This review is way too long. It's taken a month to write because it's been hard for me to write. So many events, so many feels. I feel as though I can't short-change any of the major events because they were so momentous and so...complicated, in a lot of ways.
A madcap, eventful finale to what has been an interesting season of Game of Thrones, "Mother's Mercy" was...a decidedly mixed bag. The failings of the episode are in part due to the jam-packed nature of the show. I think that this season and the last season have been markedly more stuffed with content than the first three. It was last year that the show came to take on its more globe-trotting character, where we drop in on each character for 5-10 minutes each week. This year, they did a much better job by simply focusing on three or four major stories every week, fleshing those ones out and ignoring a couple threads that wouldn't have gotten meaningful attention anyways. On the whole, the season has been expertly put-together, and giving characters 3-5 scenes in a week rather than just a few minutes before jumping somewhere else has made the content and the characters seem particularly rich.
The greatest challenge for the show in this respect has always been pacing. How will D+D put their rogues' gallery together into something cohesive and meaningful? The earlier sequences of the episode didn't really put together something all that meaningful, although with the complicated climax at Winterfell, you have to admire the guys for keeping all these plates spinning.
Stannis has had his meatiest season, sittin' pretty after his victory at the Wall and riding into battle against the Boltons. We almost liked him. And then he did...that thing, and reminded most viewers why they didn't really like him in the first place. Stannis woke up the next morning to find the snows melting, but his men have deserted - most of his sellswords, and all of the cavalry. Selyse has hanged herself after burning their daughter. Even Melisandre abandons him. At this point we'd all be hightailing it back to Castle Black, but what does Stannis do? He leads his seriously outnumbered infantry into battle, and they get absolutely crushed. And proving the point about Chekhov's monologues in Thrones, Brienne of Tarth is there to execute Stannis.
I'll cry about Stannis, still fighting in the books, later. But this was all just very badly paced. They skipped the battle - and I get it, money better spent at Hardhome and Daznak's Pit, but come one! - and managed to make the conclusion to Stannis's epic career seem even slight, the very last word with which we would describe Thrones.
There's not too much to shit on but the editor here, but it just goes to show - bad editing fucks everything up. Lots of this was great. Stephen Dillane killed it. The early moments, when everything went from bad to worse and he stared disintegration in the face - those were brilliant. But by simply not cutting - to anything, literally anything - Thrones blasted through his whole conclusion and made it seem as though the showrunners were simply trying to get it out of the way. This is just bad construction for the whole season. You don't build up this huge battle at Winterfell, involve many more major characters than ought to be there, and then make it slight. GRRM is waiting a whole book to get to that point. If only the show-runners could show similar restraint.
What kills me about this is that the content was fine. Dillane was incredible. Leading a band of ragged infantry into the galloping horsemen of the Boltons was one of the most Stannis-y things we've ever seen him do. Also in resolute character was his resignation to death at Brienne's hands. Just put something else in between all of these scenes and you have something pretty effective, with weight and gravitas. Rush through it, and you have the ignominious conclusion to the seasonal arcs of tons of major characters, and worst of all, to the epic struggle one of the most resilient and unusual players in the game of thrones. Brienne is one of the most appealing characters on the show and her cause, in this case, is supremely righteous, but that doesn't make up for the poor pacing.
Rest in peace Stannis. You deserved death, but not like this. Ya done fucked up, D+D.
Simultaneously, the writers took a bunch of strong, season-long work from Alfie Allen and Sophie Turner and again, rushed things. Sansa escaped her room while the Boltons rode off to battle, but what was the impetus? When things just happen like this, you can't help but feel that events are being generated for plot convenience rather than from organic, character-driven decisions. So too was Ramsay's turn back to the light (paying homage to tossing the Emperor in the Death Star?)
Yet in the end - as in with most of the post-Stannis episode - their paths went the way of the conclusion of "A Dance with Dragons." Theon and Sansa jumped off the high walls of Winterfell into the snows below. It's a cliffhanger that hasn't been justified contextually, and since neither character felt terribly motivated by anything other than the long-established fear, it was also anti-climactic.
