Brought it with them from where? They planned to capture dragons thousands of years ago when dragons only existed in Westeros for 300 years? When the Wall went up there wasn’t even iron working in Westeros.
I don’t recall that. Sansa or Bran says he sent the assassin?
Well that was a good finale. Not as a great as last year’s but a good one.
The meeting in the arena was awesome. Nearly every character not a Stark all in one place. What I found almost funny is Jon’s goofy plan kind of worked: Cersei actually seeing a living wight did have a reaction. Certainly it did on Jamie.
Beyond Cersei, the person whose reaction I was interested in seeing going into this week was Cersei’s pet Mad Scientist. He knows how to control Undead things. They aren’t the same as the Night King and the wights but you have to wonder if his knowledge could actually come in handy if Cersei had legitimately thrown in with them. I was waiting for him to put a piece of the wight in his pocket for study later but unless I missed it, that didn’t happen.
The Trial of Littlefinger was great. My only mistake was I, like LF himself, underestimated Sansa and did not believe she was in on it but nope, she played the player masterfully. And hearing every one off his crimes and schemes laid out in open court just before his throat was cut was a great scene. I also liked the two sisters on the Wall after. I wanted them to touch fists and say, “Stark Sister’s Powers ACTIVATE!”
Cersei and Tyrion in the room might have been one of the best acted scenes in the series (I’m talking about The Mountain’s performance of course :)).
I don’t think Tyrion was jealous of Jon as someone above suggested. I think he just knows that allies fucking makes for complications they don’t need right now.
Okay so about what comes next. Here’s the problem as I see it: what is the climax of the story? Is it defeating the Night King or determining who win’s Westeros? There doesn’t seem to be enough episodes to support both and make them feel satisfying. It feels like one has to be settled pretty quickly so they can dig into the other and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
Well, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Golden Age of Television is that even the most awesomely written and acted shows have trouble coming up with an ending that measures up. Game of Thrones has just as much chance to fall a little short on the ending as any other show.
Another thing occurred to me: I actually expected the wight to be dead when he opened the box, thus making them all look like fools. If the white walkers can survive non-freezing weather, then what’s their hold up? Is it that they can only resurrect the dead in the cold, or is their effectiveness dimished in some other way in warmer climes?
Great scene! There were a good number of amusing lines in this episode.
I really hope you’re right about Tormund. I love him, he’s hilarious. He and Brienne need to get together just so she’ll lighten up a bit.
Good point. Unless they have 90-minute shows and really fast action for all 6 of the last episodes, I don’t know how they’re going to swing it. Even that wouldn’t work well.
Much as I doubt it’ll happen, I really would enjoy seeing a wight eat Cersei. Then again, the wight might become ill from doing so.
The Wall.
Ah, so he was waiting for a dragon.
Or anywhere else along the 300 mile mostly unmanned length of the wall.
Although, this particular plan makes sense because it allows the 700 foot tall wall to collapse into the sea. Otherwise you end up with a 700 wall collapsing into a 100 foot pile of unstable rubble.
We don’t really know the relationship. Do the White Walkers come with the Winter or does Winter come with them? Maybe the Wights only need the cold to stay “fresh” longer?
That looked like a pretty big Army of the Dead. Way more than 100,000 and more people than I would expect ever lived north of the Wall.
Ah, so maybe the warm weather eventually leads to their decay and ineffectiveness.
I enjoyed this season a lot, but IMO the writing was geared towards generating “awesome moments” rather than coherent narrative focus. Many of those moments were indeed awesome (Arya and Brienne, Jon meeting Dany, Euron’s capture of Yara, the Hound talking to pretty much anyone, dragons v zombies, Jaime and Olenna, dragons v Lannister soldiers, and more), but the motivations and decisions of the characters often didn’t make a whole lot of sense (not to mention the incoherence of time and geography). For example: were Arya and Sansa faking the conflict the whole season? At some point they plotted off-screen to kill LF. Was this before they started fighting, or just before the last episode? If it just before the last episode, then how did Sansa change her mind so drastically? Or was Sansa plotting the whole time, she just didn’t let Arya in on it until the very end? Or did Bran orchestrate it? Maybe there’s some series of conversations that would make it all make sense, but I’m not sure what that is.
It just shows that the showrunners aren’t the geniuses, George RR Martin is. As soon as they didn’t have his books to go on for the details, the writing got sloppier.
Although frankly I hope Martin’s planning a totally different direction. I think that the seasons since the show was on its own have been great TV, but I don’t know how much I’d care about reading it. And as I said, if George RR Martin is just going to do a novelization of what we’ve seen, then he can just outsource that job to Alan Dean Foster or something.
No, you’re totally right. Which is what made this season the most disappointing. Previous seasons (1, 3, and 4 mostly) were so great because they subverted expectations by going with brutal and cunning directions that people would do in the real world but that aren’t generally reflected in fiction/fantasy. There were also spectacular visuals, but that’s not what made Game of Thrones different.
Last episode had dragons killing ice zombies by the hundreds with fire breath but I didn’t care because of how stupid the plot was. This episode has brother and sister disagreeing with each other over whether to betray their other sibling and it was awesome. D&D, buddies, more of the latter.
It’s like the zombie problem. When an attempt is made to explain zombies, generally these days via some form of virus, it just raises more problems. “Why aren’t they rapidly decaying?” “Where’s the energy coming from to drive the muscles?” “Shouldn’t any damage rapidly reduce effectiveness?” And so on and so forth. Now, Game of Thrones has the advantage of the answer being “magic”. It’ll be interesting to see if there are environmental effects.
