The Dance of Dragons

Let it be said that even in this blackest of seasons, which reaches all-time new lows in "The Dance of Dragons," Game of Thrones never lost its sense of humor.  Early in the episode, Jamie and the Dornish - Prince Doran, Ellaria Sand and Prince Trystane - are negotiating themselves through the little diplomatic spat the Martells and the Lannisters find themselves in, and clan Lannistell realizes that they've probably all been duped by Ellaria's vengeful connivings.  All will be forgiven, but Bronn must be punished according to his crime of striking a prince.  Those of us looking for episode 9 deaths get nice and worried when he's dragged out of his cell, but alas! Just a commensurate slap in the face from Areo Hotah!

As pointless and plot-sucking as the Dorne storyline has proven this year (unless they have something really big planned for next episode), when you reach the end of an episode like "The Dance of Dragons," you can't help but feel grateful for a little mindless levity like that.  This truly brutal hour of Thrones featured probably the most unforgivable act in series history, one that came as a shock to both book and show readers but which apparently will soon be book canon (see D+D rushing to slip in that GRRM told them about this twist in the "Inside the Episode").  This is, course, the burning of Shireen of the House Baratheon, and it is so nasty that it overshadows even the concluding triumph.

Nothing exemplifies the general bleakness of this season as much as the turn of Stannis.  Long a derided character, always holed up on Dragonstone, either doing nothing or burning men alive, Stannis did not seem to make much of an impression on show watchers until last year, when he unexpectedly showed up at the Wall to save Jon Snow and the Night's Watch.  This remains one of my all-time favorite moments in the series - for shock context, my Unsullied friend literally stood up and screamed when Stannis and Davos rode through the mist.  

Stannis's climb to the top seemed unstoppable this season.  From "fewer" to his tender scene with Shireen earlier this year, to the fact that he was riding against the Boltons, probably Westeros's nastiest remaining villains, Stannis seemed poised for greatness and even widespread popularity.  Trust Thrones to fuck us over like this.  Stannis has been in trouble - his camp is snowed in, his men are starving, and there's that nasty Melisandre proposal hanging over his head.  Ramsay raids the camp at the beginning of the episode, destroying food, supplies and horses.  This, I suppose, is the final straw.  He elects to have Shireen burned to turn the tide of war in his favor.  

The sequence itself, directed by David Nutter, was in part an exercise in restraint, given the content, but it still could hardly have been more horrible.  Much of it is shot from Shireen's point of view - the reveal of Melisandre standing by the pyre strikes a chilling note in this respect.  Even worse, however, are the shots of her parents, standing idly by.  One would expect the fervent Selyse to be all for this, but it is she who breaks and weeps by her burning child, not Stannis.  This goes to show how committed Stannis is to his own cause, and to the Lord of Light.  Selyse may be the more outwardly devoted but Stannis is just as much so if not more, he's just less obvious about it.  Worst of all are Shireen's drawn-out, agonized screams.

With respect to that scene with Shireen at Castle Black, it could be argued that this is out of character for Stannis, but I would disagree.  The show likes to fool us into forgetting what people really are, and they have really pulled a hood over our heads with Stannis this year.  Yes, he gets the Walker threat.  Yes, he saved the Night's Watch.  Yes, he has good grammar.  But Stannis has been burning people alive since we first saw him.  He underhandedly murdered his own brother for personal gain.  None of that bothered us too much - it was all in war, and Renly's death certainly isn't the most horrific war crime we've seen portrayed on Thrones.  But this...this is on another level.  Even the Red Wedding can be justified as people acting, however appallingly, against their enemies.  But Shireen is his fucking daughter.  They've set this up, with Stannis's inflexible ambition and will, with the leeches and the king's blood concept, and the burning of Stannis's kinsmen (his brother-in-law suffered this fate back in the third season) but to burn one's own daughter is a betrayal of trust so deep and disturbing that even I, the most ardent Stannis proponent I know, cannot condone it by even the most heartless, realpolitik logic that this show operates within.  Gods help you, Stannis Baratheon.  Now you are truly lost.  

