What was the significance of what the Hound said to the Mountain? Was it just a threat?
I think it would be a great twist if Robyn defeated Gregor in single combat.
I know the timeline of the show is pretty vague, but Ol’ Milk-lips ain’t beating the Mountain at anything but suckin’.
If she kills Tyrion Dany torches King’s Landing. She’s touchy that way.
Probably just a threat plot-wise; also, meta-wise, a tacit acknowledgment that everyone wants to see them fight BUT NOT THIS SEASON, SUCKAS.
I am a little miffed at the whole Jon is the legitimate Targaryen heir business.
We are led to believe that Ned hid the truth for two decades for fear of danger to Aegon/Jon. Ok fair enough.
Everyone believes the cover story (Ned’s bastard conceived during the war). Including Robert and Tywin. There are several problems with that.
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The fact that Rhaeghar kidnapped Lyanna is well known, it was the official cause of the rebellion. Its also known that she stayed with him for more than a year.
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What did they think was happening between Rhaeghar and Lyanna? He was reading her poetry? No. They probably all expected that he nailed regularly, they even say “rape”.
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They also know Ned found her in Dorne, guarded by Kingsguard. Ned even boasted about beating Ser Arthur Dayne. And she died PDQ after Ned found her.
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Incidentally, having a child out of wedlock is absolutely out of character for Ned.* Everybody * is surprised at it. Robert, Stannis, others say that it was not something Ned would do. And he never does it again.
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He also refuses to discuss who the mother was; why they hell would he bother being so secretive.
Ned Stark, a notoriously upright man emerges from Dorne with a dead sister who had just been with Rhaeghar a year and a half and totally coincidentally a baby whom he calls his bastard, whose mother he refuses to discuss. Jon might as well have had neon signs flashing “Targayean baby” on him, yet no one makes the connection?
Tywin should/would have realized the truth in about 30 seconds and had the Mountain pay them a little visit.
The the army of the dead start marching before or after the dragons were born? I’m thinking that this all started when the dragons were born. The Night King has most or all of Bran’s powers - maybe more. He would have known that there are now dragons, and everything since could have been in preparation for capturing one of them.
As for the chains - the army of the dead was recently at Hardhome, which was a seaport that hosted large ships. Those could be anchor chains brought with them from Hardhome. It might also be why they went to Hardhome in the first place.
Littlefinger’s plan all along was to frame the Lannisters for the murder of a Stark. That’s why he gave a common assassin a priceless Valyrian Dagger that he claimed was Tyrion’s.
As to the target, either Littlefinger figured out that Bran was somehow crippled by Jamie or perhaps by Joffrey or Cersei, or he decided it didn’t even matter - if Bran was injured in a suspicious fall and then murdered, with the murderer being connected to the Lannisters, then it really didn’t matter why Bran fell - the Lannisters get blamed anyway. He may have just gotten ‘lucky’ in that a Lannister really did do it.
And the door towards a Tormund/Brienne romance opened a little wider in this episode, as Brienne made it clear that she was no longer bound by the petty constraints of Westerosi society. “Fuck Honor”, I believe she said. Wasn’t that basically the same thing that Tormund said to Jon when he talked to him about bending the knee to Daeneris?
The old Brienne would never have considered a crass, uneducated wildling as anything other than an object of scorn or pity (or just not worthy of even thinking about). The new Brienne? The one that only cares about the living vs the dead? A guy like Tormund might be right up her alley.
This was the weakest writing in the episode. Not only did Cersei in Bond-Villain fashion reveal her treacherous plans in detail to Jamie, she then let him walk out the door and join her enemies, fresh with the knowledge of exactly how she’s going to betray them. That was a pretty ridiculous way to move that plot forward, in an episode that was otherwise great.
And Tormund fucked a bear once. That experience might come in handy when “handling” Brienne. 
Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it works for her to try to split Jon and Daeneris.
Agreed. Since he bent the knee to Daeneris, it wasn’t even his call to make. The proper response there was to say, 'If you want me to stand down, you will have to ask my queen. I have no right to offer that answer."