As it is, the dead clearly move at the pace the plot demands. (Rather like The Walking Dead in that respect.) They’ll have a real advantage in the future–no supply lines to protect, no need to hold territory, no worries about casualty numbers on their side, and presumably an ever-growing army. I’m not sure how you make that into six episodes of interesting television. So obviously there’s going to have to be other characters who aren’t directly fighting the dead (at least at first) doing things, but I’m not sure where it goes from there. Obviously there can be scenes like Theon facing Euron to try to rescue his sister, or Cersei’s machinations in the south and trying to bring in mercenaries, and lots of little interpersonal scenes between characters.
I guess I’m mostly thinking it’s going to take some pretty good writing to avoid the obvious traps that make something like The Walking Dead so tedious to watch. At least they’ve got an actual set of possible endings.
She was playing them the whole time, killing him would have just gotten her fried soon after.
Not a bad finale; and its effect is quite welcome: I’m mildly interested to see the show’s vision of the finale chapters but don’t mind the waiting time at all.
And the 6th season has accomplished something quite remarkable: I am now curious to read the next book.
Anyway, some thoughts:
Why is the show still acting as if legitimacy changes anything in the world?
Everyone we have seen sitting on a throne in the show got there by violence. The ones who led due to tradition or the rules of the land were pushed off their pedestal by others.
Realpolitik rules Westeros and Essos, not an idea. That, of course, might change - but any idea worth following for more than one person needs to be more powerful than l’état c’est moi.
Besides, if Jon learned anything in the past months, it should be this: He is not a king. The job he’d succeed in is Lord Commander of the Queensguard.
He has the abilities and the character for it: a good fighter, loyal, trustworthy, thruthful, dutiful and too stupid and unimaginative to ever participate in a coup (without giving it away the moment he needs to act innocently).
In that role, he can even be the much needed voice of conscience without getting into the way. His queen is going to need him doing this. Sansa is too much Littlefinger by now ;).
Rhaegar & Lyanna:
What I still want to know is why? Were you both so stupid that even Romeo & Juliet would shake their heads in disbelief? Or was Rhaegar on a “holy mission” to produce the Prince that was Promised like other Targaryens before him but unlike them (possibly) successful? And did Lyanna know?
The Night King:
It’s almost too late to address the motives and desires of the White Walkers, but not quite. I hope the show sees more in them than a force of nature or Childrenstein’s monster on the loose.
Their motivation should be more complex than the average comic book supervillain, and there are hints enough to give them depth.
The Collapse of the Wall:
That was too easy. I’d like to know Plan A. Unless the Night King is a greenseer and the future is set, he could not have predicted to have a dragon handy just in time to break the Wall.
If the future is set, if all events are preordained, well, than this is truly a depressing story, and we have only seen victims of the machine moving everything in its place.
He was like Eisenhower on the Rhine. Expecting to have a long slog to get across knowing he would win but it would be hard fought, Night King expected to get by using zombie waves to overwhelm the defenders (and future Night King wights). The dragon was his Ramegan Bridge. Ike got across the Rhine basically for free when the 9th Armoured captured the bridge intact. Night king got through with his Zombie!Dragon.
I thought that went without saying.
In any case, they were.
Six? Try 9 to 12 hours. They’ve already said the remaining episodes will be almost feature-length. And it’s easily done: 3 hours of battling ice zombies, 3 hours dealing with Cersei, 3 hours dealing with Dany/Jon, and 2-3 hours dealing with the “little people.”
Given what the main characters are getting paid, I see the main cast lasting until at least Season 8:5.
Nothing big, but some people freak about the littlest things.
A “Newhart” reference!
Not sure about the tv show timeline (what else is new?), but The Mountain might have already killed the other Aegon by the time Jon was born. Was Rhaegar already dead by the time Jon was born? He certainly wasn’t there.
Speaking of, there is a lot of awkward coming next season. Gendry’s dad killed Jon’s dad. Dany killed Samwell’s father and brother.
And Dany? You know, the person who invented herself as the rightful queen of everything, and has been desperately chasing that vision, with varying amounts of success, for years? Well, you know that handsome, brave, honest, trustworthy, fighting-man who also has a knack for forming coalitions despite being sort of a dumbass? The one you are boning? Yeah, he has a better claim to the throne than you do.
Oops.
Besides liking your kids and being a King and all, a big part of the attraction was like why Hermione Granger chose Ron Weasley–you would always be the smarter one and he would be the big yellow dog faithful to the end.
And you can’t just stab him when he isn’t looking because he is also undead, and, if he comes back again, he might be juuuust a touch annoyed with you.
Not to mention what his half-sister might do to you…
With 6 episodes left -
If I was running the show: [spoiler]
Penultimate episode ends with Bran warging into Raegar and kamikaze-ing into the Night’s King, just as all was lost. We lose some beloved secondary characters along the way.
Show Finale: Bronn finds a sack of gold and gets his castle. Brienne and Tormund knock boots and go to reclaim a hunk of the far North. Cersei kills Tyrion somehow, which finally pushes Jaime to strangle her. He in turn is killed by Ser Gregor, who is killed by the Hound, who dies in the process. The very end of the series shows Sansa, Arya, Jon, Dany and a wounded Drogon pondering the future. Up rides Howland Reed, who kneels before Jon and openly proclaims him the rightful heir to the Targaryen throne. Dany gets a gleam in her eye and as the scene fades out, we hear her say
“Dracarys!” [/spoiler]
Roll credits.
So, as the Army Of The Dead come south, is there a brief period where a wight warms up enough that Ser Jorah could date one without it falling apart? Assuming that the wight doesn’t swipe left, of course.