The ending of the Dorne subplot made me wonder why the fuck we'd been there in the first place. Jamie, Bronn, Myrcella and Trystane leave with genial blessings from Doran. Tyene says something so degrading that I don't even care to repeat it here, but it reduces the entire show by a considerable margin.
The point, perhaps, could have been that Jamie came into his own as a father, only to have it snatched away at the last moment in a classic Thronesian twist. The father bit was actually pretty sweet, if a bit slight with respect to its actual story relevance. But because nobody cares about Myrcella and because the Sand Snakes and this bloodthirsty twisting of Ellaria were both annoying and underdeveloped, the whole thing rang terribly false. Dorne never got better and ranks as the Thrones team's all-time weakest thread.
This was an especially reckless off-book thread, but the rest of the episode swiveled back to book territory; for Cersei, Jon and Daenerys, things ended very explicitly as they did in "A Dance with Dragons." And in this sense, the show was merciful. Apart from the hard death of Stannis, they left us pretty much where we were at the end of "Dragons," though signs of reshuffling showed at the seams. I'm trying to move from weak to strong so let's go "average" with Dany, wandering in the wilderness only to be found and surrounded (captured?) by a khalasar.
Thrones has been in pretty good touch with Dany's dragon queen side this year but the scene at Daznak's Pit and her brief scene this week display the limitations of the show. It can't display internal dialogue as powerfully as GRRM can with his POV format. I don't want to be a book complainer but in Daenerys's case the show has been aping the books pretty hard and failing to get the content across all that powerfully; I think her last two chapters of DWD tell us more about her than anything that had come before. Without the internal monologue or the content flowing through Dany's delirious mind, they have no access to the depth of the books. Through no fault of their own, I think, but the point stands. Decidedly average Dany cliffhanger scene this week that leaves us right in DWD territory.
Except back in Meereen. Hoooollly shit. The brooding, post-Dany advisors try this one for size; while Jorah and Daario go off hunting for Dany, Meereen - on the brink of civil war, mind you - will be ruled by 1) a eunuch general whose soldiers have been getting massacred by the insurgents 2) a foreign scion who knows nothing of the local politics and 3) a hairdresser. Ok, so there's more to Missandei, but you just have to shake your head at this. The Thrones universe should eat these guys up given how badly this has been thought out, but I doubt it. I guess we get another season of Meereen. But the magically appearing Varys does give them some serious help, I'll admit.
I've got to be honest, pretty deep into the episode I was snickering at how silly all of it seemed, how rushed, how badly thought out. But there were a few terrific, twisted sequences towards the end that really drove the knife in, so to speak. As we suspected, Arya took the bait that is Meryn Trant and made an unsanctioned killing. In the moment, the whole thing is very satisfying, the most brutal, justified revenge porn perhaps ever sanctioned by D+D. Disguising herself as one of Trant's little girls (which is still just disgusting), Arya whips off her Faceless Mask and gouges Trant's eyes out, then talks to him while he lies bleeding from the face. It's all incredibly graphic - director David Nutter leaves the camera lingering for what seemed like at least a minute and a half on an eyeless, bleeding Meryn Trant. It's pretty horrible, but fuck Meryn Trant. Arya reaffirms her identity by way of talking Trant to his death.
Her triumph is short-lived. Personal killings are not the way of the Many-Faced God. Arya is so not "no one" yet, and Jaqen seems to know this immediately. He takes her through existential emotional punishment and then blinds her, in a move that, uniquely in this episode, retreats backwards into the books to make yet another cliffhanger climax. It's a nasty scene and Maisie Williams killed it. Arya's plot has been broadly inconsequential this year, but it's also a necessary trial-by-fire for the character, who has been turning into a killer but is learning what kind of killer she will become. The whole thing has a complicated moral bent, in that the teacher-thing that Jaqen is doing makes a lot of sense and Arya seems selfish, but then, fuuuuck Meryn Trant. This is some of the distraught moral ambiguity that Thrones does best.
Thrones really nailed that kind of ambiguity during Cersei's walk of shame this week. Compelled, by desperation, by the need to see her son, Cersei makes a strategic confession to the High Sparrow. She hits only the points that she knows the Sparrow can confirm, namely the Lancel affair, but she categorically denies the accusations of incest leveled by Stannis and others. This could destroy the crown as it stands, and we will have to wait for Cersei's trial by the Faith next year to see how this plays out, but for know, the Sparrow is as sphinx-like as ever.
