We see the Dothrakis going towards the ships too during the episode. I would assume them to go back to their sea of grass, to resume pillaging, after their short touristic tour of Westeros.
I got a giggle at Jon heading up to try to talk with Dany. All those Dothraki screamers with their blood lust up, and he just shoves his way through, nudging 1,000-lb war horses aside all nonchalantly.
Reminded me of the old SNL skit about I.T. Guy.
“Move!!”
(Absolutely lost it at Brienne penning Jayme’s deeds. Very graceful of her.)
Yes, but Jon already joined the Nights Watch once…and then subsequently left it. He vowed to serve his Queen…and then subsequently slayed her. So he’s not exactly known for keeping his word.
And Jon isn’t a bastard son anymore, he’s now a real danger to all the councilmen as he’s not only a proven Kingslayer but a legitimate claimant to the Iron Throne. So sending him to the NW and expecting him to maintain his vow, on his honor, makes no sense, except to conveniently keep him alive for the fans.
Besides, as far as their function goes, as you say, the Nights Watchmen used to keep the Wildings in check, and they had a very hostile relationship. In fact his brothers murdered Jon after he allied with them. But that was then, and this is now. The Wildings assisted the North in defeating the Night King, and then peacefully returned to their homes.
So, if the Night King is dead, if the White Walkers are dead, and if the Wildings are no longer their enemy, what exactly is the Night Watch’s purpose?
The last glimpse we have of Jon is him going through the tunnel and walking amidst the Wildings and his friend, Tormund, who’s already indicated that he’d make a great King. What do you make of that?
If anybody had any sense at all they’d let those boats get halfway to Essos then sink them. Do the whole planet a favor.
Ghost got his skritches, so that part of me is happy. The rest was grossly unsatisfying.
It’s been mentioned that Dorne should have been up in arms about the North seceding, but Yara should have taken objection to that too–the primary condition of her support of Dany’s cause was that Dany promised to recognize Yara as queen of an independent Iron Islands. There is absolutely no reason she would have rolled over and accepted fealty to the wheelchair throne with no concessions.
In the scene where Tyrion slowly wakes up in the cell, before being taken to the Kingsmoot. To me, his eyes looked very strange to begin with: white, cloudy, unfocused for what seemed like a long time, okay, actually probably just a handful of seconds, but it felt long, before they looked normal.
To the point I was wondering if Tyrion was warging.
Did anyone else see it like this?
I just wondered why we were wasting so much time watching Tyrion laying on the floor. If they were going for something specific in the scene, they never followed through.
Huh. The parts everyone else really liked were some of my least favorite parts, while some other parts I liked a lot more than other folks did.
The “Dany has dragon wings” shot was breathtakingly cool, but I found it really jarring. This isn’t a show that traffics in self-conscious trick cinematography, and while that’s a fine thing to do in other shows, it just didn’t match the show’s aesthetic for me. It was also a little on-the-nose: “Hey, didja notice that Dany has gone full dragon?”
I also wasn’t a big fan of the visual of burning the throne. The combination of real effects and CG effects looked really weird to me, almost like something out of a B movie.
The quick council decision was a little weird, but as I think about it I’m grudgingly okay with it. As I understand the situation:
- There are a couple of foreign armies camped out at King’s Landing. They’re super pissed about Dany, but they also don’t know the landscape.
- There’s the Iron Fleet outside the city. They’re pissed about Dany, but also not enormous fans of the foreign armies.
- There’s an army of Northmen outside the city. They’re pissed about Jon being captive, and not enormous fans either of the Iron Fleet or the foreign armies.
- There are representatives from the other five kingdoms. Their armies aren’t there, but they have armies back home ready to throw down.
Everybody recognizes that they’re sitting on a powder keg, and that a wrong move could blow everything up, leading to new stages and new fronts in the war. King’s Landing provides a pretty powerful demonstration of how badly that can go.
So Grey Worm brings Tyrion into this council, and GW is pissed, but maybe he sees that without Dany there’s a good chance the Unsullied won’t survive a coming war. If he kills Jon, the Northmen, under Sansa’s command, WILL have their war. (He may have made this calculation earlier, explaining why Jon survived the Unsullied). What he really wants is for these barbarian motherfuckers whose land he’s found himself in to come up with a political solution that means he can leave with honor intact.
