Dany Targaryen – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 4 – The Last of the Starks

“I’m here to free the world from tyrants. That is my destiny. And I will serve it no matter the cost.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

After all the storming excitement of last week’s episode, I think Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss thought we needed a bit of a breather before moving on to the remaining battles for Westeros. So this week we got The Last of the Starks, a satisfying but curiously schizoid episode which came across as nothing so much as two individual eps glued together.

Game of Thrones: Season 6, Episode 9 – Battle of the Bastards

“Let’s end this the old way. You against me.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Wow. Have you been missing those epic battle sequences Game of Thrones does so well of late? Yes, there’s been some awesome political manoeuvring, backstabbing and the general nastiness the show is so good at. But perhaps you hanker for those slightly more formulaic days of the early seasons, when episode 9 was guaranteed to centre around a stonking, rip-roaring epic battle. Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 6, Episode 9 – Battle of the Bastards”

Game of Thrones: Season 5, Episode 9 – The Dance of Dragons

“Sometimes a person has to choose. Sometimes the world forces his hand.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

With the full throttle carnage usually expected from ep 9 of Game of Thrones having come early last week, this week the question was, what will ep 9 bring this year? As it turned out, it was much the same mix as last week, the Big Action Set Pieces split over two eps this year. As with last week, the ep started slow, then built to an unexpected epic battle in the third act; less epic than last week, perhaps, but that’s quibbling. By any other show’s standards, this might have been a season finale. In Game of Thrones, it was ep 9. Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 5, Episode 9 – The Dance of Dragons”

Game of Thrones: Season 5, Episode 8 – Hardhome

“I’ve seen the army of the dead. I’ve seen the White Walkers. And they’re coming for us. For all the living.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Holy crap. If you’ve been waiting for the standard epic battle usually provided in ep9 of each season of Game of Thrones, well… it came early. And if you’ve also been missing The Walking Dead, this should have more than filled the void. Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 5, Episode 8 – Hardhome”

Game of Thrones: Season 3, Episode 1–Valar Dohaeris

“Big men fall just as fast as little ones – if you put a sword through their heart.” – Jon Snow

It’s a solid if unspectacular start to the much-anticipated third season of Game of Thrones, with an episode that has to establish where its growing army of characters are and what they’re doing since we last saw them. With the ever-increasing roster of main characters and ever more complex plots within plots, this is no small task. It’s unsurprising that, while it’s full of intrigue, the season opener has to take in so many subplots that it doesn’t deal with any of them in more than cursory detail. Even then, there’s one or two important subplots that showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, scripting this week, couldn’t actually fit in.

This is hardly surprising – George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series on which the show is based, gets ever more labyrinthine as it goes on. Recognising this, Benioff and Weiss have sensibly decided that this year’s ten episodes will cover roughly half the third book, A Storm of Swords. That equates to its book publication, in the UK at least, where the paperback was also split into two volumes.

It might, therefore, give greater room for the characters and plots to breathe. On this week’s evidence though, I wouldn’t guarantee that. Still, the script sensibly kept any new characters to a minimum, which meant that even if we didn’t see much of the ones here, we already had a handle on who they were and what they were about.

A fair chunk of this ep focused on events Beyond the Wall, where the big threat of Ancient Unstoppable Evil is. To my mind, while they’re clearly the most dangerous of the show’s antagonists, the mysterious White Walkers and their army of slavering zombies are less interesting than the political machinations elsewhere. But we’d been left with the big cliffhanger last year of an apparent army of the devils marching on the band of Nightwatch camped in the wilds, so necessarily we had to deal with that first.

Gotta say, after the buildup in the season finale, the lack of an actual big battle was a bit of a disappointment. But lavish though it may be, Game of Thrones doesn’t have the budget to stage a Battle of Blackwater every week. Besides, it played out here much as it did in the book, with Samwell Tarly finding a corpse, assuming everyone was dead, then being rescued from a (fairly unconvincing CG) zombie by the survivors of the Watch.