If you draw a red line and say “These are my conditions”, then the other side tells you to go screw yourself, you pretty much have to follow up. If she had said, “No? Well… Okay, I’ll help you anyway”, everyone would have instantly known that she had no intention whatsoever of helping them. She HAD to walk out after threatening to do so. She may have even been hoping that someone like Tyrion would show up and give her another compelling reason to join them so she could skirt around the previous red line and lure them back in. In fact, the way it worked out made it look even more like she was playing straight with them, because she showed her willingness to walk away first.
In season 1 Ned and Robert had a discussion about the various whores they screwed. I don’t think the idea that Ned fathered a bastard looks unusual to any of these characters. Raising a bastard in the way Ned did is hugely unusual for someone in his position. It does fit in with Ned’s character though.
The bigger problem would be him explaining his sister’s death. But remember, he was the only survivor of the battle with the Sword of the Morning. It’s plausible that he was able to blame the death on the Targaryen’s and mutilate the body to make it seem like she was murdered.
A terrific episode, I thought, and a worthy end to the season. I kept rewinding and rewatching the good parts.
Agreed. As pissed-off as she is, she still has just enough self-restraint to understand that.
I really thought Ser Frankenmountain was going to kill Jaime, though. The last indication he got from her seemed to be, “Go ahead and kill him.” But he let him go.
Yes! When it came charging out at her, and when Jon did his Ask Dr. Science bit about how to kill them, that was all great.
Yeah, they should at least have acknowledged that dictum of their dad’s.
And jeez, Aidan Gillen as Littlefinger did an acting masterclass in the trial scene, ranging from smugness to surprise to shock to wheedling to bluster to begging. In rewatching, I noticed that after he asked Sansa to let him defend himself, and she seemed to give a little nod, he didn’t even try to defend himself, but went right over the Vale guy and ordered him to escort him back. It was obvious he had no defense. No wonder everyone in that room was content to see him die.
A great character, and superbly played by Gillen all along, but never better than at his end.
That would certainly have been truer to GRRM’s anyone-can-die ethos.
And I bet she’ll still be pregnant then, meaning he’ll know he’s killing his only remaining child too. Brrrr.
Right.
It’s amazing what you can do with a needle and thread!
Heh. Great mental image. “I survived greyscale for this…?”
Love it!
I agree that R+L=J, in addition to being pure fantasy cliche, should have easily been guessed by various characters in the story. Fans have been waiting for it for a long time but it was never one of GRRM’s best ideas in the first place.
This episode seems to reinforce the idea that the best strategy was to sit tight behind the wall.
The wights are so slow and stupid that it’s going be a challenge to make them seem sufficiently threatening. A couple of thousand horse archers with 50 dragonglass-tipped arrows each could destroy the whole army in a few hours. Regular archers could destroy a huge chunk of it.
Is Zombie dragon is more agile than the others? I guess it will have to be since it’s going to be 2 against 1. That will definitely be the highlight of the final season.
Overall I didn’t care for the episode too much, especially compared to previous finales, and much of it didn’t make any sense.
Howland Reed.
The presence of Bran at the trial pretty much tells you what you need to know - that Bran explained it all to Sansa and Arya. We don’t need to see the scene, because it’s confirmed when Sansa starts listing all of Littlefinger’s crimes - many of which she couldn’t possibly know unless Bran told her.
I think the scene with Sansa and Arya where Arya flips the dagger to her was genuine, and was set up to make sure that everyone knows that Arya has no interest in being Lady of Winterfell, and is actually no threat to Sansa. On the other hand, Sansa was clearly playing along with Littlefinger when he tried to convince her that Arya was going to kill her. So I think we can assume that the conversation with Bran happened between those two points. But we needed to see that last scene, because as viewers we needed Littlefinger to attempt to trigger a murder of a Stark child right before they killed him, to ensure that we know who’s standing on the moral high ground.
Bran: “Okay. Hey, you there - the head of the knights of the Vale. Here are 10 things about you I know that no one could know…” Anyone else want me to tell them anything I couldn’t possibly know? Anyone? Beuller? Oh, and remember that religion we all believe in, that says someone like me should exist? Anyone want to see me make a flock of ravens spell your name in the air?"
Notice that the Knights of the Vale did not flinch at any of this? They were there for a reason. The leader of the KotV likely already sat down with Sansa and Bran and had been convinced thoroughly. The whole trial was a setup to get Littlefinger into a room he could not escape from.
