GAME OF THRONES SEASON 7 EP. 2 REVIEW

     


GAME OF THRONES SEASON 7 EP. 2 REVIEW

Spoilers ahead!!!!!!!!!!!

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With Episode 2, "Stormborn" coming to a close, we've got some serious plot developments and continuing reminders of what a wonderful person Tyrion is, and some reunions happening...Gendry is back from his 4 season row-a-thon! Ha, just kidding. But 'Arry the orphan does get reunited with two old friends from all the way back in seasons 1+2 respectively. You remember those days, right? When the show didn't have so many continuity errors, plot holes and disregard for characters traveling across entire continents from scene to scene? ... well anyway. Let's dive in!

       We open the episode titled "Stormborn," aptly, on Dragonstone. Last episode we got a 5 minute triumphant montage of Dany and the Jets climbing the crags and sands and Dragonglass-embedded cliffs of her family's old castle. This episode for some reason she's already sick of being home. Okay? Strange dialogue, and Tyrion opens with the most canned expository line of "you know, person named after being born in a storm, you were born in a storm like this." Heavy sigh. Even casual viewers, I'm sure are thinking "yeah, no duh?" This, I feel, was a line meant for someone like Barriston Selmy, whose purpose was not of exposition, but as a link to Dany's past: Barriston the Bold, a man who served and protected her father loyally and fought beside her brother would mention this as an anecdote. Well he was killed in an alleyway by peasants with knives so now we just have what's left of Tyrion's character, drinking and knowing things.

       This, Tyrion drinking and knowing things I mean, persists throughout the entire Dragonstone segment. It's fine that he knows Westeros, but I think that many of Dany's cabinet do, don't they? Why is Tyrion a military general all of the sudden? Why isn't my man Grey Worm telling him to stfu because Tyrion's never held a spear in his life and he needs to leave the war planning to the warriors? Why doesn't Dany have a plan at all? I wouldn't go so far as to just write this off as "mansplaining," because Tyrion should be listened to, he does have value and strategy to add...but this scene is just so out of character for both he and Dany, and the actual battle plan: “Divide and conquer across an entire continent”, is probably a bad idea without knowing who your allies or enemies are.

So they'll send Yara and Theon and the Sand Snakes to go get the Dornish army and then move in from the south...wait. Why wasn't the Dornish army with them? Did they travel with lady Olena alone? Like without anything to show or share with Dany? Just a prince's murderous widow and her three bastard children showing up with an old lady? Okay fine, GRRM sent Quintyn Martel to ally with Dany in the books I suppose, and he ended up getting roasted by a Dragon after proposing to her, so I guess it's fine but it's just another plot hole. The snakes can't just send a raven to rally their troops? Oh that's right, they don't have anyone else to send it to because they murdered the entire royal family for...reasons... misandry and justice for none!

P.S. Dany, how's Meereen doing under that Mercenary you left in charge? Who cares though, right? Not like you pissed off and destabilized the entire continent of Essos and then just bounced...NO we have a villain to stop, stay on task!

       Continuing on Dragonstone we get Dany calling Varys out for being the spider that he is. This was a relief but, like Jon and Sansa spiffing (more on that later), this scene just feels awkward and not at all dramatic when in front of the entire war council. I know this episode is written by Brian Cogman who, unlike D&D probably goes back to actually check continuity and does his best to keep the spirit of the characters, so I'm glad we at least get to have these much-needed interactions to fill in plot holes, but this particular moment felt forced. I did enjoy her threat to burn Varys alive though. There is a shred of (what I hope to see more of) Targaryen madness in Dany, and I think her character needs it because YAWWWWnNNnN at Daenaerys so far this season.

So the terrible plan is laid out, the plan with hardly any reconnaissance, the plan that in Season 1 Robert Baratheon told us doesn't work. One army, with a single leader, with a single purpose. (Click here to remember the good days when characters hid their ambitions and made logical arguments.) and then Lady Olena speaks up when all the others have gone. She tells Dany to not listen to all the sheep telling her what to do, to be a Dragon. She's right. Tyrion's plan is doomed to suffer losses. But Dany might take that advice a bit too literally and start burning Westeros to the ground. That might at least make good television so...it's something.

       Next up on Dragonstone is that Malisandre shows up conveniently when Dany is pardoning people for serving other kings. Lucky her. Mal comes clean about mistaking the wrong person as rightful king. Oops. Mal tells of the prophecy (fickle things, these prophecies have been lately) of Azor A'hai and Missandei corrects the translation of "prince that was promised" to be a gender neutral word meaning royalty, or something way more clunky anyway. Well isn't that just convenient? So, as far as Dany sees it: Girl power. Dany likes Mal and now it's officially crowded here on stormy Dragonstone.

