The stories are merging! Soon we may make it down to less than five from the 47 we were dealing with before.
Lady Stark-Lannister-Bolton and Her Merry Band
Sansa gets a letter from Littlefinger, inviting her to a secret meeting. He tells her that he's mustered an army from the Vale and has them encamped at Moat Cailin. She's so pissed off at him for leaving her with Ramsay that she doesn't give a fuck, and comes very close to having Brienne kill him where he stands. After pointing out that he damn well knows what Ramsay did to her and making him think very hard about what he's done, she merely says she never wants to see him again. As he leaves, he tells her that the Blackfish has reformed his army and retaken Riverrun.
Back at Castle Black, Jon and Davos are figuring out how to build their own army. Sansa tells them about the Blackfish and sends Brienne to get him, while the rest of the band ride out to round up every Northern house they can get. Which leaves Edd in charge of the ten or eleven remaining members of the Watch, although even he's not sure if he's the Lord Commander or not.
Hey, remember the Ironborn?
It's kingsmoot time! Yara's the first to declare, and when Theon gives a quasi-elegant speech about how she's been leading men into battle and so forth while their father nearly led them into ruin, it looks like she's got it in the bag. But, then uncle Euron shows up, and he's a man with a plan (not a very specific plan, of course), so the local lords support him. While the high priest crowns him (which involves nearly killing him through drowning), Yara and Theon and every loyal soldier they can muster fuck off. Which was an excellent idea, since their uncle's first command as king is to find them and murder them. They're long gone, though, and they've taken most of the ships, so his second command is to build more boats.
The Adventures of Grumpy Dwarf and Baldy No Balls
The Sons of the Harpy have ceased their attacks, and it looks like the slave masters have accepted the deal, returning peace to Meereen. However, with Daenerys still away, Tyrion worries that her brand might be suffering, so he calls in a marketing guru. They get the High Priestess of R'hllor to drop by, and while Varys is skeptical of her motives and abilities -as Melisandre was backing Stannis and that didn't turn out well- she knows all about how his dick was cut off by a sorcerer, and that seems to be enough of a demonstration of her powers. Daenerys is the prince who was promised as far as she's concerned, so the word of her greatness will be spread far and wide.
The Widow Drogo
Before she can take her Dothraki horde anywhere, Daenerys has to decide what to do with Jorah. She keeps banishing him, but it never seems to stick. Before she can make up her mind, he informs her of his illness and his love, then starts to leave. However, as he had pledged to serve her until his dying day, Daenerys tells him to stop, and orders him to spend the rest of his days looking for a cure so he can be her right-hand man when she conquers Westeros.
Montage Assassin
Arya's bow-fighting still needs work as the girl with no name is able to beat her ass pretty easily. Nevertheless, it's time for her second chance at becoming a real assassin. Not Jaqen sends her to the theatre so she can kill one of the actresses. It turns out the troupe is putting on a satirical play about the politics of Westeros and Arya's supposed to assassinate the woman who plays Cersei.
What'chu Talkin' 'bout, Hodor?
The Three-Eyed Raven shows Bran the origin of the White Walkers: The Children of the Forest made them because they needed an army to fight the men who had invaded their lands. Somewhere along the line, they fucked up and lost control.
Later, while everyone else is asleep, Bran decides to do some greenseeing on his own. Unfortunately, he winds up walking amongst the undead, and when the Night's King grabs his arm, it somehow breaks the magic seal around the tree cave they've been hiding in. There's precious little time before the army of the dead arrives, but the young padawan's training is not yet complete, so they need to do some quick work back in the Winterfell of 25 years ago before they run the hell away. The army gets there really fast, and though the remaining Children mount an admirable defence, they're quickly overwhelmed. Meera manages to kill an Other and smack Bran back to reality just long enough for him to warg into a terrified Hodor so they can flee. They're still pretty fucked, though. On the way out they lose Summer, the Three-Eyed Raven, and the very last of the Children who uses a suicide bomb to slow down the wights just long enough for Hodor, Meera, and Bran to get out the door. There's still an army behind them, though, so Meera yells at Hodor to "Hold the door" while she tries to drag Bran away. Bran somehow hears this back in the past, and through a combination of things that aren't really explained, he accidentally fries past-Hodor's brain and "Hold the door" is contracted to simply "Hodor". The big man holds it with all his might as long as he can, while his young charges flee into a storm.
