Game of Thrones 8x04: The Last of The Starks

It's the day after the night, and it's time to burn the dead and get drunk. Daenerys legitimizes Gendry and makes him Lord of Storm's End, so he immediately runs off to profess his love for Arya and propose to her. She turns him down, 'cause the sex was good, but he's no Podrick. Tormund downs enough liquid courage to finally make his move on Brienne, but Jaime's pretty thirsty, too, so he bangs the first lady knight, and Tormund settles for a Northern girl.

After the celebration, Daenerys literally begs Jon not to tell anyone he's the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, but he feels like he has to tell the Stark girls for some reason. Even though he swears her to secrecy, Sansa immediately blabs to Tyrion and starts scheming a way to get her ex-half-brother on the throne.

Daenerys, the dragons, and a small force head to Dragonstone via ship, but are ambushed by a small group of Euron's ships armed with dragon-killing ballistae. They kill Rhaegal, sink all her ships, and capture Missandei. The Dragon Queen is rightly pissed off since now she has no one left to announce her as Khaleesi and breaker of chains and whatnot, so she just wants to burn King's Landing to the ground. Tyrion tries to convince her not to do it, but she's not having it, so Varys thinks that she might not be the best person to rule the Seven Kingdoms after all. The gang heads out for a quick parley with Cersei, who has lined the walls of the city with ballistae as well. Qyburn comes out to deliver terms, but since he's not empowered to negotiate, Tyrion talks directly with his sister... who predictably ignores everything he has to say and has The Mountain chop Missandei's head off. Daenerys is super, crazy mad.


What I Liked
-"Now, which one of you cowards shit in my pants?" I'm really gonna miss Tormund.
-Everyone gets lucky. The North has been at war for so long and through so many different conflicts that I'd say at minimum, a solid 25% of its total male population has been killed. The Northern ladies probably haven't gotten laid on a regular basis since Ned Stark was alive.
-Varys still serves the realm above all else. He may be the last major character with any sense.

What I Hated
-Gendry asks Arya to marry him. That must have been some awesome sex because the two of them barely know each other and he's in love with her.
-Jon sends Ghost to live on a farm. I know CGI direwolves are expensive, but this is just ridiculous. Most people wouldn't get rid of a beloved pet without saying goodbye, and a "Good boy, Ghost, go with Tormund," would've been a hell of a lot better than the brief, sort of, but not really sad look we got.
-Euron Greyjoy's cloaking device returns. The whole sequence where Daenerys arrives at Dragonstone is stupid as hell.
-Tyrion still thinks he can convince his sister to do anything. He used to be a smart guy, but apparently Cersei has some kind of energy field around her that turns him into a total moron.
-Cersei still thinks she can rule the Seven Kingdoms. Her allies currently consist of Euron's fleet, whatever Lannisters might be left, Qyburn, and The Mountain. The Golden Company doesn't count because they're only hanging around because she paid them. Everyone else hates her. Her army certainly isn't large enough to intimidate people into following her, and she has no legal claim to the throne, so I'm not sure what she expects the outcome of all of this to be.


Final Thoughts
I understand why they needed to eliminate one of the dragons as well as another solid chunk of Daenerys' army, but they did it very, very poorly. Apparently scouts just aren't a thing in Westeros, but cloaking devices are. Also, Euron's forces scored three direct hits the very first time they ever fired at a flying target, but didn't think to shoot the other dragon, then machine-gunned all the enemy ships using some kind of off-camera quick-reload mechanism.

Still no word on Lord Royce or what Bran was doing in episode three. I swear if some deus ex machina force of Crannogmen or something rides to the rescue at the end of the next episode, I'll lose my shit.

I enjoyed this episode more than the previous one, but it still wasn't good. Turning Daenerys into a power-mad, vengeful lunatic seems like way too much of a departure. Her entire motivation is a bit messed up at this point. All that stuff about wanting to free the people and break the wheel has gone out the window, and now she just wants to kill Cersei so she can become Queen of Westeros. It doesn't matter to her that Jon has a better claim and he'd be a kind and just King, she wants to rule. She wants to rule shitty Westeros where winter lasts for years instead of installing her nephew as ruler and then heading back to Essos to be Queen of the big chunk of land she conquered over there. Her family could rule on both sides of the sea, but that makes too much sense, so she's probably gonna burn it all down and be queen of the ashes.

Game of Thrones 8x03: The Long Night

War has come to Winterfell... again. I swear this is the last time. There's a big fight, the living are eventually all but defeated, but Bran sits motionless for hours, which manages to bait the Night King into coming after him. When all seems lost and the last male Stark is about to get the chop, Arya leaps out of nowhere and stabs ol' frosty in the chest, and all the dead drop dead-er.

What I Liked
-The shot of the dragons flying above the clouds is fantastic.

What I Hated
-The night is dark and full of dark. Also, there's more dark with a side of dark. It was partially the fault of the compression on the stream from the HBO website, but even on cable it was pretty dark and I had to crank up the brightness on my TV to see anything.
-Even with enough brightness, the action is really hard to follow. People and zombies die, we know that much, but who, when, and how is nearly impossible to discern.
-Arya plays a quick game of The Last of Us. The whole situation in the library was ridiculous. There's a massive battle raging all over, but somehow ten wights sneak inside and Arya evades them by hiding behind bookcases and under a table in almost total silence.
-Everyone's battle tactics. We don't know much about the Night King, so he may just be some goof with magic powers who doesn't know anything, but there must have been at least one halfway competent commander on the side of the living who could've helped them plan things out a bit better.
-Beric basically dies the same way as Hodor. The major purpose of two characters' lives was to slightly delay some zombies. That's how you know the writers have run out of material.

Final Thoughts
There really isn't a lot to say about the plot of this episode, because it basically has no plot. It's essentially one long battle with very little time devoted to actual story advancement. Which is not to say that the story doesn't advance. A whole crapton of people die, including Edd, Lyanna Mormont, Beric Dondarrion, Theon, Jorah, the Night King, Melisandre, all the undead, all the Dothraki, most of the Unsullied, and most of the rest of the army of the living. When the battle's finally over, all those people's storylines are pretty much wrapped up... 'cause they're dead. It's kinda like how they wrapped up the whole Faith Militant thing at the end of season six: And then they all died. The end.

Where the hell was Lord Royce? What was Bran doing all episode? Is there anyone even left alive in the North at this point?

We'll have to wait for the next episode to find out, but it really seems like literally all the Dothraki in Westeros are now dead, and that was a fairly substantial portion of their total number. Thanks to Daenerys, an entire civilization has been nearly annihilated. A super-rapey, murdery civilization, but a civilization nonetheless.

I have no problem with Arya killing the Night King, I just wish there had been a bit more build up to it. He chucks an off-balance javelin or two, but at no point does he even draw his sword, and that's just disappointing. You want your big evil to do at least a little fighting to justify their big evilness.

So, we probably know about as much about the white walkers as we ever will (at least until that prequel series starts or Martin finishes another book), which isn't a whole heck of a lot. Their sole motivation seems to be "Kill all humans!" although that seems a bit self-defeating, since their method of reproducing involves human babies. Unfortunately, they needed to wrap up their part of the story since it was made abundantly clear that Cersei was never going to give a shit about them. 100,000 zombies could've laid siege to King's Landing and she still would've cared more about killing Tyrion. That's the problem with having so many dangling plot threads in the last season: sometimes you have to snip them off in an unsatisfying manner.