Then there’s the little matter that the Lady of Winterfell was an eyewitness to the murder of Lyssa Arryn… And also that summary justice is totally a thing in the North. The series opened with Ned Stark beheading a man without a trial at all.
I guess I only just now realized that rather than being a master schemer…Baelish was just a guy who walked around kicking people’s lego sets and doing what he could to put himself ahead at the end of the day.
Makes more sense too if he’s just plain crazy. His “What do i want? To sit on the Throne.” as of last year was dumb. At some point a master schemer has to realize how far he’s come and how lucky he’s been…rather than “I’ll just keep rebooting until the computer is fixed.”
Remember Bran quotes something Baelish said back to Baelish that there is no way Bran could have heard which lets us know that Bran did his three-eyed raven trick to listen in on Baelish in the past.
Right. Sansa doesn’t need to prove anything; she’s in charge and she has a murdersister and Wheelchair Yoda. There’s not an appeals court.
I know there’s been a lot of criticism thrown at this season, much of it justified, but I have to say aloud how much I loved Littlefinger’s arc this year. Game of Thrones has always been fond of flipping over tropes, but I think at some point “flipping over tropes” got confused with “the good guys always lose.” Littlefinger has always been a bit of a trope of his own: the master schemer villain, who always and improbably knows his enemies’ movements before they make them. Had he in some way come out ahead in Winterfell, it would have been every bit as much of a cliché as if Ned had succeeded in Kings Landing.
Instead - rather brilliantly, I think - they wrote Littlefinger’s arc this year as a perfect inversion of Ned’s Season 1 arc. The things Ned did well, that made him a success in the North - his sense of honor and duty, his physical strength, his steady and predictable nature - doomed him in the South. In exactly the same way, Littlefinger’s strengths - duplicity, scheming, playing on subtle urges and hidden animosity - made him invulnerable in the South but easy pickings in the North. Ned was helpless in the face of debauched schemers like Cersei Lannister… but none of Littlefinger’s tricks were worth two cents up against a literal prophet, a shapeshifting assassin, and a country full of plainspoken warriors with no time to waste on him.
Loved it.
They called it making the 8 if they banged a girl from all 7 kingdoms and I guess 1 other place - maybe Kings’ landing?
I think people are misunderstanding the Samwell/Gilly scene where she mentions the annulment. The way it was portrayed, Gilly was reading something important, and Sam was too busy doing other stuff to really pay attention.
But what was Gilly reading? She was reading one of the books that Sam was transcribing that’s why all those books were there - Sam’s job was to make copies of them. No printing presses in Westeros.
So, either Sam had already transcribed that book, and Gilly was reading from the ‘completed’ pile, or it was a book Sam had yet to transcribe. if you go with the first interpretation, then Sam’s annoyance at Gilly is more understandable. He’s like, “Yes, I know all that - I JUST TRANSCRIBED IT!”. If it’s the latter, then even if he didn’t listen to Gilly at all when she was saying it, he would have read it soon enough when it came time to transcribe that book.
So why have the scene at all? Because the audience needed to be told what was in the books he was transcribing. It was Chekov’s book - you needed to show a scene that let us know that Sam had that knowledge. If he had just blurted it out to Bran without the Gilly scene, we would have went, 'WHAA??? When did you learn that? That’s awfully convenient to spring that on us now!"
For that matter, why would ANYONE care? In the battle for the living against the dead, historical claims are pretty much irrelevant. All the cool kids on the show are saying so. For instance, the new ‘King of the North’ is a bastard, or so the people who support him think. That’s not supposed to happen.
On the other hand, his true lineage is VERY important if magic is involved. Do you think it’s a coincidence that three dragons are born and the last two Targaryans meet and combine forces just as the Night King rises up? This is all foretold in prophecy, and if I were to guess, what we’re seeing is a replay of an endless cycle of the struggle between life and death in this universe. The dragons and the Targaryans are the defenders of man against the forces of the dead. Fire vs Ice. When the dead march, a Targaryan will rise up in defense.
This, by the way, was also the end plot of Heavy Metal, which even had the defender of mankind against Evil be a young girl with white hair who is the last of her race (the Taarakians), and who rides a large magical flying bird to fight the forces of death and evil. When evil rises, a new Taarakian is born to defend man…