That being dealt with, we didn’t return to them – there wasn’t really time. It was swiftly on to the Wildling camp, where the captive Jon Snow was ushered into the presence of ‘King Beyond the Wall’ Mance Rayder, making his first appearance here. Ciaran Hinds was as impressive as ever as Mance – another good piece of casting from a show that tends to do well here.

Jon won his confidence with a sincere-sounding speech about recognising the real enemy and not being convinced the Watch had their hearts in dealing with it. It sets up an interesting scenario; Jon originally ‘joined’ Wildlings as an inside man for the Watch – will his loyalties genuinely change?

We won’t find out this week, as it was swiftly off to King’s Landing to catch up on the aftermath of the Joffrey/Lannister victory at the Blackwater. It wouldn’t be Game of Thrones without some utterly gratuitous sex though, so we were reintroduced to Jerome Flynn’s charismatic sellsword Bronn in the usual brothel, where he was most displeased at being distracted from a whore’s crotch by the unexpected arrival of Tyrion’s squire Pod.

Tyrion himself had a few interesting confrontations this week. First, it was his sister, popping by his dingy new quarters to verbally fence; Tyrion has good cause to be wary of her, as it was one of her men who tried to kill him under cover of the battle. Luckily for Peter Dinklage, the TV version has backpedalled somewhat on the extent of his injuries, leaving him with a scarred cheek where in the novel he’d lost most of his nose. Cersei even alluded to that in a nice in-joke, commenting that she’d heard he’d lost his nose, but it was plainly an exaggeration.

Their father Tywin was no more forgiving. Confronted by the irked Tyrion asking to be recognised as heir to Casterly Rock in gratitude for his action in saving the city, the frosty Tywin told him, basically, “over my dead body”. It was an excellent scene, as well-played as ever by Charles Dance and Peter Dinklage; one of the few scenes, in fact, that had room to breathe in the multitude here.

Another was a very uncomfortable dinner with Joffrey and Cersei being visited by the Tyrells. Margery, having basically been anointed future Queen at the end of last season, was living up to the role by doing a Princess Diana – visiting orphanages, feeding the poor, and genuinely trying to become as well-loved by the people of Westeros as Joffrey is well-hated. The dinner was a scene of subtextual verbal jousting; almost every word spoken was a subtle jibe, while on the surface everyone was perfectly civil, even Joffrey for a wonder.

We also caught up with the losing side, as Liam Cunningham’s Davos Seaworth was revealed to have survived the battle by dint of hanging on to a handy rock. Rescued by charismatic pirate Salladhor Saan, Davos wasted no time rushing off to Dragonstone in a doomed attempt to free Stannis from the evil Melisandre. No dice – Carice van Houten continues to rival Lena Headey’s Cersei for the crown of Most Evil Woman in the show. A decent bloke like Davos doesn’t stand a chance against her.

The very briefest of visits to the army of Robb Stark revealed that he’d reached Harrenhal, where the Mountain had slaughtered hundreds of prisoners. The main discontent in Army Stark, however, remains the freeing of Jaime Lannister by Catelyn. It looks like that’s going to lead to trouble for Robb, but he at least had the nous to have his mother clapped into a dungeon. I wouldn’t bank on that appeasing his bannermen for long though…

And lastly, a slightly more detailed visit to Essos caught us up with the doings of Dany Targaryen and her loyal (if seasick) Dothraki. Her dragons are getting bigger, and continue to be one of the show’s better effects. But they’re not big enough to win a war, so it was off to the slave markets of Astapor to buy a few thousand of ‘the Unsullied’ a Spartan-like band of slave soldiers hardened by castration, brutal training and the requirement to kill a baby to graduate.

