I thought it was fucking hilarious how Jamie and Brienne were talking about the fire and level of heat in their room, it was totally the equivalent of an old married couple arguing about the thermostat.
If both were killed, it would be less poignant. Actually, I expected it would be Grey Worm last episode. But having it be Missandei is more shocking because she’s a non-combatant and one of the few nice people on the show.
AFAIK, Cersei only ever saw Missandei at the meeting at the Dragon Pit, and Missandei sat in the back row and had no lines. But maybe she knows her importance through spies.
I thought it was the best episode this season – exciting and unpredictable. It helped that I could see everything that was happening.
Yeah.
My problem with this is if you simply flipped it around.
If Daenerys captured a translator of Cersei’s and threatened that person Cersei really would not give a shit. So it is unlikely Cersei would somehow think Missandei is important and worth a moment’s notice.
But yeah…maybe spies told her that Missandei was a trusted advisor and confidant of the queen. I can buy that.
A dragon isn’t someone stationary shooting at you. A dragon will be out into the darkness before any could could be aimed where it used to be. Of course it could just sit there and wait to be shot but why would it?
So the odds can be evened for dramatic purposes.
That wasn’t my read at all. Jaime’s a Nelly fan:
It’s gettin’ hot in herre (so hot), so take off all your clothes
I am, gettin’ so hot, I wanna take my clothes off
Really wanted Tormund to have forgotten something and ridden back to Winterfell just in time to comfort Brienne after Jaime left her.
I was, however, cheering at the next virgin on the show to finally get laid, in a nice way - done right, by a dude she likes.
Not happy about Bronn turning up like he did, suddenly being a huge asshole. He was my favorite side character in the earlier seasons - now all of a sudden he’s a charmless dick.
Because the dragons tend to hover there and cut loose with flame for like 30 seconds rather than fire and flee.
I didn’t like it, but it is consistent with his character’s motivations throughout the show. I liked Jamie deciding to rush back to Cersei even less. But it is also who he is. Jamie would be a genuinely good person if not for Cersei’s malevolent influence.
Bronn was always a mercenary dick. We just liked him because his interests happened to run in the same direction as other characters whose side we were on, at least for the moment. At least he gave the Lannister boys a chance to buy their lives.
Yup…and he has a “Lestat Complex” too. “Whoaaaa is mee Im a monster and watch me prove it.”
She does know a ‘back entrance’. Way back in Season 1, she go lost in the catacombs after overhearing the conversation between Varys and Iliyrio, only to finally make her way out of what looked to be a sewer outside the city.
I don’t think he’s running back to her. He makes the decision to leave after finding out that Cersei has killed one of the dragons and captured Missandei; he’s afraid she might win, and wants to prevent that… He’s finally come to grips with the fact that both he and her sister are ‘bad people’, and he’s going to try to see that they both pay for their sins.
Also…when he showed up, he seemed to be in a reasonable mood and Jaime and Tyrion QUICKLY proved his point about why he was so pissed. Lack of respect and not believing him. “One more word from you…” "Tyrion: “Blah blah blah” Jaime: “You wouldn’t…” KATHANG.
If Jaime had just shut up, and Tyrion more concilatory the convo could have gone differently. Riverrun?? The point that should have been made is that Cersei will never give Bronn Riverrun.
Episode 6, Scene 34, INT Red Keep, Throne Room. Dany sits on the throne, downcast. Ash falls from a hole in the ceiling. A sullen crowd watches her coronation while Dothraki and Unsullied keep the peace…
BRONN enters with crossbow: “OI. Dragon queen!! I was told I could have Highgarden!. You know. Big castle! 400 miles west of here! I need the keys.”
I think that Jaime needed to get out of there before he changed his mind, and said those things to Brienne to make her hate him and therefore easier for him to go. I don’t think he wants to save Cersei. He didn’t make the decision to go until Bronn told him Cersei wanted him dead and then heard that Cersei was winning. He thought she would die in the war but then realized that might not happen. So he has to make sure it does. He can’t be the good person Brienne believes he is until he settles that score.
Suburban Plankton beat me to it.
I finally figured out where I’ve felt this feeling of “I’m numb. And I’ve cried my last tear. And from here on out every frame is just a march of inevitability. No one left has any choice in what they do.” before.
The Dark Tower books.