"The Dance of Dragons" is largely about aspirations and self-imposed identities being put to the test against perhaps more primal identities.  Stannis faces a terrible test of his will and chooses the path of the Lord of Light, the result being an unforgivable act.  Arya's chosen path of becoming a Faceless Man is also tested this week by a brush with her perosnal past.  I skimmed over her thread last week because HARDHOME but in "Hardhome," she was given the assignment of learning about and killing a thin man who runs a cruel life-insurance scheme for merchant captains.  This week she walks right by the thin man because someone from her past appears - Meryn Trant, the murderer of Syrio Forel, escorting Mace Tyrell on his mission to renegotiate the crown's terms with the Iron Bank.

Meryn Trant sure is a shit, and the thinly-veiled brothel suggestion that he sexually abuses little girls in his spare time doesn't do him any favors.  Besides, he killed Syrio, which lands him firmly on Arya's list.  "No one," of course, should not have a list.  We knew when Arya couldn't throw away Needle that she wasn't 100 per cent ready to be a Faceless Man, and the appearance of Trant appears to put her engagement with her own identity to the test once again.  Since she spies on him in the brothel, though, it seems as though she's already made a decision.  The significant glance from Jaqen suggests that she's not the only one who knows it.  

Wisely not ending the ninth episode with a sequence of child molestation or immolation, the producers instead concluded the appropriately named "The Dance of Dragons" with another scene that ranks up there with Thrones' better spectacles spectacles (though it doesn't come close to topping Hardhome in that respect).  As with "Hardhome," they took the structural step this week of concentrating a large set-piece in a lengthy, uninterrupted passage at the end of the episode.  

It's the much-ballyhooed big fighting pits day in Meereen, and Daenerys, Hizdahr, Daario and Tyrion have turned up to watch the great games at Daznak's Pit.  Like all the best Thrones sequences, it's a bit hard to describe because it's twisty and it keeps escalating.  They give us pathos by putting a greyscaled, exiled Ser Jorah in the fight.  This is good, because for the sequence to have any contextual efficacy we need to watch a little bit of the fights, and its better to have someone we care about in the mix.  It's good killing - Jorah always gets some of the best fight choreography.

Jorah hurls a spear at Dany's tent - not at Dany, but at the would-be Son of the Harpy assassin.  And then things turn up.  The Sons of the Harpy are everywhere in the crowd, and Nutter has some great shots of the Sons emerging from the crowd, visually articulating the sense that the Sons and what they stand for are deeply woven into the fabric of Meereen, and that Dany's attempts to exorcise these demons from the city have been halting and useless.

What this sequence achieves best is the sense, for the first time in years, that Daenerys is really in danger.  The Sons kill willy-nilly throughout the crowd, going especially after Dany's protectors.  Hizdahr is killed and nobody cares, least of all the viewers.  Daario, various Unsullied and Jorah, newly allowed to protect Daenerys again, kill a lot of Sons but the tide turns against them.  Dany and her entire squad find themselves trapped in the middle of Daznak's Pit, protected by an Unsullied phalanx (which is no protection at all) but surrounded by hordes of the Sons of the Harpy.

And then Drogon shows up.  With a burst of flame, Dany's biggest, baddest dragon rolls into Daznak's Pit and starts crisping Sons like they're going stale.  And then, in probably Dany's best dragon queen moment since "dracarys" she mounts Drogon and rides off on him, out of the Pit, seemingly even out of Meereen.  The final shot of the episode is of Tyrion, absolutely floored, absolutely sold, I think.

Self-evidently, this is one of Thrones biggest sequences, and the scale and everything is quite well-achieved.  And Dany riding off on a dragon is one of the most unambiguously triumphant events of the series.  While the sequence couldn't possibly match the existential bite of "Hardhome," nor could it entirely shake a sense that somehow Daenerys was going to come out ok from this one, there was much to admire from Daznak's Pit - the special effects were terrific, especially of Drogon, and they've done as good of a economical job with the Sons of the Harpy this year.

But this is an example of a time where the lack of Martin's POV's changes the significance of the scene.  In A Dance with Dragons, the appearance of Drogon - which may seem to some like a convenient bit of deux ex machina but to me is Drogon knowing that his mother is in danger - is largely about the connection between Dany and Drogon, and about Dany beginning to embrace a different, less diplomatic and much more Targaryen approach to ruling.  This can't be achieved in the show.