The scene in which Dany’s disquiet with slavery is counterpointed with humorous translation gags between her, the slave dealer and cowed translator girl Missandei was faithfully transcribed from the book (“tell the old man he smells of piss”). As was, wince-makingly, the moment where slave dealer Krazis demonstrates how bloody hard the Unsullied are by chopping the nipple off one of them while he doesn’t even flinch. He may not have, but I certainly did.

Plainly, Dany has a problem with slavery. Equally plainly, the slavers have a problem with her (“tell the Westerosi whore to pay attention”). This may not end well.

First though, she had other enemies to deal with – namely the blue-mouthed warlocks of Qarth, one of whose number she unceremoniously burnt to death with her dragons last year. This has not pleased them, so an assassin was dispatched, in the shape of a creepy little girl with a blue mouth. As horror fans know, you can’t go wrong with a creepy little girl. Especially if she’s carrying a fearsome looking scorpion-style thingy.

Luckily for Dany, another long lost character reappeared to save her by impaling the beastie on a short sword. Yes, it was none other than Ser Barristan Selmy, last seen being fired from the Kingsguard by the petulant Joffrey. Repenting of his allegiance to the Baratheons and the Lannisters, he’s turned up to help the last Targaryen, who he sees as the true heir.

In the books, Barristan spent most of the length of one novel not revealing his identity, instead going by the name Whitebeard. The producers of the show have sensibly dispensed with this, as the viewers would undoubtedly recognise actor Ian McIlhenny unless he was heavily made up. Rather than going through that, they’ve clearly decided it was a plot thread they didn’t really need.

They may well have to edit out quite a few others, with this adaptation being probably the most ambitious of all. Even in such a crowded opening episode, there were several important plot threads that we didn’t catch up on. Where are Bran and Hodor? What’s become of Brienne and Jaime Lannister? How’s Arya Stark doing?

This was a solid enough season opener – for many shows, you’d think it outstanding. For this one though, it merely felt functional; a necessary catchup and scene setting for the advancement of the multifarious plots this year. Game of Thrones is never less than compelling, but it’s at its best when concentrating on just one or two of its plot threads, or a handful of its characters. For the beginning of a new season, that’s not really possible, but this was probably the best compromise we could hope for between drama and story advancement.

Game of Thrones: Season 2, Episode 5–The Ghost of Harrenhal

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 5 YET.

“Men win wars. Not magic tricks.”

It was another catch-all episode of Game of Thrones this week, as almost every one of the season’s multifarious subplots was advanced, bit by bit. With the characters already so well-drawn, there’s no real need to focus so tightly on any one, which is fortunate; there’s so much going on now that the show has a lot to pack in over the next five episodes.

Nevertheless, there did seem to be a bit of a theme in this week’s script by series creators David Benioff and DB Weiss – the increasing return of magic to the lands of Westeros and Essos. Aside from Melisandre’s murderous shadow wraith, we saw Dany’s dragons again for the first time in ages, and she met the mysterious Pyat Pree, head of Qarth’s warlocks. At King’s Landing, Tyrion and Bronn were dubious about the King’s (meaning the Queen’s) method to defend the city against the forces of Stannis Baratheon – a strange green substance called wildfire, capable of burning so hot it can melt flesh. Up at gloomy Harrenhal, Arya finds herself making a pact with the enigmatic Jaqen H’ghar to take three lives in return for the three she saved from the burning wagon. And at Winterfell, Bran’s seemingly prescient dreams are getting more foreboding, as he tells Osha of a vision of Winterfell swamped by the sea and full of floating dead men.

That’s a lot of magic, for a show that has, until now, very much sidelined this traditional aspect of fantasy stories. And yet it still doesn’t interfere with the sense of grimy medieval reality that the show has already established. We already knew that there had been magic in this world; but as Maester Luwin contended a couple of weeks ago, it had long since vanished. Its apparent return cannot bode well – and presumably is tied to the return of the unstoppable White Walkers, as this world’s deadliest winter approaches.

