Sure hope Joffrey gets tortured nine ways from Sunday. What a fucking monster. And I hope his mother is the one to do it. Yech.
Any reason to believe that she knew she’d survive the fire?
-Joe
It was a leap of faith, which looked very much like an act of desparation.
Leaving the books out of it, the show itself had previously let us know that Dany had, at the least, an extraordinary resistance to heat (getting into a scalding bath, handling the dragons eggs after they were heated on the coals), and has implied that she was aware of this herself and had experimented with it. She did have reason to believe she might be able to walk into the fire.
My local Mexican restaurant has a little old Mexican woman who carries out burning hot plates in her bare hands. Still doesn’t mean she can be a fire rescue superstar.
I know what you mean, of course, but it’s still a big leap for her to take. Unless of course she just plain didn’t feel the heat as she walked up and knew it’d be safe for her.
-Joe
She was also more than slightly insane with grief.
Yeah Dany was pretty out of it, she lost every single thing that mattered to her because of her own choices. I don’t think it mattered to her if she burned or not, and i don’t even think she was trying to hatch the dragons.
It seemed to me she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t be harmed by the fire. I think the idea that the fire would help in hatching dragons was a wild guess on her part.
My WAG was that the whole thing was actually more an attempt to bring back Drogo or die with him if that failed than anything else, the life of Mirri, the dragon eggs, etc.
What I took away from Dany’s ability to withstand fire was that it was a sign that she and not her brother was the one true heir (perhaps of the dragon throne?).
Dragon eggs+barbarian king’s funeral pyre+live witch+fireproof Targaryen=baby dragons. Now Viserys’s “They lost secret recipe” story makes sense; that’s not an obvious combination.
And another big thanks to all the book readers for not spoiling anything for the rest of us.
A couple of those might have been unnecessary.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the secret recipe wasn’t Targaryen + Bigass Fire + Eggs, though. After all, I’m the king! I’m not stepping into a bonfire!
-Joe
She might have needed the live sacrifice too.
The recipe I got was Bigass Fire + Human Sacrifice + Eggs. Remember, Dany had just witnessed scary blood magic that required the sacrifice of a life in order to work. And she’d experimented with fire + eggs before, and that hadn’t worked. So now she made the fire bigger and added a human to the fire.
The two of you might have a point.
-Joe
Sure, twice already they’ve had scenes where it’s indicated she’s impervious to heat and knows it. Once when she entered a bath that the serving wench begged her not to because it was way too hot, and once when she handled the heated dragon eggs.
Regarding the live sacrifice to hatch the eggs, yeah, that didn’t occur to me until reading your posts but it does help explain why Dany didn’t need her screams, only her life.
I think so. In an earlier episode she handled the dragon eggs that were in the fire and didn’t get burned; but when her handmaiden’s hands got welts on them when she touched them.
Yeah–and the burns she got showed that it went far beyond hot-plate levels of heat. The handmaiden touched the eggs for only a second or two, but she practically had waffle-iron-shaped burns from that time, as though the eggs were so hot they instantly sizzled her flesh.
Stoid, I was just glad they didn’t screw up the CGI. The book readers were waiting for two scenes in particular–Ned’s execution and the birth of the dragons. And we knew the birth of the dragons would be the final scene of the season. It needed to be as powerful as it was in the book, and HBO succeeded.