Lastly on Dragonstone we get my favorite scene of the entire episode. Greyworm is preparing to go off to Casterly Rock and Missandei finds him in his room and we actually get to see some acting. GW talks about his tortured slavery and how the fear was beaten out of him as a boy. But now he has fear again because he loves Missandei. This scene is very tender and vulnerable for both these characters that are plunged into a foreign world and have very little to hold on to. Now they have one another. I'm not crying, YOU'RE crying! Then they have..errr...sex? Eunichs typically still have thier d!cks for like peeing and stuff, but who knows, and we as an audience are not privy to the answer of whether or not he does still have his. The scene is still rather sexually graphic, but it does not feel gratuitous because we actually care about these characters and their struggles and their relationships. It's a very beautiful scene.

       

       In Winterfell Jon receives a letter that Sansa reads from Tyrion. It was the fastest Raven to ever fly, it would seem. I know, I know, I'm supposed to turn my brain off for stuff like this, but I refuse to. So Sansa reads the note from Tyrion forcing Jon to come bend the knee to the invading Targaryn Queen. I can almost see the wonderfulness of this scene in the (never arriving) books:

Jon is dealing with a Wildling uprising or some such Northern House drama in Winterfell as they prepare for the war, Sansa is being coyly manipulated by Littlefinger but she has achieved some empowerment over LF so she's playing him as well as questioning Jon at every turn because she likes the taste of power, Davos and Royce are doing their best to keep the piece and urge Jon not to back the Mad King's daughter and then the raven flies in after Jon retires to his quarters: the quarters of his father Ned and Cat, both long dead as he is haunted by the memory of his terrible childhood. A fire blazes in the hearth as Ghost lays lazily at his feet. He reads the letter from Tyrion: All Dwarves are Bastards in their father's eyes. Jon doesn’t call attention to it, he just reads it because it's not, again, a moment of exposition, but a moment that we, fans of the material, get to have between two of our favorite characters. Then the chapter ends.

       Instead we get clunky and forced dialogue that feels all at once expository and nostalgic for its own sake. Not to mention how cringe worthy these lines of I think Jon is just super cool! and I think Tyrion is a swell gentleman! are really testing my patience and intelligence as both a fan and viewer. But I digress. My predictions on receiving word from Bran were wrong. Jon instead is going to plan on backpacking across the continent to have a date with aunt Dany. So. That's happening pretty darn soon.

Oh! And he's leaving Sansa in charge, his sister who has, up until this very moment been in opposition to every decision he has made so far. And she's left ripe for Littlefinger to dig his claws into despite the next scene, which rather randomly takes place in the crypts of Winterfell with only Jon and Littlefinger present. I mean if you wanted to take Winterfell, now would be the time LF...no? We do get a nice satisfying callback to when Ned threw him up against the wall of his brothel in season 1 though. Ahhh the Starks, quick tempers slow minds.

In King’s Landing, Cersei has called her banners and the support is looking pretty thin. "Some of you are bannermen of house Tyrell who is in open rebellion against the crown." Well yeah, no shit. You blew them all up in a horrific terrorist attack! Were you going to explain that? No? I mean it was wildfire and a Targaryen has returned! It's the perfect scapegoat to rally the realm! Hello? Brian? Dan? Dave? Ahhhhh, they don't give a sh!t. They have to make Cercei evil and irrational from here on out so that we fall back in love with Jaime without them having to write anything interesting or conflicting for him…

WAIT! A scene with Lord Tarly of the Reach! So the Lords of Westeros seem to be silently kowtowed as far as their new Queen is concerned, but Randyll Tarly of Horn Hill still has sh!t to do. He is among the most feared and genious military minds in all of Westeros. He has come to swear allegiance to the queen but is now being asked to destroy...Olena Tyrell? Does Jaime mean like, assassinate her? Or like destroy her root and stem on the battlefield (Ha, because the Tyrell's sigil is a Rose, get it)? So it seems that the Lannisters do have some pretty sick tricks to pull.

       Down in the underbelly of King's Landing's Keep we get a scene with Cersei and Quiburn discussing their new awesome plot to destroy these feared and awesome dragons... How you ask??...You know the plot of the third Hobbit movie where Bard the Bowman slays Smaug with a black arrow from a windlance? Oh you didn’t see it? Well, it's that. It's exactly that apparently. Oh good, I was afraid it would be something interesting. As bad as that third Hobbit movie was though, at least they spent some money on the CGI to make it look good...what's your excuse HBO? I mean it would have literally taken 2 seconds to put in a line about how the only thing strong enough to pierce dragon's hide is dragon bone and the Keep is literally filled with bones of dragons. Fine. What do I know about fantasy lore?