Still, you can't help but be impressed with the production, and I think most viewers will find themselves as slack-jawed as Tyrion.  It may have been a bit shamelessly triumphant for Thrones but the more you think about it, the more this seems like a less-than-stellar development.  Tyrion, Jorah, Daario and Missandei are left in the Pit, with not much direction, I would think, and goodness knows where Dany's going.  They could have highlighted those ambiguities, but in an episode as heavy as this one, perhaps it was best to just wrap things off with some unabashed dragon-riding.

Bits

- The emasculation of Mace Tyrell continues.  Mace loses, but the viewer wins in situations that find him regaling Mark Gatiss's Iron Bank representative with a long song.

- I was very glad to see that Ramsay didn't kill Stannis in his sleep, less glad to see what came of his raid.

- Great shot of Ser Alliser atop the Wall.  What I like about Ser Alliser is his sense of duty - he didn't have to let Jon Snow and all of them through.

- I am still a pretty big fan of Alexander Siddig as Doran Martell and I wish that everything about Dorne didn't completely suck.  I am not that excited to see Prince Trystane on the Small Council, apparently next year.  

Book Bits

- I like the way they're using the Mercy section of the forthcoming Winds of Winter here.  If Meryn Trant is a stand-in for that character, than the pedophilia is canon.

- They seem to have made Elia the main villain of the Dornish situation - we all suspect that she sent that threat to King's Landing, her amends with Jaime Lannister notwithstanding.  It would be a somewhat controversial move if I gave even one fuck about the situation. 

- The apparent death of Hizdahr is a bit of a wrinkle for those of us adhering to the Harzoo conspiracy theory.  Which is not to say that I'm fussed because whatever, it's just Hizdahr.

- D+D sure went out of their ways to emphasize that GRRM told them about Shireen.  Large implications for Stannis but since Shireen is still at the Wall and Stannis is campaigning, I don't have much of an idea where all of that will fit in.  The Stannis stuff is so recklessly off-book that it's hard to even compare the two anymore.   

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is primarily about drugs.  There's some other stuff going on, yes - Dick Nixon's face looms large in Raoul Duke's (Johnny Depp) hallucinations, and Vietnam is omnipresent.  There are some musings on the rise and fall of the counter-culture movement.  But this film is really about drugs.  Director Terry Gilliam apparently intended for the film to feel like a drug trip from beginning to end.  I was more than ready for it to wrap up, which I suppose is not exactly unlike a trip.  The film is quite hallucinogenic and almost anti-plotted; it deliberately derails any attempts of the viewer to piece a story together.  So to Gilliam's credit, he succeeded - Fear and Loathing is a trip.

Duke (a stand-in for source-material author Hunter S. Thompson) and his associate Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) are on a road trip to Las Vegas when the drugs hit.  They're smoking and swerving in a top-down convertible, loaded to the breaking point with sheets of acid, quarts of liquor, sacks of grass and the feared ether, the only drug that worries Duke.  In some films the audience might take that as a cue to worry about an ether-binge final act, but that would not be in keeping with the total lack of order in this film.  They take the ether within a half-hour, and of course, it goes badly.  Not to worry; in this universe, there's always a step up.

So what do drugs look like through Fear and Loathing's eyes?  Sheer insanity on many levels.  In the first cross-country road trip scene, Duke has relentless visions of bats, creatively evoked through swooping shadows on the hood of a car ("don't stop here!  this is bat country!").  When they arrive at the hotel the receptionist turns into an eel and Duke can barely stammer out the reservation information (this is one of the funniest scenes in the film).  A jam-packed bar turns into a reptile orgy.  And when Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Bazooka Circus (probably a bad place to go on any drug), "the fear" hits, and things begin to spin horribly out of control.

I don't have an experience to compare Fear and Loathing to - I haven't read the book, or any Hunter S. Thompson for that matter, nor can I think of a film that so wholly attempts to embody the drug experience.  I may be at a serious critical disadvantage having not experienced Thompson before.  But this is not a part of the Thompson canon, this is Terry Gilliam's film.  The film medium fully embodying drug-think is going to be a different thing than the written word doing so.  And I don't think this is a trip much worth taking.

