Game of Thrones (contains serious, massive SPOILERS)

[Kong Wen]

Just watched. Pretty good episode! Nice direction and nice acting on Clarke's part.

Shoe, did people who put together a clip like that take everything Dany said at face value? When people are propagandizing, it's not uncommon to lie.

Slurm, I feel like you need some help buddy! Let's try to give you a hand on a couple of these things:

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Why is the mountain so strong nothings explained he's basically kratos at this point. He got stabbed in the chest and was like meh. If he's that strong he'd survive that fall.

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He's a corpse. Qyburn's methods are left a mystery. Maybe he did survive the fall. He didn't survive the flames.

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Jaime basically dying on the ground to basically running back to save Cersei. Like how? Nobody recovers that fast

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He got stabbed a couple times. Contrary to Hollywood shorthand, it takes a while to bleed out. He was effed, but he had a few minutes. This is a pretty minor quibble. Narratively, what was important was that he was on the clock.

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Dany killing innocent people for no reason just completely ignores how her character has been for 8 seasons.

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Perfectly in keeping with her character. All she wants is the kingdom. She's had her head filled up with it from the day she was born, by her brother and by sycophants. Hell, we got a scene right before that where she literally says that all she has to cement her rule is fear. When she was freeing slaves in the east, she learned what power could do for her. When she came west, we got 4 full episodes full of scenes of her moping and looking forlorn and realizing that people in Westeros don't love her, don't secretly toast to her. Everything she believed about her rightful place was wrong. She wants to rule the entire continent full of people who don't care about her, and there's only one way to do that. I was worried that her moping would resolve into something sentimental, but it's a pretty good arc for her, actually.

It also serves a dual purpose of giving Jon a reason to be in the story. His life has always been about protecting the realm from the threat from the north. Now he sees what the real threat is. Ironically, it took until the very last episode for Jon to wake up to what is happening in the world. Sansa knew.

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Jaime running back to Cersei ruined his character he became this good/evil character but they just completely had him go team cersei at the end.

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Again, this is a perfect resolution of his arc. I actually love the fact that people somehow thought we were going to get this knights in shining armour fairytale hero arc out of Jaime, especially after what happened to Ned. What was important was showing us that even assholes like Jaime can be good people. His last speech to Brienne was the distillation of his character: he's a good man, but he's not a good man. He did some bad things and we didn't like it. He did some good things and we did like it. His whole life was anchored in a toxic relationship. It might not be the most satisfying ending for him, just like Ned's ending wasn't the most satisfying, but it far from ruined him.

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So Jaime, Arya and Sandor just strolled into Kings Landing without anyone noticing them? Arya I can understand but the other two no way. Eurone dies before hitting the water do way he makes it to short

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Sorry, but these are minor and dumb logistical complaints. The gates are open and scared soldiers are hustling a bunch of refugees into the city. They're not doing full body scans. And Euron bailed, lmao.

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Last week those bolts hit the dragons easily and Dany couldn't touch the ships. This week not a single hit and she just one man armies her way into a castle.

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This is one of my favourite complaints from people because it really shows that their level of thinking about what's happening on the screen ends right at the screen. Last week a seriously injured dragon was happily moseying towards his playground after a long voyage home and got blindsided by an ambush that was sitting there waiting for dragons to come by. This week, his fully-rested, bigger, faster, meaner brother who was fully expecting an attack took a top-speed surprise nosedive at his enemies, who were scrambling to reload their shit. That's a series of easy dodges. I feel like the people who didn't work this out are the same people who are baffled that someone pretended they wouldn't burn houses and then burned houses. "But she said no!"

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Brans been useless and I don't see how he's going to get closure next week.

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I feel like Bran already got his closure. You shouldn't envy him. He lives mostly in the past now. People thought he was going to be some kind of time-traveling god, and if they're disappointed that their ridiculous middle school fan fiction didn't come true, that's mostly on them.

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Arya's whole episode plot was just to have another view of the battlefield

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We got the growth we needed from her, though. She thought she was a hard-ass assassin whose only purpose was to kill. All that time being mentored by Yoren and Sandor finally culminated in her finally deciding to listen to him just this once and abandon her list. She's a real person now.

As for your predictions for the next episode:

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I would be satisfied either way. If the show ends with Jon either bending the knee in a ruined Red Keep or getting killed by Dany and she rules with an iron fist happily ever after, that would be fine. If he somehow gets rid of her, that would be fine, too. Not sure how they do Drogon in, if they do. They definitely have a lot of cleanup ahead of them.

[The Shoemaker]

Kong

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I'm pretty sure the next episode after that clip of Daenerys she burns the Tarlys alive, so yeah I don't think she really meant was she was talking about there, or wasn't connecting the two.

But no, the clip makers definitely took it at face value!