Cersei is allowed to proceed back to the Red Keep, having confessed, but there's a nasty twist - she will walk naked through King's Landing, with the evil septa shouting "shame" behind her. Cersei is utterly stripped of her dignity, as the Sparrow foreshadowed in his arrest monologue, shorn like a beast before being unclothed. During the walk she is pelted with insults, accusations, fruit and rocks from a hateful public.
This astonishing scene, one of the very best and most gut-wrenching in the show's history, is a confrontation, even though it looks like just a punishment. Cersei's walk of shame is a battle between Cersei's ferocious desire for independence and respect being pit against the horrific sexual politics of the day in a pitched, seemingly one-sided showdown. Lena Headey, giving a terrific (better be Emmy-garnering, honestly) performance alongside an equally brave body double, attempts to hover above the jeering crowd and her own physical shame. The odds seem overwhelming. The scene is paced brilliantly - at first the crowd is silent, and the only sound is the arhythmic clanging bell. But the crowd eventually gets into it, mocking Cersei's body, her sexual sins - they attempt to destroy her humanity and identity.
Cersei is despicable, one of the most straightforwardly evil characters on the show, but this season has shown a tendency to want to get inside her head (observed most obviously during the quasi-mythical flashback scene). Left to her own devices for once, Cersei absolutely fucked herself over and is now enduring punishment. As with her awful son, we demanded comeuppance for years. When we get it, we're not sure if we like it - moreover, we're not sure if this is what justice will look like in the broader political future of Westeros. In a lot of ways, the scene completely strips Cersei down, in all senses of the word. When you see her facing such awful punishment, perhaps the gravest, most horrible manifestation yet of the sexual politics of the Thrones world, you don't see the horrible woman who betrayed Ned Stark, who fought for Tyrion's death. You just see a woman struggling to retain her basic human dignity. It's riveting.
Cersei eventually makes it up the hill and into the Red Keep and she sees...Pycelle, Kevan Lannister, too shocked, perhaps cruelly offended by her state to even engage with her. But Qyburn, her personally-fostered "Grand Maester," shields her immediately and introduces her to Ser Robert Strong, the product of all that "work" he's been doing. Confirming a popular book theory, it looks like Cersei is down but not out.
To me this season has largely been about leadership failure, and the final, gut-wrenching twist at the end of this season exemplified that more wrenchingly and hopelessly then even the great defeats of Daenerys and Cersei - Dany is down but has dragons, Cersei is down but has Robert Strong, and Jon is dead. Inevitably assassinated in the Castle Black courtyard by a gang of Night's Watch, led by Ser Alliser, Jon completed his emergence this year as the great tragic hero of the show. Questions will continue to circulate about whether Jon Snow is dead or not, but as an arc, this was certainly effective in driving the nail in. This has been a particularly dark season of Thrones, and this felt an appropriate note to end it on. It's worth noting that this greatest of the ongoing mysteries in the active book series has thus far been preserved. In this and with a number of other threads in this finale, the show circled back to A Dance with Dragons cliffhangers, and thus gave GRRM some more time to get "The Winds of Winter" out there. Good.
I have very mixed feelings about the execution of this finale, but the Arya, Cersei and Jon stuff was very good. The season as a whole was also mixed but had some of the series' finest hours. I'll write a crisper review of the whole season later. This is so late because I've been busy and honestly, I've been not feeling like thinking about Thrones and doing other things so I've just been not wanting to write this.
Bits
- Given Thrones' proclivity for gruesome violence, one has to question the strategic cut from the death of Stannis. It would be nice if he made it but I kind of doubt it. They really went out of their way to emphasize his downfall during his sequence this episode.
- Not like anyone will miss Meryn Trant, but Ian Beattie sure was a fun performer to watch in a sleazy, misanthropic kind of way, and apparently he just fucking loves being on the show. But you could hardly have asked for a more memorable death. Perhaps they can bring back Ser Ilyn Payne now that Wilko Johnson is miraculously cancer-free?