I'm pretty opposed to the mission of post-modernism, which this movie neatly falls into with its rejection of linearity and causality.  I think that in general, doing this - rejecting things like story and meaning - makes a fucking mockery of art.  Nothing is ever made in a vacuum, but post-modernism would hold that we live in a vacuum by going out of its way to reject all the trappings and constructs around us blah blah blah.  Now, I don't wholesale reject post-modernist works (I like me some Borges, for example, though he's at a bit of a precipice rather than fully initiated).  Anything structural/stylistic bit of creativity or wildness is fine as long as its in the service of a story, or in making some kind of point, and it is possible for post-modernist works to make powerful points.

Fear of Loathing has no point to make.  It's a series of drug experiences.  It has no story.  Un-contextualized Vietnam flashbacks and a floating Richard Nixon head does not constitute a point - not that Fear and Loathing meant to make one by showing those things.  Gonzo flits in and out of the plot with no sensible pattern.  And I get it, that's the point.  You're supposed to feel like you're on drugs.  What I'm saying is not that the film has achieved its intents badly, but rather that its plan in the first place was a bad idea for a meaningful film.

All of which would be well and good if Fear and Loathing were actually fun but my god, its just exhausting.  It's like being slapped in the face with a wet tie-die t-shirt for two hours, over and over and over again.  Sure, there are some funny moments; I could watch a slobbering Benicio del Toro for a while.  But not two hours.  And there's nothing more to this film than fairly predictable tripping ideas, which are hard to sell in the first place because there's always a serious inauthenticity, for every viewer, to such a personalized experience as psychedelic use being portrayed on cinema.  It rings false, and it numbs you into boredom.

And I think that's the most damnable offense for this film, which thinks of itself as anything but boring.  There are inspired moments, but I looked them up, and most of them come start from Thompson - who, I remind you, I haven't read.  So it seems to me that everything really interesting about this film is a second-hand interpretation of what I can only imagine is a superior work.  And that's really all there is to this film.  It's empty-headed and waffling, and not nearly as much fun as it thinks it is.

Hardhome

In the Jon Snow-heavy first episode of this fifth season of Game of Thrones, "The Wars to Come," I wrote that disaster loomed, though you couldn't always tell where it was coming from.  I've given up trying to predict what's going to happen this season - from the Sansa/Ramsay marriage to the death of Ser Barristan to the convergence of Tyrion and Daenerys, it's become impossible even for an astute reader to truly follow what has been going on.  And heading into the final stretch on Game of Thrones, disaster had come to loom on many, many fronts, but it wasn't clear where, as Gandalf once said, "the hammer stroke will fall hardest."

I cannot even comprehend how, in the remaining two episodes, the hammer stroke could possibly fall harder than it did at Hardhome.

I'm floored.  I have taken several passes at writing this review and keep giving up after it descends into increasingly unintelligible superlatives.  This was a truly seminal episode of Game of Thrones, and more game-changing for the story and for the show than any episode I can think of excepting perhaps "Baelor", which simultaneously set the War of the Five Kings in motion and showed viewers how this show was really going to work.  But structurally, emotionally and with respect to the future of the show - well, I've not seen a Thrones quite like this before.

Let's pull back a little bit before I lose myself in Hardhome superlatives again, because this was the best episode of the fifth season long before I lost my face in the last twenty minutes.  The non-Hardhome headliner of the week was obviously the long-anticipated interactions between Tyrion and Daenerys, which were phenomenal.  They're unsure of each other.  Dany plays hardball and holds the threat of execution over his head - Tyrion bluntly tells Dany that he's deciding whether or not he is interested in working with her.

I realized that this was one of the only times, except perhaps when Jorah was exiled last year, that we've seen supplicants of Dany that we really care about.  Being in Meereen's throne room and seeing it through Tyrion's eyes gave a real sense of Dany's trappings and appearance of power.  The set is absolutely incredible, first of all, but Emilia Clarke - who has the affect of a seemingly once-in-a-generation ruler down to a tee at this point - simply exuded strength and influence.

This power dynamic is extremely important for this pairing, which represents the strongest narrative device connecting Dany to the Westeros canvas to date.  Ser Barristan arrived, yes, but he was always a fairly minor player, a member of the old guard.  Tyrion - yes, one of "The Children" - is a son of those Robert's Rebellion combatants, an informed, cynical master of Westerosi political machinations and a devastating judge of character.  It's not in his character to believe in someone like Daenerys, but we can see that he's become more convinced by the end of their interactions.  Dany is powerful and intelligent and good-hearted, and Tyrion sees this (as much as sees her weaknesses and recognizes her need to have someone like him at her side).  By pairing Tyrion and Daenerys, the show has taken the greatest step to date of bringing Daenerys into the fold.  Appropriately, it portends great things.