It wasn’t all magic, of course, as the struggle for the Iron Throne continued apace. No sign of the loathsome Joffrey this week, though a ranting street preacher made clear the people’s dislike for their sadistic new monarch. Poor old Tyrion found himself lumped in with the hatred as the King’s Hand; “I’m trying to save them,” he grumbled to Bronn. As ever, Bronn was a marvellously sardonic sidekick for Tyrion, and continues to inject notes of realism about what war is really like. The role is a real opportunity for Jerome Flynn to reinvent himself from the housewives’ favourite crooner that he was in the 90s, and he’s seizing it with both hands, playing the part with relish.

Tyrion extracted the truth about Cersei’s plan from the pathetic Lancel, who’s such a wimp he’s not even fun for Tyrion to wind up (though it’s plenty of fun for us to watch). In the latest cameo by a genre veteran, a nearly unrecognisable Roy Dotrice popped up as Pyromancer Hallyne, eager to show off ‘the substance’ that his Order makes. It’s not clear (and neither is it in the books) whether wildfire is magical or a straightforward chemical weapon – I tend to the latter idea, likening it to the Byzantine incendiary known as Greek Fire. Either way, Bronn’s misgivings about its use make clear that this is very much an Ultimate Weapon, and one that could easily backfire uncontrollably on its deployers. Lucky Tyrion’s taking charge of it…

The reason for such drastic measures is that Stannis has now gained the upper hand in numbers, after using Melisandre’s deadly shadow to assassinate his own brother. That scene was genuinely creepy, Catelyn and Brienne watching in horror as the well-realised wraith crept up behind Renly and impaled him on an insubstantial blade. It’s a shame to lose Renly, whose war was over before it really began. But it does simplify matters somewhat that there’s one less pretender to the throne to keep up with. As Renly, Gethin Anthony was genial and likeable, but these qualities are hardly useful in a savage civil war. If nothing else, though, I’ll miss his role as eye candy and his dalliances with the pretty Finn Jones as Ser Loras.

Loras and his sister Margery were spirited away before Stannis arrived to take charge, presumably by Littlefinger, who popped up to work his schemes on them. It’s clear that Margery is the one with ambition in that family; Natalie Dormer did well as she steelily declared, “I don’t want to be a queen. I want to be the Queen.” I wonder where that will take her?

Also on the run from Renly’s camp were Catelyn and Brienne, who look to be forming another of the show’s well-judged double acts. There’s quite a few of these already; Tyrion and Bronn, Stannis and Davos, Varys and Littlefinger… It’s a good dramatic device, and one wonders if the showrunners took a bit of a lesson from classic Doctor Who scribe Robert Holmes, whose scripts always included at least one good double act.

Brienne and Cat are the only ones who know the truth of what happened to Renly, but they’re also suspects. They’d obviously do well to stick together until they reach safety. Gwendoline Christie, given more to do as Brienne this week, is looking like an excellent casting choice for this fan favourite from the books, and I look forward to seeing her adventuring with Lady Stark.

Up beyond the Wall, the Night’s Watch has moved on from Craster’s House of Incest and into the mountains, where they’ve met up with Qhorin ‘Halfhand’, a legendary Ranger. The change of setting is profound; previously, all the scenes beyond the Wall had been in claustrophobic snowbound forests. The breathtaking vistas high in the mountains give a much greater sense of scope to the wilds beyond the Wall – and the snow looks rather more convincing too. I wonder how much of these vistas are real, and how much CG?

At this point, Sam got to remind us of the actual threat the Seven Kingdoms are facing, in a discussion of the First Men with Jon – “I think they were hiding. And it didn’t work.” Sam also reminded his fellow Watchmen that three blasts on a horn herald the arrival of White Walkers, a signal unused for so long that it’s little remembered outside of history books.