And when Tyrion comes forward, at first GW is like, “Shut up, asshole, you betrayed the queen,” but then Tyrion starts talking, and the barbarian council is listening, and he’s like, maybe Tyrion’s going to figure out a way we don’t need to go to war.
And the Westeros council is thinking basically the same thing, and they may realize that almost any choice of new monarch is going to lead to more factional war. But then Bran is offered, and it’s such a weird, out-of-left-field choice that they listen to Tyrion’s explanation. It’s basically a new way to imagine the monarchy, having someone with literally zero personal ambition in control, and they’re like, fuck it, we agree now so that we don’t have war with the Unsullied, and if Bran is awful we rebel, that’s kind of what we do.
I agree that the pacing was pretty weird for this scene, and it could’ve used a lot more tension (maybe it should’ve been an entire episode of secret meetings and betrayals and negotiations). But ultimately, I think folks’ actions are reasonable here: they found maybe the only way out of the incipient war that they could, in Bran’s coronation.
But once again, Tarly is just a vassal, not on par with the lords of Dorne, Highgarden, Winterfell, etc…
The Wildings are no longer an enemy, for now. Who knows a few decades from now. I could make an argument that it is better to begin replacing the deal brothers of the Night Watch and re-building the various castles on The Wall now vs. waiting until there is some future need should new or returning threats arise but the decision to send Jon there is not based upon that need. It is completely irrelevant in my opinion.
The Nights Watch has provided the nobles a societal outlet for criminals you can’t execute without consequences, bastards you can’t just kill (unless you’re Ceresi), and disappointing 2nd, 3rd, and so on sons. That’s been the benefit of the Nights Watch for 100s and 100s of years to the nobles. Wildings were really no real threat beyond The North but they made an excellent justification for having a Nights Watch where you can send those undesirables you can’t get rid of easily. And by the end of the story it was a perfectly consistent option for the nobles in the position of having to solve for “What to do with Jon but still hold together Westeros”.
I think the best example we have from the show is Aemon Targaryen. He was seen as a potential heir to the throne but he refused it and joined the Night’s Watch because it was politically expedient for all involved.
I didn’t expect that. Drogon seems to recognize him as a Targaryen and tends to behave like a pet with him.
They’re the same people they were before. I assume they’ll resume raids in short order, at least some of them. And in couple generations, all those who fought along the Northmen will be dead, and presumably the Wildlings will behave in the same way they did in the past.
Given how her one sexual relationship worked out, she’s probably okay with that.
Why do they need a master of whisperers or whatever when Bran can go all minority report whenever he needs to? I find the prospects of that kind of creepy BTW.
And why was he looking for Drogon? were they going to try to hunt it?
I think it was a callback to his time in the sky cells at the Eyrie. I actually just watched that episode recently because my wife wanted to watch Viserys’s head melt again on a whim, and it’s the same episode. Tyrion also was imprisoned and expected to die a few other times in the series, so it was kind of a “one more time in jail awaiting execution for old times sake” scene.
I got the impression that Jon was going with them to stay. Tormund had told him he had the “true north” in him. So I can’t imagine them raiding anywhere while Jon is alive. And, really, why would they? Jon told Tormund they were free to settle in the lands south of the wall. I think Sansa would be ok with that. The North lost a lot of people in the Battles of the Bastard and the Night King. There should be plenty of land if they want it. The only reason they raided before was to piss off the Night’s Watch anyway. They weren’t taking resources.
Ben Hur has a guy wearing a wristwatch, I seem to recall. Indiana Jones is clearly behind glass in some of the snake pit shots. This stuff isn’t all that important.
I think both of them realized that with the new set-up, they had a shot at the throne without having to go to war for it. They were willing to go along with Bran being king because they could then rebuild, rearm and get back to playing power games for the next opening. What they don’t realize, of course, is that opening might not happen for a few centuries. Oops.
And again, the war that they’re avoiding now isn’t just against each other: it’s against each other, plus the Unsullied, plus the Dothraki. Maybe everybody is really really keen on not having another war while these two foreign armies are in Westeros.