 This was a dense episode, stuffed with a new assassination assignment (and costume!) for Arya, and the major revelation for Sansa that Theon killed two farm boys, not Bran and Rickon.  Like last week, this constitutes another incomplete step towards returning Sansa to agency.  Between the scalpel and this knowledge, she now has two weapons to possibly use against Ramsay.  She may reveal Reek's treachery, but as she also made clear in their tense, well-acted scene together, it doesn't much matter to her what happens to Theon.

Now all of this was well and good - and Lena Headey was also fantastic this week - but HARDHOME literally blows every other conflict or interaction on the show out of the water.

Quite frankly, this was the most impressive single sequence Game of Thrones has ever put together.  "Hardhome" was a full hour of television, and you really feel the weight of those against the comparatively flighty 50-minute episodes that D+D occasionally fling our way.  Structurally, "Hardhome" was brilliant.  When the show has a standout or climactic sequence to get to, they approach them in one of three ways, depending on the character of the sequence.  With battles (Blackwater and Castle Black) they devote the entire episode.  Sometimes (see the third and fourth episodes of Season 4 for Daenerys) they stuff an important climax into the beginnings or ends of episodes and ignore them thereafter.  The best approach, in my opinion, is to spend a major chunk of the episode in a major set or location and flesh things out before we get to the the good stuff.  This served "The Rains of Castamere" and "The Lion and the Rose," two of the series' very best episodes, very well.  But what is done here is somewhat unique even within that last category - the creators devote an uninterrupted half hour to Jon and Tormund's mission to rally the Wildlings huddled at Hardhome to the cause of the living.

The sheer number of amazing things that happened in this powerful mini-narrative is astonishing.  Jon and Tormund arrive at the coastal fishing village of Hardhome, which is a beautifully photographed, seamlessly enhanced Northern Ireland coast.  Even before Jon and Tormund reach land, we feel the significance of this moment.  Ramin Djawadi's score pulses menacingly and hostility looms from every corner.  But Jon and Tormund are convinced of the necessity of their mission, and when the charming Lord of Bones shows up and starts talking shit, Tormund beats him to death.  It's ostensibly because Rattleshirt insulted his masculinity but also because there just isn't time for such squabbles when winter is coming.

It's not easy to get the Wildlings to accept the help of the Watch, and they don't completely succeed in that endeavor - only about 5,000 of the remnants of Mance's army voluntarily join the alliance, and the Thenns are especially opposed.  The foul-mouthed giant huddled in the corner doesn't seem too happy about it either.  But chieftainess Karsi (Birgitte Sorenson, and I'm butchering that) speaks up for Jon and Tormund's cause, and it's because the cause is truly desperate, not because of any lost love.  "We're not friends," Jon Snow says of himself and Tormund.  "I'll never trust a crow," says Karsi.  But ultimately, some of these Wildlings recognize the reality of the situation; that they are a broken, battered people holed up on a frozen shore at the end of the world with unstoppable enemies descending, and they need all the help they can get.

Jon, Tormund, Dolorous Edd and Karsi are helping Wildlings into boats when the cold winds rise.  An unearthly storm descends from the cliffs pressing Hardhome to the sea, moving much faster than any meteorological event I've ever seen.  The winds of winter sweep through most of the Wildling camp until the Thenn leader, knowing what's up, orders the gates separating most of the camp from the dock area to be shut, locking most of the wildlings from escape.  Thousands of them, doomed to their frozen fate, die and are resurrected as wights.

The White Walkers attack in force at Hardhome, sending in their unstoppable horde of wights, and the final fifteen minutes of this episode details this horrifying battle and the escape of those few living lucky enough to get out.  The logistical and emotional interior narrative of this pivotal sequence was just astonishing.  Everything made such good sense.  The Thenn, who strongly opposed the alliance with the Night's Watch, stands fast with Jon against an actual White Walker, to his doom.  And wouldn't he?  These are the White Walkers - they are death incarnate.  Feuds between humans, no matter how ancient, falter completely in the face of such ruination.

