He may not know for sure about Bran one way or the other – I don’t think he does, actually – but he knows that Robb and Rickon are dead.
Not at all. It’s going to be at least a thousand miles either way, but they’ll have to go farther and cross mountains, rivers and marshland to get to the North. I guess with the Freys gone you might imagine they have less enemy territory to cross going north, but we saw the Lannister army heading to the Twins last week. That’s not even considering it’s winter, and they are used to a warm, possibly tropical climate. So it won’t be a cakewalk by any standard.
Here’s a map. (The better map at quartermaester.info was giving me trouble. It might work for you.)
I think the Unsullied might surprise Euron with their defensive skills. Being an army of slaves, by and for slavers means they aren’t suited to be an expeditionary force like they’ve been used so far. And we saw they fell short when tasked with quelling a guerrilla rebellion in Slaver’s bay.
But the Rock is a hell of a fortress. A dragon probably couldn’t take it. And they’re well trained as a defensive force. I think next week will finally be the Unsullied’s time to shine. And wipe the smirk off Cersei and Jaime’s faces when they realize that giving away their home was not as great an idea as they thought. They may never get it back.
No.
Sam knows, and should have told Jon, but we have no indication that he did and Bran specifically avoided Jon at Craster’s so Jon wouldn’t prevent Bran going north.
They are not going to fight anyone. The Lannisters emptied Casterly Rock and left. The Unsullied are stuck at an empty castle with no food, no boats and no one to fight. Euron is not going to try to take back the fortress, what for? there’s nothing there.
Well, this is Daenerys’s army we’re talking about! Since when do they need to eat? They’ll just twiddle their thumbs until somebody comes to take back the Rock, and defeat them. Their orders were to take and hold Casterly Rock, and that’s what they are going to do.
Grey Worm wouldn’t think about heading off on a doomed march through enemy territory across an unfamiliar continent, even if that were a good idea. They’re there. They’re going to stay there. They might send a task force over to Lannisport (or other cities and castles in the Westerlands) to inform everyone Daenerys is in charge of the West now and grab a few bites to eat, but they aren’t going anywhere is my point.
And I do think this is a victory disguised as a failure disguised as a victory. Cersei and Jaime think they are smart, but Daenerys isn’t just moss stuck to a rocky lifeless island anymore. She controls the largest and most impregnable fortress in the Western half of the continent. She’s got a fairly large, fairly competent army to hold it and project power in that region as well. And I think they’ll have a great chance at holding onto it even when Jaime and Randyl Tarley come to take it back. Especially if a dragon or Dothraki horde (or both) can weaken their army before they get there.
Jamie and Randyl Tarly aren’t going to storm the Rock. If they do come back, they’ll blockade it to prevent any food from getting in. The Unsullied are well and truly fucked.
It’s not a gambit. Taking the knee would be *treason[/] to the Northmen. He is a king, every bit the equal of Daeneris. He came there to represent his people, not to surrender them to another five minutes after meeting her.
If anything, Daeneris’s demand that he bend the knee was the stupid thing to do. She had to know that he wouldn’t and couldn’t do that, so she started their meeting off on the wrong foot right out of the gate.
I can’t tell whether the writers are intentionally trying to depict Daeneris as becoming more and more imperious and mad-king like, or if it’s just weak writing.
The magical movements of the forces are also getting annoying. It is impossible to figure out how much time is passing on the show, because things that should take weeks or months seem to happen overnight. In one scene we see Jamie Lannister in bed with Cersei, than in the blink of an eye he is commanding an army at Highgarden. When did that army form? How long did it march to get there? How come Highgarden had no warning of a massive force marching for weeks to get to them?
In the meantime, the story is threaded with events that seemingly happen overnight. Ser Jorah looked pretty healed up from the whole body flensing Sam gave him, but the implication was that he was inspected the next day, as he was told he would have only one day before he had to leave. And those scenes interleaved other ones where weeks should have passed. It’s becoming incoherent.
There is a clear path through the mountains north. With dragonfire has air support, they could make it. All they need are dragons. And maybe some winter coats.
I really can’t see a reason why Sam wouldn’t have told Jon. That would be absurd.
It’s a weakness in the writing; while Daenarys was insisting that Jon bend the knee, he should have just said, “if I do that, the North will rebel and you’ll be fighting on another front. Let’s call a truce and sort this out when Cersei and the White Walkers are both no longer a threat.”
Bran asked him not to because he feared Jon would try to prevent him from seeking out the Three Eyed Raven.
She’s been this way throughout the entire show. It was just easy to root for her when she was doing it to foreigners and slavers. Now that she turns towards our favorite characters and treats them the same way, we see her in a different light. She fed people to her dragons just because one of them might, possibly, have been the Harpy or friends with the Harpy. She’s not really a good person, and hasn’t been this entire time.
It becomes more apparent because they’re speeding things up, but as I said many times, it has always been this way. Since the beginning of the show, months can pass in a place while only days pass in another. And there similarly might be months passing between two scenes involving the same characters. The time scale is always quite loose. All we can say is that all events in a season happen within the same general time frame that is probably about one year long. Since we’re already in the middle of the season, we can probably assume that several months passed. Fleets had the time to sail around Westeros, armies to march from King’s landing to Highgarden, Jon Snow to go from the North to Dragonstone…
I agree however that things are going too fast now, with few scenes showing a progression between two major events. As a result, fleets, armies and characters seem to be just teleporting from one place to another. On the other hand, people have complained a lot that the pace was too slow during previous seasons.
Regardless of what the archmaester says, This doesn’t seem like Sam’s idea of punishment. If Sam’s copying scrolls, he’s not scooping soup and dumping poop. But the archmaester, who told Sam not to mess with Greyscale, has to do something like punishment, no matter how impressed he is. So he took Sam away from his important chambermaid duties, and threw him into a task which most people would consider punishment, but is probably Sam’s idea of a dream assignment.
It just occurred to me that Daenerys and Jon Snow should be about the same age, with Jon being the younger one.
I assumed it was in addition to his soup and poop duties, not in replace of.
Anybody who thinks the Unsullied are out of the picture now are likely badly mistaken. I see one of two things happening: either someone gets sloppy and the Unsullied sortie out and stomp some Lannister butt, or there is a general truce to fight the White Walkers and the Unsullied march north with the Lannister army. But rest assured they aren’t going to spend the next 10 episodes just sitting there playing with…ok, bad choice of words.
In general the pace of the show is way too fast now. They said they cut down the number of episodes per season because there’s just not that much story to tell but that’s bullshit. The earlier seasons were padded with scenes that would show the passage of times - perhaps a conversation about military strategy that sets the pieces and helps you understand where and when things are happening, or a conversation that happens during traveling to give the sense of a progression of time. We’ve lost most of those. Now it feels like we’re watching a highlight reel - all the setup is cut out and we’re just zooming from big moment to big moment.
This episode contained some of the biggest movements in series history back to back without any room to live in or show the passage of time, just boom across the world here, zoom across the world there. It feels as though we’re getting a condensed final season of a show that didn’t have enough time to tell the story it way it wanted to, but that’s not the case here.
what are the Dothraki doing? Did I miss where they are now?
I am disappointed that the Dorne/Reach storyline ended so quickly. They set it up at the very end of last season, had no part in the first episode of this one, and then ended it two episodes later. They didn’t need to have them ally in the first place.