Book Bits
- An impossibly cruel Benjen Stark troll, but also brilliant.
A madcap, eventful finale to what has been an interesting season of Game of Thrones, "Mother's Mercy" was...a decidedly mixed bag. The failings of the episode are in part due to the jam-packed nature of the show. I think that this season and the last season have been markedly more stuffed with content than the first three. It was last year that the show came to take on its more globe-trotting character, where we drop in on each character for 5-10 minutes each week. This year, they did a much better job by simply focusing on three or four major stories every week, fleshing those ones out and ignoring a couple threads that wouldn't have gotten meaningful attention anyways. On the whole, the season has been expertly put-together, and giving characters 3-5 scenes in a week rather than just a few minutes before jumping somewhere else has made the content and the characters seem particularly rich.
The greatest challenge for the show in this respect has always been pacing. How will D+D put their rogues' gallery together into something cohesive and meaningful? The earlier sequences of the episode didn't really put together something all that meaningful, although with the complicated climax at Winterfell, you have to admire the guys for keeping all these plates spinning.
Stannis has had his meatiest season, sittin' pretty after his victory at the Wall and riding into battle against the Boltons. We almost liked him. And then he did...that thing, and reminded most viewers why they didn't really like him in the first place. Stannis woke up the next morning to find the snows melting, but his men have deserted - most of his sellswords, and all of the cavalry. Selyse has hanged herself after burning their daughter. Even Melisandre abandons him. At this point we'd all be hightailing it back to Castle Black, but what does Stannis do? He leads his seriously outnumbered infantry into battle, and they get absolutely crushed. And proving the point about Chekhov's monologues in Thrones, Brienne of Tarth is there to execute Stannis.
I'll cry about Stannis, still fighting in the books, later. But this was all just very badly paced. They skipped the battle - and I get it, money better spent at Hardhome and Daznak's Pit, but come one! - and managed to make the conclusion to Stannis's epic career seem even slight, the very last word with which we would describe Thrones.
There's not too much to shit on but the editor here, but it just goes to show - bad editing fucks everything up. Lots of this was great. Stephen Dillane killed it. The early moments, when everything went from bad to worse and he stared disintegration in the face - those were brilliant. But by simply not cutting - to anything, literally anything - Thrones blasted through his whole conclusion and made it seem as though the showrunners were simply trying to get it out of the way. This is just bad construction for the whole season. You don't build up this huge battle at Winterfell, involve many more major characters than ought to be there, and then make it slight. GRRM is waiting a whole book to get to that point. If only the show-runners could show similar restraint.
What kills me about this is that the content was fine. Dillane was incredible. Leading a band of ragged infantry into the galloping horsemen of the Boltons was one of the most Stannis-y things we've ever seen him do. Also in resolute character was his resignation to death at Brienne's hands. Just put something else in between all of these scenes and you have something pretty effective, with weight and gravitas. Rush through it, and you have the ignominious conclusion to the seasonal arcs of tons of major characters, and worst of all, to the epic struggle one of the most resilient and unusual players in the game of thrones. Brienne is one of the most appealing characters on the show and her cause, in this case, is supremely righteous, but that doesn't make up for the poor pacing.
Rest in peace Stannis. You deserved death, but not like this. Ya done fucked up, D+D.
Simultaneously, the writers took a bunch of strong, season-long work from Alfie Allen and Sophie Turner and again, rushed things. Sansa escaped her room while the Boltons rode off to battle, but what was the impetus? When things just happen like this, you can't help but feel that events are being generated for plot convenience rather than from organic, character-driven decisions. So too was Ramsay's turn back to the light (paying homage to tossing the Emperor in the Death Star?)
Yet in the end - as in with most of the post-Stannis episode - their paths went the way of the conclusion of "A Dance with Dragons." Theon and Sansa jumped off the high walls of Winterfell into the snows below. It's a cliffhanger that hasn't been justified contextually, and since neither character felt terribly motivated by anything other than the long-established fear, it was also anti-climactic.
The ending of the Dorne subplot made me wonder why the fuck we'd been there in the first place. Jamie, Bronn, Myrcella and Trystane leave with genial blessings from Doran. Tyene says something so degrading that I don't even care to repeat it here, but it reduces the entire show by a considerable margin.
