Right. It didn’t seem like they were traveling long before encountering the slaughtered Wildlings.
Also, Ghost brings in a severed hand belonging to two missing Night Watch, whose bodies were later recovered to re-animate inside Castle Black. It didn’t seem he went very far to get it.
Yes, he was seen briefly a couple of times.
Yes, when they first enter the forest you see the wall. Then there are multiple cuts and you no longer see the wall. This could be days later as far as I’m concerned.
All of Bronn’s friends are in Winterfell, then. Jaime, Tyrion, and Podrick.
Bronn’s probably headed there now with a crossbow, but I don’t think he’ll use it on any of them. He certainly can’t stay in King’s Landing if it’s true that Flynn and Headey despise each other and have it in their contracts that they’ll never share a scene together.
Oh, but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some fiery tart threw a dragon at you.
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the series!
I agree completely; this is what annoys me about this show that, let’s face it, looks great and has top-notch casting, acting, and (usually) direction. And superb special effects, too, for the most part.
But the “smartest person I know” line was utterly unearned. It is, however, a sign of the way the showrunners are going to end this thing: with Sansa doing very well, even if not as Iron Throne occupant, but only as consort to the Iron Throne occupant. One way or the other, Sansa is fully approved of by the writing staff (including GRRM?)
My bolding. I think the writers absolutely do intend to show exactly what you’ve outlined here: that Daenerys is being presented as an initially-sympathetic character who has become uppity, and that this tells us the future of this character (unhappy), as much as the ‘Sansa is the smartest person I know’ line tells us the future of Sansa (happy).
It’s all very heavy-handed.
That premiere really did look gorgeous, though. You can see why they’re doing only six episodes, given the likely cost of each—particularly if the episodes offer as much dragon “footage” as this one did. Those scenes are massively expensive to produce.
Cersei would have sent him on that mission herself without that clause. I was actually surprised at the start of the scene when I thought Qyburn was summoning Bronn to meet with the Queen.
That’s why I used the word “around” and not the word “exactly”.
The new intro is interesting. Especially the bands with the little gilded scenes on them.
The first one seems pretty straightforward. The zombie dragon melts the wall as the army of the dead stand by. On the other side of the wall are what look like birds. “Crows”, I imagine.
The second is an enigma. A lion has caught a fish. There are other fish nearby. A griffin shot with arrows is hanged in the middle. On the right is a helmed man with a dagger (who may be naked, flayed, or dead) holding a severed wolf’s head.
The last shows a comet-like object on the left that looks kinda like an owl. Livestock or deer graze below. Three dragons fly nearby. Another dragon just right of center is very large, and is probably meant to stand as a single image.
The first one doesn’t seem to hold much mystery.
For the second, the lion with the fish might represent Jaime defeating the Blackfish, though that doesn’t seem like a very significant event. I guess that the dead griffin represents Tywin. The wolf’s head might be Ned Stark, Shaggydog, or some other dead Stark.
The third seems pretty generic (dragons hunting livestock), except for the comet. The red comet from the first season? The dying Viserion? Something else? The lone dragon might represent “the winner of the game of thrones.”
Rewatching that reminded me that the White Walkers arranged the dead Wildlings and their body parts in some sort of symbolic pattern, similar to what was seen at the end of this episode.
Any idea what is up with that? I haven’t rewatched any episodes and don’t recall if we’ve seen other instances of this.
Right. Crows signifying the fleeing Nights Watch.
That’s the Red Wedding. They are going backwards in time. That’s a Lannister lion on the left; the fish in its mouth is the sigil of House Tully. The central image is The Twins castle, where the wedding took place, with a dead direwolf, the Stark sigil hung in the middle. On the left is the Flayed Man, the sigil of the Boltons, holding a direwolf’s head. So it’s the victory of the Lannisters and the Boltons over the Starks and Tullys.
Further back in time, that’s the hatching of Danys dragons. The large dragon is Dany, the Mother of Dragons, and the other three are her children. The “deer” are the horses of the Dothraki. And the comet is the Red Comet that first appeared with the birth of the dragons and the start of the War of the Five Kings.
We see the same symbols in the cave paintings on Dragonstone evidently made by the Children of the Forest. They are an indicator that the White Walkers were created by the Children of the Forest.
Nice!
I can’t take credit for all of that. I read several articles about the new opening sequence on line and that’s a summary.
I had exactly the opposite reaction. I thought that the character interactions came across as very believable precisely because they are so understated—sure, they haven’t seen each other in a while, but basically, each of their lives has been completely turned on its head, as well. None are still really the same people, and they don’t connect with each other in the way they did; just having long, tearful reunion scenes would’ve undone all that development, bringing them back to square one. The way it was handled, I thought, was very successful in conveying exactly that.
Although I realize that part of this might be because I just saw an episode of Star Trek Discovery where basically the whole episode was spent on long, tearful goodbyes trying and failing to create emotional impact by endlessly dwelling on telling us how deeply all of these characters connect and how important they are to each other.
So maybe I was just primed for a bit of ‘less is more’.
I think that this is basically the entire point of Jon Snow and Dany. Both are leaders that are right for their respective domains—a Queen of the South, and a King of the North. The trouble is, neither are right for the current situation—the strict honor code has already been the downfall of Ned Stark, and I think it might well be for Jon, too, unless he can actually embrace his heritage and outgrow his adoptive father. Dany has very clearly and purposefully been portrayed as flawed; her hubris and arrogance are almost certain to cost her—we’ve already seen this with Sam Tarly.
Neither are the leaders you’d want in this situation. What’s needed is a pragmatist—somebody capable of sacrificing a village of innocents in order to save a kingdom, yet somebody not beholden to empty notions of power, like being the rightful such-and-such.
Personally, I think the pieces have been very well set up to clash over exactly this issue. I’m not sure they can pull this off, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
They arranged dead Night’s Watch and horses into a pattern in an earlier episode, too. That was during Jon Snow’s first expedition beyond the Wall, so probably season 2 or so.
Here’s the pattern of the Wildling bodies from the first episode. Here’s the Dragonstone painting with a similar image.
Here’s the dead horses arranged in a pinwheel after the Battle of the Fist of the First Men (Season Three). By the time Jon, Mance, and the Wildlings find them the Night’s Watch fatalities have been reanimated and only pieces of the horses remain. The pinwheel shape is basically the same found at the Umber’s castle and in some of the cave paintings.
The final scene underlines a concern of mine from the last season: Bran is way too overpowered a character. Potentially he knows everything, which undermines the plots contrived by the other characters, for example the plot to use Bronn to kill Jaime. An interesting move might be to kill him off at a crucial point leaving the other characters blind but I suspect he will continue to be used as a clumsy deus ex machina for revealing important information.
Ha, all I could hear was Lois Lane saying to Superman, “Can you read my mind?”
Also, after the Fellowship of the Wight escapade, we learned everyone can ride a dragon since they all flew back to the Wall. Dany was at the controls at the time, so maybe there is a difference between piloting a dragon and being cargo, but ostensibly not.
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