This time. He’s been perfectly fine with (attempted) child murder in the past (even joking while he did it - and note the callout to that very scene in his convo with Edmure), and was also just peachy with arranging the gang-rape of his own brother’s wife.
Just because he sometimes regrets his evil, doesn’t mean he isn’t evil. I think some people confuse sympathetic with not-evil.
I don’t think Jaime was involved in what happened to Tysha with the soldiers. That was all Tywin’s doing.
Not because he was above that sort of thing, but that he wouldn’t be so cruel to Tyrion.
Quite possible, it fits his character, the one on the show even more than the one in the books.
Littlefinger’s backstory of humble beginnings and unrequited love, who decided to insist on living his dream by adapting the entire world to it, fits a persona who will reject the idea that his vision of the future could be toppled by the embodiment of anti-future.
In the show, the moniker “King of Ashes” fits another character much better: Cersei.
I’d even say that everyone who wanted or still wants to rule Westeros has proven to be more a King or Queen of Ashes than Littlefinger, either voluntarily and unwittingly.
He’s actually the Hand now. He had the pin on when putting the crown on her head.
Yeah. The casks looked pretty old, and they were slowly leaking in spots. The cache looked like it had been there for quite a while, not that it had been freshly made for the occasion.
Cersei may not have thought that Tommen would commit suicide as a result of her actions, but she still believed that he was fated to die soon somehow. She said as much to Jaime after she learned of Myrcella’s death. She came to terms with it and decided not to let it sway her actions. Hence her coldness at his actual death, she had already mourned for Tommen. Just because Cersei took simple actions to protect Tommen doesn’t mean that she had stopped believing that he was going to die somehow anyway.
I think you’re mostly right about Tommen’s mindset. But I think his despair came more from Margaery’s death and the revelation that his own mother could do that to him. The Mountain appearing to prevent Tommen from going to the trial was a dead giveaway that Cersei was the one who bombed the Sept. All that death and loss and grief coupled with the revelation of his mother’s monstrous nature was too much for him to take.
I think that the confrontation between Davos and Melisandre was really interesting. Mel’s crisis of faith over the past season+ has been one of my favorite subplots. To me, Jon’s half-assed sentence of exile came off as him buying her sincerity mixed with empathy that stems from the hard decisions he’s had to make in the past. I think he recognizes a kindred spirit in her. Curious where her story’s going to lead.
There is a difference between actively trying to kill her own son or not trying to prevent his death, and believing that, not matter what, she is going to see him dead. Cersei’s fatalism is germanic or nordic in nature.
Beric and Thoros sold Gendry (Robert Baratheon’s bastard) to Melisandre, which is also the reason she is on the list.
I just remembered that Melisandre told Arya that she “saw the faces of the people [Arya] is going to kill.” I wonder if Mel saw her own face in that lineup.
Remember that the Wildfire that Tyrion unleashed on Stannis was what he’d confiscated from Cersei. This Wildfire seems to be a cache which was unaccounted for. Which is why she had Qyburn investigate. She would have had no need to do so if this was leftover from the Battle.
In season 1, IIRC, Robert came back from the hunt sure that the accident was his own drunken fault. I think later there were hints that Cersei arranged his death, and now, like a Bond villain, she admitted it to the Septa. But how? How did she arrange his accident without he himself knowing it?
She had Lancel give him drugged wine during the hunt, slowing his reflexes and increasing the chance that he’d make a fatal mistake. Which made it even stupider for her to empower the Sparrows.
Agreed. Two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead.
ETA: Plus, if memory serves, this was shortly after marrying Catelyn, so he might not have known her well enough to trust her to keep the secret, and the longer he held it, the harder it would be to divulge the truth.
ETA2: And I missed Snarky_Kong saying the exact same thing even earlier in the thread. Youz guyz write to damn much and it’s too damn hard to keep up!
Robert didn’t know that Lancel was giving him wine spiked with strong alcohol to make him slow and awkward. Cersei facilitated Robert’s death, but he killed himself, in more than one way.
Beaten to the punch by oft wears hats.
I had thought all the wildfire was used up for the battle of Blackwater, but it makes the most sense that there was still at least one cache unaccounted for.
So, how was Qyburn able to get his little birds dedicated enough to kill? It seems unlikely they would go so far as to murder for him just because he gave them some candy. Was he spiking the sweets with some kind of nefarious mind control concoction perhaps?
Tommen hadn’t died yet, and I don’t think (despite the awesome costume change) Cersei was really planning/expecting his suicide.
But having Pycelle as the king’s Maester was not going to work for her. Pycelle was a quintessential small-c conservative in the Westeros context: rule-bound and legalistic, hesitant to approve bold action, and not likely to be helpful to Cersei’s more … pragmatic approach to rule (through Tommen, if things hadn’t gone sideways there).
I am curious why she didn’t let him die at the Sept, but maybe he wasn’t going to go there after the whore session?
I wonder if this is pretty much the last we’ve seen of Essos? We might have a couple scenes there to conclude Jorah’s storyline, but I doubt it will be in many episodes.
Which, sadly, is not nearly the worst of the fates that have been offered to her.
The whole twincest thing got revealed anyway. It just turned out that most people found it expedient to turn a blind eye to it so as not to disrupt the kingdom.
Considering her other option got a gold plated mullet, her Targaryen options are mighty thin.
You’re right, I mixed that up with him being involved in setting up the relationship.
The Branestration was still all him, though.
As much as I’ve been down on the writing this season, some of the rest of the work is the best they’ve ever done.
The music has been wildly divergent this season. In previous season the music was almost entirely varied theming, but this season has had a lot of purely original contextual pieces that are in a style unlike anything done in previous seasons. I checked to see if they changed the composer, even, and they didn’t.
The editing and music in the opening scenes before the destruction is some of the best work they’ve ever done.