DnD cleverly sent away or killed off every single character that would have really upset me to see them die. And the few still around that would have upset me? Set them on a one-way mission. (Hound and Arya). So now I’m left with an ever-shrinking crew who are just seeing out the motions. Tyrion has a tiny bit of agency left, but I at this point don’t care much about him. Varys, Dany, Grey Worm, Jaime (Though we don’t quite know what his suicide mission is) Jon are all locked into revenge and duty. We miggght see Brienne and Pod on their own doomed mission.
Doubt we see Sansa or Bran actually affect the outcome of the show again.
But yeah. I’m numb and felt the same way in the Dark Tower books when the -* was broken and ******** left.
Overall, I liked this episode after a being disappointed in last episode. I wondered if they were going to have Dany go the Mad Queen route - they had obviously (and generally skillfully) been setting it up for a while now, but it seemed like they were going so risk-averse and boring in their storytelling I thought they might go in a different direction. They still may. Maybe Dany will die in her attack on King’s Landing, keeping characters from having to make difficult decisions about it. But the way she threatened Jon was a good turn and a justified character moment. In general, having the northmen who all love Jon doting on him and ignoring her, on the day she should’ve been the great big savior, was a good way to set up that conflict. Well done.
Tyrion making it out of this episode alive is implausible. Cersei left Tyrion alive the last time they met because she thought she could manipulate him, which she did. Additionally, a full strength Dothraki/Unsullied/Dragon army was at her doors, and antagonizing them by killing Tyrion is a losing move. So she didn’t.
But this time those constraints aren’t in place. Cersei is not trying to avoid conflict - she is deliberately egging on Dany by killing Missandei. They’re in the end stages of their war, so the reputation lost for potentially killing an unarmed man approaching your gates is probably not a big deal to her. And Dany’s armies are depleted, and it’s not at all clear that Cersei can’t beat them conventionally. Cersei simply should’ve ordered Tyrion filled up like a pincushion. Possibly right after she kills Missandei and he’s just standing there shocked. So that she could double her provocative move.
The only reason for her not to do this is that Tyrion is a fan favorite character.
Also, I realize that this is just the way that they wanted to shoot it cinematographically, and it’s a cool shot, but Dany and her advisors, and her small personal guard of unsullied, were way too close to the walls. It seemed like they were in borderline arrow range, but even if they weren’t, they were certainly in balllista range. If Cersei is trying to provoke a fight anyway, it makes sense just to take a crack at ending the dragon queen right then and there. So I’m going to have to assume that the distances Dany would’ve waited outside the walls was further, but it looked cooler to shoot it as if it were closer. Also, the 20,000 Golden Company should’ve simply rode her and her small force of unsullied down. I realize that too was probably a budget limitation - they didn’t want to portray her whole army standing there with her. But all together, it rubbed me the wrong way, since it made it seem as though the war was Cersei’s to win right there, she just had to take it.
At first I thought that this doesn’t feel right. The climax of Jamie and Brienne’s relationship was the knighting seen. There hasn’t been an undercurrent of sexual tension between them… there was… morality and honor tension. Her vouching for him, and him knighting her was the perfect completion of their arc. Having them have sex seemed unnecessary and a little off, tone wise.
On the other hand, Jamie betrayed his sister to honor his word to fight up North. He can’t go back to her, and he’s not a lord or an important man up North, so it may make sense that he might let go and try being with her to start a new life up there. Still, it didn’t quite ring true to me. I sincerely wished Tormund had grown on Brienne. I’d rather have seen that relationship, with Brienne and Jaime’s arc completing perfectly in the previous episodes. I guess they didn’t have time to make it work.
They’ve undone Jaime’s redemption before. We saw him become a better person and start to realize the evil that is Cersei and how she influenced him to be the opposite of what he wants to be, and he seemed to start to grow. But then when she sends him away - to handle the siege of Riverrun - he’s right back to “I’ll kill everyone here to be with Cersei again” - it didn’t ring true then, and it doesn’t ring true now. But I suspect now he’s not going back to attempt to be with her, he’s going back to attempt to kill her or otherwise resolve the war, and what he told Brienne was bs.
That was my initial reaction too. Bronn was too unfriendly to them. But I’m not sure the scene is actually wrong. Bronn has always been a heartless mercenary. We like the guy, because he’s worked for “our guys” - but do you remember when Tyrion once asked him if he would murder an infant - rip it right from its mothers arms without question and murder it right then - he answered “without question? No. I’d ask how much”
Bronn was promised a castle - he almost married the dimwitted girl and murdered her older sister - when Jamie pulled him out of that, with the promise of a bigger reward. Later, Jaime gave him a bag of gold - which was a great reward, but not the castle he was promised - and in any case the gold was lost during the battle of the loot train. So Bronn has been working for years and risking his life for the Lannisters and has very little to show about it. And now that he’s been recruited once again by a Lannister to do evil - “this fuckin family”, it’s plausible that he just wants to be done with them and fucking finally cash out.
