Carol looks really begin to paint a certain picture here.
Bo: She was so Carol that I wondered if this was a season 5 episode. Margaery was straight up glaring triumphantly as she stole Carol’s son away.
Julia: The one thing Cersei would never say is “the gods decreed the patriarchy!” I guess we weren’t supposed to see her as sincere, but she would still never say it.
This was also the first mention of the idea that Cersei will somehow stop being regent when Joff gets married. That still doesn’t make anymore sense than it did in 2015.
Musa: I guess Dowager Queen isn’t something that exists in Weisseroff? I don’t know, there’s something weird happening with Cersei in this episode. It almost seems like she’s existing in some kind of void between being Cersei and Carol where she can almost pass for either in any given scene. She seems to switch twice in the scene with Tywin alone! She starts off as Cersei light with regards to her questions about Jaime and talks about the Tyrells as if they’re the enemy, then switches to Carol when she talks about how concerned she is with Joffrey falling under Margery’s control and then switches back to Cersei at the end when she and Tywin have her stare down.
Bo: D&D don’t have the slightest understanding of actual medieval power structures. This is the show we’re supposed to hold up as realistic? And we’re supposed to trust them to know history well enough for an alt-history American Civil War show to not be total trash? (Mercifully, no.)
Though to be fair, Martin’s not exactly an authority on medieval society either.
Musa: Martin has at least read some popular histories of medieval era society even if the actual veracity of the sources he used is questionable. It’s highly doubtful D&D even have that going for them.
Kylie: Welp, she’s well on her way to being Queen Mother, nothing more—that much is clear.
Exposition Imposition: good or clunky?
Bo: The Varys scene was as clunky as clunky exposition gets, as Kylie covered earlier. I get the connection they circled around to, but it was still awkward and ill-placed.
Julia: Does Marg’s pig face story count as exposition?
Bo: Even women in exposition have to be catty!
Musa: The stuff with Varys and Olenna felt like the writers just needed a whole bunch of information set up last minute before it started paying off. The fact that the Sansa/Margaery scene takes place right afterwards makes it seem so poorly handled.
Julia: In that same vein, we find out this episode that Ros is literate. (Just like Bronn and Shae!) Was there a sex worker teacher all the others how to read, just like at Chataya’s? But yeah, let’s throw in some last minute building up of this character before you know what.
Kylie: The most organic exposition was Brienne explaining Tarth’s nickname. Which was from the books, shock of all shocks. I guess Joff running around the sept talking about Targs being morons wasn’t that bad, though. It’s just the stuff that was clunky was extra clunky.
Julia: I forgot about the Targ exposition. And it was all accurate! No Maegor III here!
Musa: There’s enough background Targs that can be used as a means for Joffrey to gleefully brag to Marg about all the crazy stuff they did that led to their own deaths. So there was no need for D&D to make up superfluous lore that doesn’t actually add anything and sometimes detracts from the actually substantive history of Westeros.
Julia: Yeah, who would do such a crazy thing?
How was the pacing?
Julia: Every episode just feels longer and longer.
Bo: I assume from this point on that there will never be a really well-paced episode. Every single one will have scenes that drag, scenes that feel pointless, scenes that exist just because they want to be funny, and important moments cut far too short. It is what it is now. Gods help us all.
Musa: I’ll be honest, I was seriously just counting the minutes till we got to the Astapor scene. This episode seemed largely focused around the King’s Landing plotline (which makes sense with the sheer number of main characters present there) but with that in mind, everything else sort of just felt tacked on? There’s very little connective tissue here as far as disparate plotlines go, and that’s a problem the show has always had, but as the seasons go on it gets more and more apparent and seriously becomes jarring at times when scenes just end and we go somewhere completely different.
Kylie: I think a big issue, too, is that the King’s Landing stuff was setting up the ‘chaos is a ladder’ moment, which should have never really been set-up. We’ll tackle it next week, obviously, but the idea is that Littlefinger is this really masterful and sociopathic spy-guy, because we couldn’t gather that from him pulling the dagger on Ned. He also is supposed to be the guy that has one over on everyone, so he knew about Varys and Ros’s friendship—fear him! He’s King of the Ashes!