But there was little time to dwell on such forebodings, as Qhorin duly turned up and announced a commando raid on the HQ of former Watchman-turned-wildling-leader Mance Rayder. We’ve heard a lot about this guy so far, but have yet to actually see him. I presume that next week, that may change…

In the rather warmer environs of Qarth, Dany was teaching one of her dragons how to breathe fire – that’s surely not going to work out well when they grow bigger. As an honoured guest, Dany was rather surprised to find herself beset by ‘romantic’ proposals. Her host, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, made an offer of marriage, to be paid for by providing her with the means to take back the Iron Throne; meanwhile, Ser Jorah made a speech of adoration for her leadership that can only be a declaration of love. The ever-reliable Iain Glen played the speech well, his eyes welling up with obvious restrained passion.

Dany also met the disquieting Pyat Pree, a cadaverous blue-lipped warlock seemingly capable of appearing in two places at once, who offered a less than tempting invitation to the ‘House of the Undying’. It’s definitely getting a bit mystical over in Qarth. But the city’s vague, undefined exoticism makes it an interesting addition to the story’s universe, especially after that barren desert.

Barren in a colder way are the Iron Islands, where Theon yet again proved that he’s a bit rubbish at being a leader of men. Stung by the contempt of his sister and his prospective ship’s crew, it’s believable that he would hatch an over-ambitious plan to ‘show them all’. And so it proved, as on the advice of his conniving first mate, he abandoned the ‘plan’ to raid an inoffensive fishing village, and instead invade a prime piece of Stark real estate. Whereupon, as he obviously realised, the Stark forces would head out to stop him, leaving the unspoken realisation that Winterfell would be pretty lacking in defences as a result.

The script didn’t spell that out, but it was easy enough for anyone with a basic knowledge of military tactics to work out what Theon’s going to try. Having already betrayed Robb Stark’s trust, he’s going to go the whole hog in the treachery stakes and actually invade Robb’s ancestral seat. I can’t see that going well for anyone…

As Bran’s prophetic dreams have already foretold. Plainly all that imagery of the sea swamping Winterfell is a foretaste of the invasion by the seafaring Ironmen. After last season’s dream of Ned Stark’s death, it’s looking like Bran’s nightmares have a disturbing habit of coming true; yet another sign of magic returning to this world. I like Isaac Hempstead-Wright as the solemn, soulful Bran, but as yet he’s not had much to do this year, occasionally popping up as a placeholder to remind the audience that Winterfell is still there. Thankfully, it looks like he’s about to get a plot of his own, maybe as early as next week.

Also continuing to impress was Maisie Williams as Arya; unlike some shows, Game of Thrones has cast some truly amazing child actors. The scene in which she faced off with the suspicious Tywin Lannister was electric, her eyes burning into those of Charles Dance like two equals rather than a prisoner and captor. It’s impressive that such a young actor can more than hold her own in a scene with an old pro like Charles Dance. And the scene was freighted with threat – Tywin obviously doesn’t realise what a valuable captive he has right under his nose.

Jaqen H’ghar might, though. He seems awfully knowledgeable about everything, by presumably mystical means. German actor Tom Wlaschiha is another bit of impeccable casting as Jaqen, with the solitary streak of grey in his long hair. At the end of the episode, he’d clearly fulfilled the first part of his bargain, and Arya is yet again responsible for a death – the torturer from last week having plummeted from the battlements with his head turned somewhat farther than necks usually allow.

It was a busy episode plotwise, which surprisingly found no time for the usual excesses of sex and violence. You get the feeling that it’s all building up to a positive orgy of killing in the very near future, though. And while there was none of the show’s trademark ‘sexposition’, at least I got some titillation from the surprisingly buff Joe Dempsie all sweaty and shirtless as Gendry:

Next week, presumably many of the strands set up will begin coming to fruition, and I predict killing aplenty as Theon’s unwise plan starts to unfold and Jaqen continues to stalk victims at Harrenhal. Looking forward to it!