The insanity continues.  Hordes of Wildlings flee in utter disarray to the sea as the wights struggle to break through the gate, drowning each other and overturning boats.  Karsi, having just sent her daughter away, stands and fights to protect them.  At a desperate moment, Jon Snow rallies the Night's Watch to make a stand.

The visceral horror that has been achieved by the production team of Game of Thrones cannot be overstated.  The wights are terrifying, detailed in varying states of decay, ranging from the totally-decomposed skeletons like those that took out Jojen Reed last year to the very newly-dead Wildlings from the other side of the gate.  The Walkers first appear in apocalyptic fashion, four dread horseman directing battle from high above the snowy cliffs.   The wights are fast and hard to kill - they keep clawing back at you, no matter how dismembered.  This is part shocking Thrones medieval action, part brutal, undead horror, achieved at a visual level that takes the already impressive production quality to soaring new heights.

What separates this battle from the maw of zombie thrillers is the intensely realized sense of fear at the prospect of the undead, and the fascinatingly story that is behind the sequence.  Great action tells a human story amidst the maw, and this story is already deeply powerful.  This tense, barely-forged alliance between two ancient enemies is the backdrop to an assault by the White Walkers on the living, Night's Watch or Wildling, which makes every other conflict in the show seem utterly superfluous.

I'll leave it to you to watch for the rest of the highlights - giant smashing wights with a tree trunk is my personal favorite - but I really need to emphasize the importance of this sequence.  When the sinister leader of the Walkers strolls out onto the docks to stare down Jon and Tormund, who barely escaped with their lives, what he's doing is issuing a threat to the living, to the world of Westeros, more brutally and powerfully than either Game of Thrones or, to be honest, George R.R. Martin himself, have ever achieved.  This is where the real battle lies.

That the show constructed a deeply powerful, entirely original climax and situate it structurally within the season so that people wouldn't actually know what was coming - this was episode 9 level stuff - represents a huge payoff in the liberties that D+D have taken with the books this year.  This was simply one of the very finest episodes in series history and though it diverged from the books, I really did feel that it was telling the same, important story.  Their handling of Jon Snow and the Wall this year has just been stellar, and this gives me extreme confidence going into the final two episodes.
Bits
- So that's at least a massive chunk of Mance's 100,000-strong army, which makes all the emphasis of that number last year continually harrowing.

- Lena Heady was absolutely terrific in her cell.  The creepy-faced septa, who I was hoping wouldn't return, totally returned.  She's a great tormentor for Cersei, who is reduced this week to lapping up water from the ground.

- One of the show's most ominous "somebody talks about a character then we cut to that character" transitions with Olly and Sam, on so many levels - "he always comes back".

- Really, really great sparring by Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen.  The script emphasizes their many personal connections, which you don't realize until the two of them are paired like this.  It makes you hope they can stick together.  Daenerys seems a good bet to fight the Walkers with her "break the wheel" approach to things. And dragons.

- I've become a huge fan of Kristofer Hivju as Tormund.  He's sheer force and just a ton of fun.

Book Bits
- Wun Wun!  Will "For the Watch" be playing out in the same way?  I mean Wun Wun could cause a lot of trouble in Castle Black.

- Valyrian Steel kills White Walkers - confirmed.  Most people know in the books but it was not confirmed.

- Is there a Night's King in the books?  Idk but this guy is super scary.

- Ramsay plots a raid against Stannis.  I am very scared for Stannis's life this year, and I really think he's going to die at the end, but if Ramsay kills him with twenty of his Bastard's Boys in a little wintry raid I will be livid.

- Of course, this Tyrion/Daenerys pairing is necessarily shortlived, as next weeks episode is called "The Dance of Dragons".  Nice to get a taste.  I do feel that their paths will cross eventually, despite the near-miss at Daznak's Pit.

- Hardhome is heard of in the books as this really horrible place where there are "dead things in the water" and the Wildlings are slowly being picked off.  This was pretty nasty too.  