It’s just, we didn’t need this at all. The Tyrells didn’t need motivation to want to marry Sansa to Loras, Varys running around to try and last-minute save her because Ros was concerned came out of nowhere (and was especially odd placed in his revengeful monologue episode), and Ros’s corpse is absolutely not needed for us to understand Joffrey and Littlefinger’s nature. It’s like half this episode was created on setting up a situation and an answer when there was no question in the first place.
Musa: I’m just going to take a second to point out that the Chaos is a Ladder speech is in two episodes. We still have one more episode of building up to that moment before it happens. Basically the part where Sansa tells Littlefinger she won’t go away with him and he then conspires to have her married to Tyrion essentially out of spite? I don’t know if I’m remembering that correctly.
Bo: I know this is hotly debated, but I’ve never viewed Varys and Littlefinger as equals and GoT’s desperation to make them equals always annoyed me. It usually happens in really terrible exposition, too.
Kylie: No, I completely agree. Varys has always seemed like he’s playing a completely different game, to be honest, while Littlefinger is just this rather unsubtle guy who wants power and his teenage crush. Even if we pretend Varys is definitely not a Blackfyre, you can tell there’s this intense strategy and focus on something far longer term than, “Cat’s daughter is now hot let me groom her.”
Julia: REVOLUTION!
Sorry.
Let’s talk about sex, baby
Kylie: Sex workers, who are normally quite descriptive, found Pod’s performance “difficult to describe.”
Bo: If I didn’t know the future of this joke, I’d honeypot that they mean he was really awkward and bad. They returned the money to help the poor kid (?) feel better. People still honeypot it that way.
Julia: You’re right, that would be doing about if they weren’t still going on about it in season 7.
Speaking of sex, Marg’s wardrobe isn’t getting any less anachronistic.
Musa: Was there no actual sex or nudity in this episode itself? I didn’t think the writers were showing that much restraint in season 3.
Bo: I’m sure they’ll make up for it next week. Perhaps the sexposition relies on Shae appearances.
Kylie: Yup, the most we get is Olenna talking about her and Varys’s nether regions. Which was very necessary.
Musa: It’s funny because Varys is a eunuch you see and therefore does not have any genitals. Do you get it? Do you see why that’s funny?
In memoriam…Craster, Joer Mormont, Kraznys & the slavers
Bo: Mormont’s death was well done, but I felt absolutely nothing when it happened. Dracarys was incredible. See, they nail that one big moment and it dominates the watercooler talk, not all the stupid stuff.
Musa: True enough. I honestly had forgotten that Mormont dies this episode, since they cut out the significant part of his death where he says his last wishes to Sam. Adding on the fact that they’ll have Sam just run into Jorah in season 7 anyway, why couldn’t they have just done the scene where Jeor tells Sam to get his son into the Night’s Watch? I mean, I know the answer is because they don’t plan this stuff out in advance at all but seriously.
Kylie: They’ve adapted the Night’s Watch stuff so, so poorly. In fact, Griffin couldn’t make sense of why mutinies didn’t happen all the time, and why anyone even went along with Mormont’s dumb mission in the first place. He seemed…slightly reasonable as a person, so I guess that bit was sad for people around? But to say Astapor overshadowed it all puts it very mildly.
Musa: Not like anyone sheds tears for the literal slavers. I mean some people do, but they’re weird. It’s almost as if Krazyns was built up specifically as cartoonishly villainous and gleefully misogynistic so that when he was inevitably burnt to death by dragon-flame, we cheered on his demise instead of arguing that Dany broke the sacred laws of economic transaction of slaves. Though then that brings us back to my one specific complaint about the way the show handled that scene and how it kind of undermined the slave’s own desires to revolt.
Kylie: Couldn’t agree more on that point, too.
We’re curious to hear what you agree on, however, and disagree for that matter. Are the D&Disms really piling up, or are we just hyper-focused to see all the good? Definitely let us know in the comments, and may we all have good fortune in The Wars to Come.