I know no one cares, but I was looking over on reddit and noticed this thread. Essentially, this guy was pissed that the cute little dragon was shot and killed, and now the guy wants Dany to kill everyone. And pretty much everyone else agrees with him.
This is a good example of my claims that the GoT audience has swelled up to be filled with unsophisticated viewers.
Dany’s dragons are not cute puppies. To a degree, we sympathize with them because they’re the “children” of one our heroes in the story. But these are wild beasts that murder people. That burn people alive in horrific ways. They are weapons of war. They’ve been used to inflict forceful rule and tyranny on the world. They burn cities to the ground. They are the closest thing that world has to weapons of mass destruction.
So for the audience reaction to be “awww, they killed the cute little lovable puppy dragon!! I hope their mom LITERALLY BURNS EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD ALIVE” is not only a completely bizarre moral statement but a sure sign of unsophisticated viewers who can’t even understand the difference between a protagonist and a hero, or that having us watch the dragons grow up doesn’t mean they’re not a tool of inflicting great pain and destruction. This is the audience the show has been catering more and more to in the last years as the show reached greater popularity, and this is the audience that isn’t even sophisticated enough to understand that the quality of writing has dropped in recent seasons.
Maybe because of the light issue last week, I was stricken by how excellent the lighting was during the first part of the episode (scenes shot with candle light).
I was a bit hit by the opening scene. I found the scene were the main characters are saying their good byes to their fallen companions uncomfortably realistic, both the corpses and the attitude of the mourners. Reminded me too much of actual funerals.
I had difficulties buying the idea of Jaime falling in love with Brienne. And even more buying the idea that then he would then have a change of heart and abandon her to side with Cersei (I loved him mentioning he strangled his cousin. I felt I was the only one still remembering this scene, that I found at the time even worst than throwing Bran out of the window, and that played a good part in my refusal to see Jaime as redeemed).
I noted with interest that Arya stated that she didn’t intend to come back from King’s Landing. There’s still a hope that the resolution of her story will be interesting.
The dragon killing scene was surprising, hence good but the setting absurd, as everybody already pointed out. And as many pointed out too, I failed to see why Missandei would be considered a valuable hostage. I also failed to see why they executed this hostage, in fact.
The Jon/Danaerys thing is interesting, even though it seems very telegraphed, and the whole Stark family, including those who really shouldn’t give a shit like Arya and Bran united in their opposition to Danaerys didn’t seem to fit. Similarly, they kept explaining how much Sansa has grown and changed but this evolution frankly hasn’t been shown properly during the previous seasons, and as a result it feels extremely artificial.
I hope for the best wrt how they’ll resolve this (although I don’t trust the show writers anymore to do something surprising and original). At this point, we’re told that Dany is unfit to rule and Jon unwilling to. So, an option would be that both would perish (and Gendry, now legitimized, become king?). And if one, or both, do perish, how it happens and in particular who will kill them could be interesting.
A last thing that seemed absurd to me was the parley scene, where they seemed to all be within range of the ballistas (including the dragon) and possibly the archers and on top of it had very little soldiers with them. In all logic, Cersei should have tried to kill them all right there and then.
Finally, I had read about the leak of this week’s episode, and specifically that it showed a main character’s death. This had the fortunate effect of keeping me on the edge of my seat. My first thought, weirdly, was that Jon could suddenly die (having been resurrected and fulfilled his purpose, like Thoros and Melisandre). Then that Dany would have him killed. Then I half expected her to be killed along with her dragon, then to be assassinated by Varys, then to see Tyrion being killed during the parley (this even before the scene where he approached the gates and the archers aimed at him. In fact, once this happened, weirdly, it convinced me that he wouldn’t die. Maybe too much of a trope.). I must say that his expectation of seeing someone important die during this episode made it vastly more enjoyable.
I wouldn’t be surprised by this reaction if it had been Ghost being killed, but the dragons are neither cute nor lovable. I’m not convinced, however, that a really significant part of the watchers really care that much about it.
I found some of reactions in the thread you linked to quite sick, however. How can you hate a movie character so much that you devise horrific ways in which he should die?