[Pluvius]

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Something simple they could've done to make Mad Queen Dany make a lot more sense is if instead of the Lannister army simply surrendering and Dany just deciding to kill everyone anyway, they'd had traps set a la the Sept of Baelor throughout the city (which would be one of the reasons why Cersei was evacuating people into the Red Keep). That would've killed a lot of Dany's men, including possibly her lover, and would've arguably made the city complicit. Of course, it would've been better if they'd just set up her descent into madness properly anyway, but that would've required a lot more episodes or previous episodes to be rewritten.

I wonder how much D&D are paid to come up with these plots. I'd probably take a tenth of it.

Rob

[Kong Wen]

Re: one of Shoe & Ploov's points:

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I think provoking Dany's action in a direct way in this episode would have taken the weight out of it. They have been building up to Dany being a conquerer and a hard bitch—not necessarily a bloodthirsty mad queen, although that has always been on the docket—for a long, long time. It's almost all anyone ever says about her. But people saying that is a side-note to what actually happened in Dany's rational mind. She was the Mad Queen before this episode started. She didn't need to lose Rhaegal in this episode or a bunch of her men in King's Landing for her actions to make sense.

She was born to rule the Seven Kingdoms. Her whole life has been pointed towards that destiny. The people of the Seven Kingdoms raise secret toasts in her name. When faced with the reality of the situation—that people don't know or care who she is—she knew that "liberating" them from Cersei wouldn't be enough to secure power over the entire realm. She already had experience from her own backstory to show the truth of this. When she liberated slavers' bay, her rule was irrelevant. The powerful elements still did what they want and the people didn't even know she was there. Missandei wasn't pettily asking to be avenged when she invoked "Dracarys"—she was telling Dany that she would have to burn in order to rule.

When Dany was perched on the wall while the bells were ringing, she wasn't "going mad" or seething with anger. If anything she was bitter about what she had already resolved to do in that moment before the conflict had started—even before she placated Tyrion by agreeing to go threaten Cersei and watch Missandei die. She knew it was ugly, but she had decided that she needed to burn the city in order for her fame and her fear to reach far enough to have any effect.

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[Pluvius]

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If she's not actually mad, then it doesn't work because what she did makes her look mad. If she's just trying to be hard, it would've made more sense to accept the surrender, destroy the Red Keep, then do nasty shit to anyone who looks at her the wrong way. Which is basically what she was already doing up to this point anyway, aside from not being able to go after Sansa because of Jon.

Rob

[Kong Wen]

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We risk splitting hairs about what "mad" means, since exercising power to stoke fear is basically mad anyway, just not batshit insane. But she didn't need to torch Sansa's castle because Sansa was nominally her ally and subject. King's Landing was the seat of power of her open enemy, someone who just flaunted her position by killing her child and her closest adviser in public. All that matters is that the other lords (and the peasants) shit their pants when they hear her name.

Even if it was a surprise—and in many ways it was supposed to be (and had to be) a surprise, since this episode hinged on the "will she or won't she" aspect—it wasn't out of character, which is what many are complaining. Surprising, sure. Sudden, no. Uncharacteristic, no.

As for me, I would have been much more surprised if they had actually had Dany hold back there and end the entire series with a simmering fear that just because she didn't do it this time, there was always the risk of it happening in the off-screen future. That would have been a great dystopian ending.

[SkyPikachu]

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Perfectly in keeping with her character. All she wants is the kingdom. She's had her head filled up with it from the day she was born, by her brother and by sycophants. Hell, we got a scene right before that where she literally says that all she has to cement her rule is fear. When she was freeing slaves in the east, she learned what power could do for her. When she came west, we got 4 full episodes full of scenes of her moping and looking forlorn and realizing that people in Westeros don't love her, don't secretly toast to her. Everything she believed about her rightful place was wrong. She wants to rule the entire continent full of people who don't care about her, and there's only one way to do that. I was worried that her moping would resolve into something sentimental, but it's a pretty good arc for her, actually.

It also serves a dual purpose of giving Jon a reason to be in the story. His life has always been about protecting the realm from the threat from the north. Now he sees what the real threat is. Ironically, it took until the very last episode for Jon to wake up to what is happening in the world. Sansa knew.

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No way have they explained her changing from freeing slaves to killing innocent unarmed people. She didn't even go for cersei the really threat she was to busy killing randoms also why did the bells trigger it? There's nothing actually explained to why she snapped then. She won go kill cersei or go kill the soldiers but her character wouldn't kill innocent people.

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Again, this is a perfect resolution of his arc. I actually love the fact that people somehow thought we were going to get this knights in shining armour fairytale hero arc out of Jaime, especially after what happened to Ned. What was important was showing us that even assholes like Jaime can be good people. His last speech to Brienne was the distillation of his character: he's a good man, but he's not a good man. He did some bad things and we didn't like it. He did some good things and we did like it. His whole life was anchored in a toxic relationship. It might not be the most satisfying ending for him, just like Ned's ending wasn't the most satisfying, but it far from ruined him.