The Gift

A big part of a successful, resonant episode of Game of Thrones is where it chooses hedge its climactic bets.  Last week’s episode would not have been quite so wretched had it not chosen to climax with 1) a pretty appalling instance of sexual assault and 2) a poorly-choreographed battle featuring the much-maligned Sand Snakes.  One of the things I complained about last week was that the episode chose to conclude with the rape of Sansa – something like that was probably inevitable, but the show didn’t to draw so much gratuitous attention to it.  “The Gift”, which is a successful, resonant episode of Thrones, is so by playing to the show’s strengths, old and new.  This fifth season has in part been so exciting because characters who have never met before have been interacting, and we got the best instance of that with the hotly-anticipated encounter between Tyrion and Daenerys.  Thrones throughout its run has done some of its best work staging intense, intimate two-handed scenes between terrific actors, and in the plethora of King’s Landing scenes building up to Cersei’s arrest, we got that as well.

Another thing Thrones does well is foreboding atmosphere, and this week we got plenty of that as well, particularly in the northern reaches of Westeros.  Jon departs Castle Black with a newly-freed Tormund, showered with scowls from Olly and withering advice from Ser Alliser.  This episode made very clear that nobody at Castle Black likes this plan, excepting Sam and, perhaps, Maester Aemon.        

After this episode, though, such support amounts to very little.  We experience perhaps the most unusual death on Game of Thrones, in that Maester Aemon dies of natural causes.  Even Ser Alliser and Janos Slynt were wroth to question the Maester’s wisdom.  Now that he is gone, Ser Alliser seems appropriately aggrieved, but whispers to Sam “you’re losing all your friends, Tarly.”  He’s right.  And Sam’s support has little effective value either.  With Jon and Aemon gone, two nasty Night’s Watchmen take it upon themselves to get closer to Gilly.  Sam tries to fight them off and gets brutalized as a result – without Ghost, they almost certainly would have killed him.  Sam has a good heart and a sharp mind, but his support really doesn’t count for much since he can barely swing a sword.  Sam does at least lose his virginity thereafter, which is quite funny if you can get past the bleak context.

It’s also snowing in the north – all over Castle Black, in Winterfell (which really highlights how fantastic that set is) and in Stannis’s camp.  The Baratheon army is starving and snowed in.  This plays to the advantage of the Boltons in the upcoming fight – as Ramsay says, the northerners know how to fight in the cold, and these southerners and sellswords are completely unaccustomed.  Stannis nevertheless insists on plunging into the breach.  It is, as all his advisors point out, terribly risky, but the Mannis is right to note that winter could last for years and that he just can’t risk taking himself out of the game for that long.  Winter, as always, is coming, but now it's actually coming.
In both Winterfell and Dorne, the show took steps towards correcting some of the fuck-ups from last week.  Sansa still has not been given the agency she deserves, but she does try some moves.  She tries to use Reek to light the candle in the high tower, as she is locked in her chambers all day, but Reek, who insists to her that “it can always get worse,” instead tattles to Ramsay, who flays the old northern woman alive.  It’s too bad, but during the showmanship scene where Ramsay reveals this gruesome fact to Sansa, Sansa starts to show some pluck.  She snatches some kind of shiv (which will hopefully find its way to Ramsay’s throat) and hits Ramsay where it hurts, at his bastard-born status.  Ramsay gets the final word in this exchange by revealing the flayed woman, but on the whole, this episode was still a significant step in the right direction as far as finally giving Sansa some damn agency.

Little of consequence happened in Dorne (well...more on that in the book-y speculation) but this week we were given two scenes that were actually tolerable.  Jamie and Myrcella technically doesn't involve any Dornish characters, but the Sand Snakes and Bronn was not even that bad.  True, Thrones resorted to its tried-and-true sexposition tactics, but at least Tyene's striptease served the actual purpose of moving the poison through Bronn's blood more quickly.  But it was the little, lived-in details that made the Sand Snakes finally seem like something close to actual people.  Nym and Obara roll their eyes at Tyene like "here she goes again," and this does so much more to make it seem like these women have an actual relationship than their introduction or ill-fated kidnap attempt ever did.  A partial but incomplete step in the right direction.  

"The Gift" did a very nice job ratcheting up the tension to nearly unbearable levels at Castle Black and Winterfell while getting a couple very neat climaxes in.  One of them was quite expected - the inevitable collapse of Cersei's schemes at her heels, all at the hands of the season-long ticking time bomb, Brother Lancel.  But this scene was expertly set up by a series of the actor-y standoffs - these two-handed scenes at which Thrones absolutely excels.  I don't have the time to spew adulations on Olenna/Baelish and Cersei/Tommen, which were both wonderful, but the two High Sparrow scenes stand out.  Olenna spars with the High Sparrow over the arrests of Margaery and Loras, and the fantastic Jonathan Pryce hinted at how scary true devotion can be.  Try as she might (and there are few people in Westeros better at this than Olenna), the Queen of Thorns cannot get under the High Sparrow's skin.  He really seems to want nothing other than justice, as dictated by the Seven-Pointed Star (a Westerosi Bible equivalent).  There's nothing more dangerous or immovable than a fanatic, especially one given a royal mandate to do whatever they think is necessary.