The point, perhaps, could have been that Jamie came into his own as a father, only to have it snatched away at the last moment in a classic Thronesian twist. The father bit was actually pretty sweet, if a bit slight with respect to its actual story relevance. But because nobody cares about Myrcella and because the Sand Snakes and this bloodthirsty twisting of Ellaria were both annoying and underdeveloped, the whole thing rang terribly false. Dorne never got better and ranks as the Thrones team's all-time weakest thread.
This was an especially reckless off-book thread, but the rest of the episode swiveled back to book territory; for Cersei, Jon and Daenerys, things ended very explicitly as they did in "A Dance with Dragons." And in this sense, the show was merciful. Apart from the hard death of Stannis, they left us pretty much where we were at the end of "Dragons," though signs of reshuffling showed at the seams. I'm trying to move from weak to strong so let's go "average" with Dany, wandering in the wilderness only to be found and surrounded (captured?) by a khalasar.
Thrones has been in pretty good touch with Dany's dragon queen side this year but the scene at Daznak's Pit and her brief scene this week display the limitations of the show. It can't display internal dialogue as powerfully as GRRM can with his POV format. I don't want to be a book complainer but in Daenerys's case the show has been aping the books pretty hard and failing to get the content across all that powerfully; I think her last two chapters of DWD tell us more about her than anything that had come before. Without the internal monologue or the content flowing through Dany's delirious mind, they have no access to the depth of the books. Through no fault of their own, I think, but the point stands. Decidedly average Dany cliffhanger scene this week that leaves us right in DWD territory.
Except back in Meereen. Hoooollly shit. The brooding, post-Dany advisors try this one for size; while Jorah and Daario go off hunting for Dany, Meereen - on the brink of civil war, mind you - will be ruled by 1) a eunuch general whose soldiers have been getting massacred by the insurgents 2) a foreign scion who knows nothing of the local politics and 3) a hairdresser. Ok, so there's more to Missandei, but you just have to shake your head at this. The Thrones universe should eat these guys up given how badly this has been thought out, but I doubt it. I guess we get another season of Meereen. But the magically appearing Varys does give them some serious help, I'll admit.
I've got to be honest, pretty deep into the episode I was snickering at how silly all of it seemed, how rushed, how badly thought out. But there were a few terrific, twisted sequences towards the end that really drove the knife in, so to speak. As we suspected, Arya took the bait that is Meryn Trant and made an unsanctioned killing. In the moment, the whole thing is very satisfying, the most brutal, justified revenge porn perhaps ever sanctioned by D+D. Disguising herself as one of Trant's little girls (which is still just disgusting), Arya whips off her Faceless Mask and gouges Trant's eyes out, then talks to him while he lies bleeding from the face. It's all incredibly graphic - director David Nutter leaves the camera lingering for what seemed like at least a minute and a half on an eyeless, bleeding Meryn Trant. It's pretty horrible, but fuck Meryn Trant. Arya reaffirms her identity by way of talking Trant to his death.
Her triumph is short-lived. Personal killings are not the way of the Many-Faced God. Arya is so not "no one" yet, and Jaqen seems to know this immediately. He takes her through existential emotional punishment and then blinds her, in a move that, uniquely in this episode, retreats backwards into the books to make yet another cliffhanger climax. It's a nasty scene and Maisie Williams killed it. Arya's plot has been broadly inconsequential this year, but it's also a necessary trial-by-fire for the character, who has been turning into a killer but is learning what kind of killer she will become. The whole thing has a complicated moral bent, in that the teacher-thing that Jaqen is doing makes a lot of sense and Arya seems selfish, but then, fuuuuck Meryn Trant. This is some of the distraught moral ambiguity that Thrones does best.
Thrones really nailed that kind of ambiguity during Cersei's walk of shame this week. Compelled, by desperation, by the need to see her son, Cersei makes a strategic confession to the High Sparrow. She hits only the points that she knows the Sparrow can confirm, namely the Lancel affair, but she categorically denies the accusations of incest leveled by Stannis and others. This could destroy the crown as it stands, and we will have to wait for Cersei's trial by the Faith next year to see how this plays out, but for know, the Sparrow is as sphinx-like as ever.