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An ending where the whole arc was for nothing isn't entertaining.

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I feel like Bran already got his closure. You shouldn't envy him. He lives mostly in the past now. People thought he was going to be some kind of time-traveling god, and if they're disappointed that their ridiculous middle school fan fiction didn't come true, that's mostly on them.

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A confusing mess with no point other than he helped jon find out who he was is the dumbest storyline ever. Why waste my time with it.

[Kong Wen]

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No way have they explained her changing from freeing slaves to killing innocent unarmed people. She didn't even go for cersei the really threat she was to busy killing randoms also why did the bells trigger it? There's nothing actually explained to why she snapped then. She won go kill cersei or go kill the soldiers but her character wouldn't kill innocent people.

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Not sure what I can say to the idea of her character not killing innocent people other than people who bought into that self-perpetuated myth were duped by Dany's propagandizing and messianic self-positioning. Her main goal was power, first in the east to amass the power necessary to go west and get more power. She painted "freeing slaves" over her conquest as a means to justify it and attract more power to her cause. We're supposed to look at her conquests with hindsight, the same way we were invited to look at Robert's Rebellion in hindsight. At the time, it sprung from the seed of a glorious justified cause, but look what it got us. (Robert and Dany are actually really interesting foils.) Dany's making the same gambit Tyrion's making on a conqueror's scale: if she has to trade a few thousand ungrateful King's Landing pawns in order to bless untold future generations, it's a good trade.

(It would actually be a brilliant ending to have her sit on the throne and end up being a really good queen, because we'd have to reckon with the methods she used to get there... although people would be all too willing to overlook them as a blip after a few years, if their irrational attachment to making excuses for Dany's character is any indication. As it is, we have to reckon with the fact that we were manipulated into rooting for a dangerous and unstable ruler just because she's a young, pretty underdog.)

Anyway, she did go for Cersei. I'm not sure why you keep bringing that up. She actually literally killed Cersei.

The bells didn't "trigger" anything. She has already decided before going to that battle that she was going to torch the place. She literally says so twice in this very episode. That's what leads Tyrion to his desperate bells pleas. He knows she's going to torch the city, and he wants to give her an escape hatch. She perched up ready to torch the city and then the bells started ringing, which gave her pause and forced her to steel herself to the action to which she had already mentally committed. The bells didn't trigger anything—but they did make her job harder. She was going to execute her plan all along, but having to do so after those bells rang made her realize it was going to come out a lot uglier on the other side.

And the bottom line, from her perspective, is that she gained everything she wanted for 30 years, everything she was told she was owed, and lost nothing. All she materially lost was Jon Snow's support, and he's a threat to her anyway. It's just as well for her to get rid of him sooner rather than later and she knows it (and he knows she knows it). She can start rehabilitating her image now that she's in the capital (theoretical legitimacy) surrounding by an army and a dragon (practical legitimacy).

[Pluvius]

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Not sure what I can say to the idea of her character not killing innocent people other than people who bought into that self-perpetuated myth were duped by Dany's propagandizing and messianic self-positioning.

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All I'm going to say is that I think you're giving the showrunners way too much credit. This looks to me much less like planned subtlety and more like some guys trying to provide fanservice to all the people who named their kids "Daenerys," then doing a 180 when they realize they've written themselves into a corner.

Also, I know you guys don't get this in Canada, but David Benioff in the after-show wrap-up thing explicitly said that she wasn't planning on massacring the people in King's Landing until she did it, and DB Weiss concurred that it was recent events that drove her over the edge.

Rob

[Kong Wen]

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All I'm going to say is that I think you're giving the showrunners way too much credit. This looks to me much less like planned subtlety and more like some guys trying to provide fanservice to all the people who named their kids "Daenerys," then doing a 180 when they realize they've written themselves into a corner.

Also, I know you guys don't get this in Canada, but David Benioff in the after-show wrap-up thing explicitly said that she wasn't planning on massacring the people in King's Landing until she did it, and DB Weiss concurred that it was recent events that drove her over the edge.

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I'm not sure what a showrunner does—I'm just basing it on stuff that happens within the text. I don't really buy the idea of them writing themselves into a corner all the way up to the penultimate episode given that G.R.R. Martin told them Dany was going to burn King's Landing as far back as Season 4 or whenever.

The recent events Weiss refers to include the stuff that happens in the weeks preceding the battle: cold shoulder from westerners, dopey throne claimant, Varys's betrayal requiring that she cement her grip immediately rather than eventually, dragon & Missandei deaths. She was looking at burntown and this stuff walked her over the border.