And finally, the High Sparrow springs his trap.  It's Cersei's own fault, for he has been very clear about his intentions to bring justice to everybody.  Only a fool would not think to include themselves in such calculations, but Cersei has always been blinded by fear and hatred.  She has allowed fear and hatred to drive her actions this year - fear of losing her remaining children, utter hatred for the beautiful, young, usurping queen - and failed to realize that she created the biggest potential threat to her own existence.  The High Sparrow obviously relishes his reveal, deep under the Sept of Baelor, but how stupid did we think he was?  He's known right from the start that Cersei was the worst of them all.  That didn't stop him from arresting Loras and Margaery, who did sin in his eyes, but Cersei was probably the big prize all along.  

This is a serious comeuppance for one of the show's most despicable characters, but by opening with the childhood prophecy of Cersei's, this season has attempted to at least explain her motivations - as I said earlier, fear and hate.  Fear and hate stem from deeply-rooted insecurities.  Cersei is basically a very sad woman, and it's hard not to feel the overwhelming despair of having all her power and authority stripped away in an instant (shoulda brought a Kingsguard down there, but that's book-consistent).  It reminds me of Joffrey's death in a way.  He looked like a sad, scared little child, the nastiest villain (at that time) reduced to pitiable reaching for his mother.  He deserved it - oh god, he deserved it - and Cersei does too, but once again the show has found ways to find sympathy for its devils at the hours of their comeuppance.  It's this kind of moral ambiguity that makes the show so great, at its best.

The big takeaway from the episode is, of course, the interaction of Tyrion and Daenerys (at this point its not even worth going over all the book-to-show changes, but this really hasn't happened in the books yet).  I figured that it was coming this season - unlike GRRM, D+D tend to satisfy rather than prolong ad infinitum - and what I liked about this scene was how unexpected it was.  For the third straight episode, Tyrion had his season's best episode, talking/fighting his way into being purchased by Yezzan along with Ser Jorah.  It's been really pleasant to watch the character worm his way back into relevance, and he seems to have done so here.  The whole thing was quite unexpected, in that it teased a near-miss.  Jorah and Tyrion really weren't supposed to be out there, and frankly I didn't expect them to get to Meereen quite so quickly.  But it's good when Thrones has the capacity to surprise.  While Tyrion and Daenerys haven't met in the books, I don't care.  GRRM delays and ponders and meanders and pontificates and it's wonderful, but this is television.  We can't be dicked around interminably.  Bring it on.  A (One of the very finest episodes of the series)

Bits

- Tormund isn't helping anybody (least of all the Wildlings) by prancing around like that once he's been freed.

- Daario's scene this week emphasized how much Daenerys needs somebody less brutal to also advise her - not to say that there isn't some wisdom to his savagery.

- Melisandre says "I saw myself walking the walls of Winterfell"...but not Stannis.  I'm turning the death-watch on.  Gods please don't let it be true.

- Rosabell Laurenti Sellers.  Not to sound like a sexist pig but damn gurl.

- Here's Chekhov's Dragonglass (I stole that, can't remember from who)!  Sometimes the show is too obvs.

Book Bits
- I don't give a shit that Tyrion and Daenerys haven't met in the books or that this probably confirms they eventually will.  It's just going to be too much fun for me to care.

- So I am now seriously concerned that Bronn will be Arys Oakheart and die, given the seductive overtures of Tyene this week.  Bronn is smart, but he probably can't restrain himself in this case.

- If Bronn and Stannis both die...I actually will barely be able to make it.  I actually cannot bear the thought of Stannis dying.

- One of the best, saddest lines from the book made it - "Egg...I dreamed I was old..."  RIP Maester Aemon.

- So...will Sam go to Oldtown?  The death of Aemon and the Gillysex kind of wrecks that storyline.