Cersei is allowed to proceed back to the Red Keep, having confessed, but there's a nasty twist - she will walk naked through King's Landing, with the evil septa shouting "shame" behind her. Cersei is utterly stripped of her dignity, as the Sparrow foreshadowed in his arrest monologue, shorn like a beast before being unclothed. During the walk she is pelted with insults, accusations, fruit and rocks from a hateful public.
This astonishing scene, one of the very best and most gut-wrenching in the show's history, is a confrontation, even though it looks like just a punishment. Cersei's walk of shame is a battle between Cersei's ferocious desire for independence and respect being pit against the horrific sexual politics of the day in a pitched, seemingly one-sided showdown. Lena Headey, giving a terrific (better be Emmy-garnering, honestly) performance alongside an equally brave body double, attempts to hover above the jeering crowd and her own physical shame. The odds seem overwhelming. The scene is paced brilliantly - at first the crowd is silent, and the only sound is the arhythmic clanging bell. But the crowd eventually gets into it, mocking Cersei's body, her sexual sins - they attempt to destroy her humanity and identity.
Cersei is despicable, one of the most straightforwardly evil characters on the show, but this season has shown a tendency to want to get inside her head (observed most obviously during the quasi-mythical flashback scene). Left to her own devices for once, Cersei absolutely fucked herself over and is now enduring punishment. As with her awful son, we demanded comeuppance for years. When we get it, we're not sure if we like it - moreover, we're not sure if this is what justice will look like in the broader political future of Westeros. In a lot of ways, the scene completely strips Cersei down, in all senses of the word. When you see her facing such awful punishment, perhaps the gravest, most horrible manifestation yet of the sexual politics of the Thrones world, you don't see the horrible woman who betrayed Ned Stark, who fought for Tyrion's death. You just see a woman struggling to retain her basic human dignity. It's riveting.
Cersei eventually makes it up the hill and into the Red Keep and she sees...Pycelle, Kevan Lannister, too shocked, perhaps cruelly offended by her state to even engage with her. But Qyburn, her personally-fostered "Grand Maester," shields her immediately and introduces her to Ser Robert Strong, the product of all that "work" he's been doing. Confirming a popular book theory, it looks like Cersei is down but not out.
To me this season has largely been about leadership failure, and the final, gut-wrenching twist at the end of this season exemplified that more wrenchingly and hopelessly then even the great defeats of Daenerys and Cersei - Dany is down but has dragons, Cersei is down but has Robert Strong, and Jon is dead. Inevitably assassinated in the Castle Black courtyard by a gang of Night's Watch, led by Ser Alliser, Jon completed his emergence this year as the great tragic hero of the show. Questions will continue to circulate about whether Jon Snow is dead or not, but as an arc, this was certainly effective in driving the nail in. This has been a particularly dark season of Thrones, and this felt an appropriate note to end it on. It's worth noting that this greatest of the ongoing mysteries in the active book series has thus far been preserved. In this and with a number of other threads in this finale, the show circled back to A Dance with Dragons cliffhangers, and thus gave GRRM some more time to get "The Winds of Winter" out there. Good.
I have very mixed feelings about the execution of this finale, but the Arya, Cersei and Jon stuff was very good. The season as a whole was also mixed but had some of the series' finest hours. I'll write a crisper review of the whole season later. This is so late because I've been busy and honestly, I've been not feeling like thinking about Thrones and doing other things so I've just been not wanting to write this.
Bits
- Given Thrones' proclivity for gruesome violence, one has to question the strategic cut from the death of Stannis. It would be nice if he made it but I kind of doubt it. They really went out of their way to emphasize his downfall during his sequence this episode.
- Not like anyone will miss Meryn Trant, but Ian Beattie sure was a fun performer to watch in a sleazy, misanthropic kind of way, and apparently he just fucking loves being on the show. But you could hardly have asked for a more memorable death. Perhaps they can bring back Ser Ilyn Payne now that Wilko Johnson is miraculously cancer-free?
Book Bits
- An impossibly cruel Benjen Stark troll, but also brilliant.
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