What I Liked
-Tormund's still making eyes at Brienne. Their giant children will conquer the world.
-The play in Braavos was fantastic. If they scrapped the current "previously on" format and instead had the troupe perform a synopsis at the start of every episode, I would not complain.
-You've got to drown before you can be King of the Iron Islands. That's pretty hardcore.
What I Hated
-Summer went out like a punk. He just charged right in to a group of wights and got stabbed. They should've at least had him take out a few more before he died.
-Varys got all pissy with the red priestess. Did Tyrion not discuss his plans with the other advisers again?
Final Thoughts
While it's nice that they've been really moving the plot along in the last few episodes, the speed at which people travel has become so ridiculous that I feel I need to comment on it again this week. Littlefinger had time to muster an army, march them to Moat Cailin, and then travel nearly all the way to the Wall. Why even bother sending messages via raven when someone can ride a horse halfway across a continent in a day and a half?
Aiden Gillen and Sophie Turner put in an excellent performance for their scene together. Sansa's genuine disgust and Littlefinger's possibly genuine repentance both come across really well. It's a pity that he won't be around that much this season. He has Maze Running to do. Although, I expect him to return in episode nine or ten to rout the remaining members of the Stark loyalist army after they retake Winterfell.
Bran now has Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure style time travel powers. He can't really travel back in time, and he can't change the present, but he can set things up so that things he needs to happen will have already happened. However, I doubt he'll use his powers to do much more than steal his dad's keys or drop a trash can on his enemies. People use their magic so infrequently on this show that it's actually a little infuriating. There are several characters who basically have superpowers, but they mostly brood around like sullen Clark Kents instead of frying fools with their laser eyes.
I hope they delve into the White Walkers' motivations a bit more before the end of the series. While it appears that they were designed to kill men, and rebelled against their masters, it's been at least a thousand years since that happened, so my biggest question is: Why now?
The frequency with which they've been mentioning Stannis' death leads me to believe that he didn't actually die. I know that's antithetical, but it just seems a bit odd how people keep bringing it up. It's like how the entire cast was saying that Jon Snow was dead and not coming back. We all knew it was BS.
They've done some really good casting work this season. Rebellion age Ned Stark and Rickard Stark both look a heck of a lot like Sean Bean. The guy who plays Rickard even sounded a bit like him.
Arya really needs another training montage. The Stark children have both been trained quite poorly, and I fear it shall lead to their downfall. Bran's going to join the dark side after his wife dies, and Arya's going to become an emo kid and kill Han Solo.
It seems like they're trying to cut down on the direwolf cgi budget this season. There's only one left (that we know of) and there are still five episodes left in which to turn him into a nice coat and some mittens. It's not all bad, though, since it'll free up some money to spend on wight cgi, some of which looked just terrible.
What was the point of making it seem like Yara had any chance of prevailing at the kingsmoot? Did anyone out there expect that they would introduce Euron and then not have him take over as king? It just made it seem ludicrous that any of the lords would be on board with murdering the younger Greyjoys. If they'd laughed Yara off the island, that would have been one thing, but they were fully prepared to make her their leader just moments before Euron showed up.
Speaking of Euron, his plan to win Daenerys over with his giant cock leaves a lot to be desired. My expectation is that we're more or less done with the Ironborn for this season, and they'll only pop up again at the end of next season when their ships arrive in Meereen and Daenerys promptly steals them. The ships in Meereen were destroyed to delay the invasion of Westeros for at least another year, but the invasion still needs to happen, so a fresh fleet from Pyke is just what the doctor ordered. Why even bother with the Ironborn if that's what's going to happen? They could've just as easily had the people of Essos construct a new fleet.
Once again, there was no mention of Dorne. I'm fully on board with never mentioning it again, but it means that everything that happened there last season was just a huge waste of time. Which is funny, considering how they've been accelerating things this year.
So far this season we've lost Summer, Shaggydog, Balon, Roose, Walda, Osha, Trystane, Doran, Areo, Alliser, Olly, all the Children of the Forest, the Three-Eyed Raven, and Hodor. That's a lot of characters who've bitten the big one. My guess is they're making room for some of the other plot lines that the writers were going to completely ignore until they found out they were somehow important.
This was a better episode than last week's, although I still haven't been wowed this year. Perhaps the second half of the season will impress me a bit more.
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