How is Benjen not a whitewalker? He’s dead, but he’s not turned. How did that happen? Perhaps that’s the key to destroying the whitewalkers…finding the dead who are still in their right mind.
Cersei made a grave mistake not taking over Dragonstone after Stannis died. As Jaime says, that’s a key strategic port but she was so busy concentrating her “power” at King’s Landing she completely let it go. I agree, surely there would be a maid or housekeeper floating around, but leaving it abandoned shows how politically unsavvy Cersei is, despite her thinking she’s Machiavelli.
I thought the main points were to 1) show us how impressive the Citadel was and 2) let us see the cloud of white ravens being sent out (winter has officially come.)
Personally, I’ve always had trouble with the white ravens. Their winters might have a decade or more between them – to they really spend all that time breeding/raising/training white ravens that never get used for anything?
Or – maybe they can dye the white ravens black for ordinary uses the rest of the time.
I agree those were the main points – although I don’t know that those were white ravens being sent out; I thought they were just seagulls.
My problem is (as with all things Sam-related), they take too bloody long to make their points. We’re seven seasons into this show. Sam is obviously a major character, given the amount of screen time he gets. But we still have no idea WHY he’s a major character. From my perspective, he’s a minor character who keeps getting major-character exposure. He’s Walter Mitty without the fun and interesting daydreams.
As I said, I’m a Sam fan, and I want him to succeed. They just take so freakin’ long to show him DOING anything that I get bored with him. I’m not accustomed to being bored by a character I root for.
A man is not Jaqen H’ghar. Losing one’s identity is a prerequisite to become a Faceless Man; that’s true for “a girl”, too. Arya refused to do so, she is not a Faceless Man.
And while entering the sect - or order - of the Faceless Men seems to be a voluntary act, they are religious assassins, pledged to the Many-Faced God.
That Arya decides who needs to be killed contradicts their rules, their belief, their reason to be. It is strange that she is allowed to act that way.
Yeah, wasn’t that weird? No one mentioned who was going to get those holdings, and how they wanted to deal with the minor houses that were vassals to the Boltons.
That’s just one of the many examples of the events within an episode occurring in the same general time frame, but not being shown in strict chronological order.
I haven’t seen anyone else talk about this, so I guess it’s just me, but:
I really, really dislike Euron Greyjoy, and the way he is being positioned to have a relevant role in the larger plot. In six+ seasons of watching, it’s the first thing that I’ve ever disliked enough to actually reduce my enjoyment of the show (only by a little bit, mind you, but still!).
It’s not the actor, or even the character, really. I just think it’s such dull and sloppy storytelling. Cersei has, through a combination of bad fortune and bad judgment, gotten herself into a completely untenable position: enemies on all sides. One of her enemies has dragons. For Euron - a dude who appeared all of twice so far in 61 episodes - to show up now to (ostensibly) bail her out is the worst kind of deus ex machina. It’s bad drama in a way this show usually avoids.
They’ve had something on the order of 75 hours so far to put all their pieces into position - this last stretch should be about moving those pieces around one another, not introducing some random new one to rescue a character from her own bad decisions.
Jaime’s offer to Edmure was that he would be allowed to live out the rest of his life as a hostage at Casterly Rock. Since he evidently was not at the Twins while Arya was destroying the Freys, one assumes that he must have been sent there. Not a plot hole at all.
In the scene with Cersei and Jaime talking with the map on the floor at one point Cersei is standing on the part of Westeros known as the neck and Jaime is standing just off the coast of the Fingers (fingers/neck). I don’t know if this is intentional foreshadowing, a wink/nod to the fans, or pure coincidence.
Bran is heir to Winterfell. Jon isn’t, and was never going to be, as he is a bastard.
Jon was elected King in the North. Bran wasn’t, and was never going to be, as he is a crippled teenager.
So, no, there is no conflict with Jon if/when Bran shows up at Winterfell. Sansa was the heir in the absence of her legitimate brothers, she’s the one who gets demoted, and that has zero effect on the status of the King in the North, which is a separate title/job to Lord of Winterfell.
I understand your pov, I just wouldn’t call it a deus ex machina.
Euron is a latecomer in the Game of Thrones, but his sudden arrival can be explained by the shift in the political landscape:
The 6 Kingdoms are exhausted, once allied forces have turned against one another, the most experienced leaders are gone, the surviving opponents could use another power on their side or desperately need help.
Balon is getting old, his male heir is not fit to rule the Iron Isles (Euron mocks him relentlessly during the kingsmoot), his female heir is capable but, well, female.
He won’t get a better chance to usurp the power from his brother, and he succeeds in doing so using his window of opportunity.
If Yara and Theon hadn’t escaped with a fleet and joined Daenerys, he might have chosen a different path, but their choice made his.
It’s still lucky for Cersei that Euron’s machinations mesh so timely with her own needs - but that’s nothing new on Game of Thrones: armies arrived just in time to save King’s Landing from Stannis, the Night’s Watch from the Wildlings, and Jon from himself, to name just three examples of timely events.
I might have easily missed something, but wasn’t Walder’s feast the last time we heard anything about Edmure’s whereabouts?
Just because he was in a cell at the Twins then doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been sent to Casterly Rock later. AFAIK, Jaime at present seems to be standing by his word, so one would expect he would have Frey comply. We don’t see his wife, Walder’s daughter, either so presumably she was sent off with him.
Arya had evidently been impersonating Walder for long enough to call a new feast and have the Freys gather. Presumably that would have been long enough for her to find out Edmure was still a captive if he were still there.
Or maybe the showrunners decided that it Edmure wasn’t important enough to waste time showing Arya freeing him. Or maybe Walder had him killed as soon as Jaime was out the gate. Or once the Freys were killed, his jailers deserted leaving him to starve.
You can devise various explanations for Edmure’s absence from the Twins, but having him sent to Casterly Rock is a simple one and consistent with what’s previously been said.
True. But in each of those cases the intervening force “existed,” and had been well established, long before the intervention occurred. Sure, Littlefinger and the Knights of the Vale showed up to save Jon from his own bad choices. But - auspicious timing aside - that intervention didn’t feel so hastily thrown in to get out of a corner. We learned of the existence of the Vale many seasons ago, and have repeatedly watched Littlefinger maneuvering himself into a position of power there. We have further seen the development of his weird relationship with Sansa over a similarly long stretch of time. When they arrived to win the day for Jon, it felt like the continuation of an established storyline.
Euron has no such bonafides. From my perspective, he literally did not exist until maybe six hours of television ago. Part of the storytelling the show has done over the last several seasons has involved building up the tension of Cersei’s situation, watching as she positions herself with ever more power but ever more danger to go with it. Now she’s here. She has the most power she’s ever had, and is in the most danger she’s ever been in. The chessboard is arrayed against her, mostly by her own doing, and the implied promise of her storyline has been “how will she handle this arrangement of pieces? Or will she finally fall?”
But now the answer turns out to be, “she will not handle this arrangement of pieces. Instead, we’re going to plop a NEW piece in the middle of everything, one without a background, and he’s going to apparently fart out a naval fleet that suddenly changes everything and accomplish things that no on else has ever been able to accomplish in the show’s history.” It makes all the tension-building in Cersei’s storyline seem false, because they had this inexplicably powerful extra rando waiting to be dropped in. It seems like an admission by the show’s creators that:
They’re not ready to kill Cersei just yet;
They did not effectively create a story where her survival would be plausible given any of the known factors; so