Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5

Only 1 more episode left?!  It’s starting to hit home that GOT is ending and I’m just so sad.  For the past few years I’ve lived for Sunday nights; not just because I love watching the show with friends but because I love dissecting it, listening to podcasts about it and texting about it the week after.  Where will I channel all of my nerdy comp-lit English major energy?!

But let’s talk about last night’s penultimate episode.

I might be in the minority of viewers here, but I actually really like Daeny flexing her evil muscles.  I’ve blogged about it before but we have seen inklings that she’s headed in this direction:

·      When she clearly delighted in Visery’s gruesome golden death;

·      When she burned Mirri alive and delighted in her screams before walking into Drogo’s funeral pyre;

·      When she threatened the wise council of Qarth because they would not welcome her inside the city walls (something along the lines of “I’ll come back when my dragos are full grown and burn your city to the groun”);

·      When she entombs Doriah and Zaro in his empty money vault as punishment for stealing her dragons;

·      When she crucifies the masters of Mereen;

o   Side note, I think this is the real turning point when we start to wonder where her head is at.  If you recall, Barristan and her other advisors were not on board with this move and counseled her to exercise mercy. However, Daeny insisted that vengeance for the previously crucified children was more important than mercy.

·      When she feeds one of the masters of Mereen to her dragons as punishment for the attacks of the Golden Harpies while admitting that he might be innocent;

·      When she chooses to burn all of the khals rather than just escape (remember, Dario and Jorah found her the night before her attack and she declined to go with them, choosing to stay and burn them all instead).

We can justify these actions on an individual basis given her circumstances (Viserys was a d*ck, the council of Qarth were d*cks, the masters of Mereen were d*cks, and so on…).  But once you list the actions together, it becomes harder to argue that she wasn’t always headed in this direction.  It was during Season 5 that I wondered aloud to Matt whether we were seeing the evolution of the “big bad,” to use Buffy-speak.

I think the problem is that all of those things happened in seasons 1-6.  That means that for all of Season 7 Daeny made pretty calm, rational decisions.  I think this is because (1) we have to buy that Jon would fall in love with her, and that’s harder to buy if she’s burning people alive in front of him; but more because (2) the show got sloppy and stopped laying the subtle groundwork necessary to make this transition work.

The other problem is that even though I completely buy her turn to the dark side, I don’t buy that she would burning all of King's Landing in such unnecessary fashion.  As previously stated, all of her “bad” actions above involve retribution against d*cks, and she’s spent the entire show as a champion of the underdogs of the word.  I find it unbelievable that she would turn on a dime in this way.  Perhaps if we had another season or two of seeing her incrementally disregard her prior love of the common folk, but we did not have that.  Instead, we have her go full on Mad Queen in the span of a few episodes apparently all because Jon wasn’t down with sleeping with his aunt.

With regard to Jaime and Cersei, I’m a little less forgiving, mostly because in the same way that we can list out Daeny’s acts that take her farther away from being a good person, we could list out Jaime’s acts that take him closer to it… only to have him boomerang back in the span of 1 episode.  The shame of it is that we don’t see any of his internal thought process that takes him there.  How does he go from leaving Cersei in disgust at her declarations that their family is the only thing that matters to holding Cersei’s face and declaring that they are the only thing that matters?!  Why did he sleep with Brianne only to leave her after staring into a fire?!  What did he mean when he told Brianne that he was hateful?!

I don’t think the show has given us any answers, let alone any good ones.  But what I am going to assume is that even though we felt that Jaime had been redeemed, his self-loathing prevented him from ever feeling redeemed.  Whether he was committing bad acts or good acts, he always felt that he was a hateful man who deserved a hateful woman.  And no matter how much he wanted to be a true knight like Brianne, he was always going to fall back to being a false knight.  

I believe that he realized this as he was staring into that fire and in that moment knew that he needed to leave Brianne before he dragged her down with him.  We’ve seen the things he was willing to do for love and who knows what Brianne would do, if pressed?  I believe that Jaime left Brianne to save her from the moral ambiguity of being in love with a guy like him.  He was being honest when he said he was a hateful person but it’s not Cersei or Brianne that he hated; it was himself.

Some other odd-thoughts:

·      I think Tyrion needs to assume Jon’s “you know nothing” tagline.  Can dude be any more wrong about EVERYTHING?!  It feels rushed, cheap and totally inconsistent with his character and everything we know about Tyrion.

·      Why did Tyrion go from being one of the main characters with plots revolving around him to be being a mere plot device for Daeny’s and Jaime’s plots?  It’s frustrating and I hope that he gets a better ending.

·      I think we’re going to see Jon turn on Daeny, then flee to Tormund’s real North as a way to escape the atrocities he saw in King’s Landing.

·      I am 50/50 on whether Arya is riding the horse away from King’s Landing (taking the Hound’s advice to forgo vengeance) or toward Daeny for one last kill in the name of House Stark.

·      I almost can’t take the ridiculous introduction of the Golden Company, only to have them be so easily defeated in 1 episode.  The famed sellswords are a convention of the books that should have stayed there.

·      I think we could all agree that Sansa is the clear winner, having stayed in Winterfell and avoided this madness.