Guest stars! Returning characters! Tiny bear ladies! All that and more on this week's episode of Game of Thrones.
Montage Assassin
Arya, who has changed her hairstyle a bit, but is not even remotely in disguise, brazenly walks through Braavos and books passage on a ship back to Westeros with a couple sacks of cash. Moments later, a girl shows up wearing the face of an old lady and stabs her in the gut. Arya does a flip off a bridge into the water, then stays under long enough for her would-be assassin to wander away. But she's not quite dead, so she climbs out of the water and stumbles through the streets, looking for help.
The Wacky Adventures of the Lannister Family
The High Sparrow has a creepy conversation with Margaery, in which he encourages her to perform her wifely duties so that the King might have an heir. Additionally, he hopes that he might bring Lady Olenna into the fold, so that she might atone for her many, many sins. Instead, granny calls bullshit on the whole thing and threatens to have the ass-beating septa beaten up until Margaery surreptitiously gives her a drawing of a flower, which convinces her to return to Highgarden. Before she leaves, Cersei visits Olenna in an attempt to get her to stay. The old lady's not interested, though, and she reminds Cersei that everything bad that's happening is entirely her fault.
Old Man River
Bronn and Jaime arrive at Riverrun, where the Freys are ineptly laying siege to the castle. They threaten to hang Edmure, then threaten to slit his throat, but his uncle is all out of fucks and tells them to just get on with it. With their bluff successfully called, the Freys don't know what to do, so Jaime takes command. He parleys with the Blackfish, who tells him that he was born in the castle and he's willing to die there. The Tullys have enough supplies to last two years, so it could be a long siege.
Lady Stark-Lannister-Bolton and Her Merry Band
Tormund convinces the wildlings to follow Jon into battle, but there aren't nearly enough of them, so they must continue to gather men from the Houses of the North. Davos convinces young Lady Mormont to come on board, but she only has 62 men to offer, and other Houses cannot be persuaded to offer any support at all. In the end, they have a force of around 2500. Jon wants to fight right away before they get snowed in, so they plan to march on Winterfell. Sansa realizes that they don't have enough men, though, and writes to Littlefinger to ask him to bring the knights of the Vale.
Hey, remember the Ironborn?
After hightailing it out of Pyke, the Ironborn are hanging out at a brothel. Theon still has no dick, so he's a little depressed, but Yara gets him to have a drink and convinces him that life is still worth living. She explains her plan to take their ships to Meereen to forge an alliance with Daenerys. Then she goes to fuck the tits off a wench.
Only Mostly Dead
Sandor Clegane is, in fact, not dead, having been found and healed by a septon who happened to wander by. Now he hangs out with a group of hippies who are building a chapel. Three brigands from the Brotherhood Without Banners ride up one day, but leave when the septon seemingly convinces them that they don't have any money. Later, while Sandor is off gathering kindling, he hears a scream, and returns to the building site to find that everyone has been murdered and the septon has been hanged. He picks up an axe, and charges off to fuck some dudes up.
What I Liked
-Cold open. They haven't done one of those in a while.
-Jaime smacks one of the Freys with his fake hand when he won't shut up. What's the point of having a gold pimp hand if you don't get to slap someone every once in a while.
-Lady Olenna dishes out the burn sauce. I feel like the show would be a lot less interesting if Cersei realized how inept she truly is, but it's still fun to watch Diana Rigg call someone an idiot.
-Wun Wun says "Snuh". I guess Ygritte taught him how to pronounce Jon's name.
What I Hated
-Jon wants to immediately go to war with the inferior army he already has. That decision makes absolutely no sense unless he came back from the dead as some kind of moron. The Bolton army alone outnumbered them 2:1, and they've since been reinforced by the Karstarks and the Umbers.
-Exposition from Ian McShane. He tells the story of how he found Sandor to Sandor.
Final Thoughts
Was it really Arya who got stabbed, or was it someone else? It's difficult to tell when you're dealing with a group who can change their faces at will. She had a bunch of money that came out of nowhere, and she didn't have Needle, so it's quite possible that it wasn't her. Of course, it could totally be her, and she just didn't realize that the assassins would come for her so quickly.
What the hell happened to all the wildlings? Mance's army was ridiculously huge, and they didn't all die at the Wall or at Hardhome. There should be a good 20,000 of them left, not the piddling 2000 they supposedly have.
Where's Melisandre? Just hanging around somewhere, teaching the wildlings about the Lord of Light?
If you don't die on screen, you're not dead on this show. Everyone who watched this episode with me shouted with glee when they panned up to Sandor's face. And they certainly didn't waste much time showing that it was him. I was sure that there'd be an extended shot of the back of his head before they finally revealed his face.
I guess Yara likes the ladies. I can't blame her for that, they had some nice wenches in that brothel. But, I don't know if she's going to be able to fuck Daenerys into allying with her like her uncle Euron apparently intends to.
There were a lot of nice moments in this episode, and I can say that it's the first one this season that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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