        

       In Oldtown Sam is inexplicably in Jorah's cell with Marwyn the Mage, who thus far is sounding more like Marwyn the skeptic, Marwyn the establishment researcher...but hey. So they are checking out Jorah's Greyscale, I suppose we as an audience have to assume it's part of his studies, and Marwyn tells Jorah that he's f@cked. Welp Jorah's explorin' days are seemingly coming to an end folks...but wait! Sam may have found a cure for greyscale and wants to attempt a disgustingly graphic surgery on the Bear Knight. So as Jorah writes a suicide note affectionately addressed to Khaleesi (because he's old school romantic) Sam comes rolling in with his bad@ss self to save the day and (if my predictions are correct) infect some serious people with greyscale accidently. That’s just my prediction on a plot that would actually be interesting but I have this sick feeling that things might just go fine for everyone. So we sit through the delicate surgery "I know I'm ripping into your decaying flesh that seems to explode with puss when I touch it, but please try not to scream." ... until the the scene fades from unsightly soars to unsightly pies in...

 

        The King's Road starring Arya "pretty much did everything she set out to do already" Stark. There's a lovely callback scene with plenty more exposition when we get a reunion (told you they were coming!) with Hot Pie! They trade quips about baking pies (ha) and he tells Arya about Cersei and her "explosive" new attitude and then lets her know that Jon won the Battle of the Bastards and for some reason Arya had no idea. I really hate that he refers to it as the Battle of the Bastards. It seems cheap and meta and I cringed more than a little bit. Anyways, she's decided to head North just as Jon leaves for his cross-continent trip to Dragonstone...which by the way is on an island, right? So I guess they'll get ferried across? Fine.
Then we get the real reunion that has the fandom psyched: Nymeria. This scene is almost good. It's set well and could be suspenseful, but it feels very rushed and anticlimactic. Also the CGI on the Direwolf is clearly just a spliced shot of a regular-sized wolf being enlarged and superimposed next to other wolves. It feels cheap and honestly at this point, HBO has no more excuses to not make the CGI of the Direwolves better. They have a collective 5 minutes in the entirety of the last 4 seasons and it's very dull. The Direwolves are every part as important to the Starks as the Dragons are to Dany. #whereisghost #protectdirewolves

So Arya finds Nymeria and then the wolf just pieces out. Great. Arya has a line when Nymeria leaves that has people very confused. "That's not you." Simple but very convoluted. The problem here again, is with the writers. Brian Cogman goes way out of his way to include snippets from character's old selves, continuity, and nice little touches that connect us with the spirit of the show, D&D do not. Brian is overcompensating with connections to the past, because, well, he likes to do that and he knows that the audience fell in love with the show for a reason. D&D do not do that, so things get left behind in their episodes. "That's not you," referred to a conversation Arya had with her father when they reached the capitol. "You'll grow up to be as pretty as your sister and marry a nice lord," says Ned. "No. That's not me." says Arya. So while I appreciate the nod (and I'm the type of person who would make this obscure connection, so that tells you who that line was for) it comes off as, again, convoluted and out of context. In the books, however, it would read nicely:

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       "Come back with me, girl, and we can tear our enemies apart together." Arya said as the Direwolf's chin dripped with blood and stringy spit. She could smell that the wolves had been hunting. She could almost taste the blood the same way she tasted it at the Twins. Arya thought of her home again for the first time in a lifetime. Nymeria brought it out of her: The walls, the halls, her warm feather bed...she longed for it. Her family, what was left of it anyways, would be waiting for her, as Hot Pie would tell it. She had to go home. She could almost feel the warmth of her brother Jon. She couldn't believe it, but she even found herself wanting for Sansa. To apologize, to reconcile, to tell her everything and share with her the stories of her adventures. Sansa was surely even more beautiful now than when they had been at King's Landing together all those years ago. Arya's eyes filled with tears as she imagined the horns of Winterfell welcoming her in as she rode upon the back of her Direwolf with a pack of a hundred other snarling beasts in tow. Jon would be crying too. Jon loved her.

 Father always said we had the same eyes, Jon.
As Arya stared deeply into her wolve's eyes through the cloudiness of her own, she felt a wildness inside her that she had not felt in many moons. She reached out to touch Nymeria, but the Direwolf snapped and barked like the wild beast she was. There was no taming her. She was no steed to be ridden into battle triumphantly, no pet to be called as she pleased. No, Arya now realized that she was lucky enough to still be alive in this pack's presence. With a single twist of fate, she could be torn limb from limb and that would be the end of it. Such is the nature of beasts, and this Shewolf was wilder than any of them.

        No.  Arya realized as Nymeria turned her back. You won't come back with me, will you girl? That's not you. You must be free to fight your own battles as I have done mine. You're with your kind now. Goodbye Nymeria.

       One by one Nymeria's wolves peeled away into the pack to follow their leader, and just like that, the Direwolf had gone. The sun was almost set, and Arya's cheeks were frozen by her tears and so she wiped them and returned to her little fire with her poor, petrified pony. If she were to reach Winterfell with any haste, she'd need her rest.  

       You have your pack, Arya thought as she heard the wolves howling in the distance. Now I have to find mine.

        

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       Okay I got a little carried away with some serious fan fiction there, I know. But the general point is that Arya knows she cannot control her Direwolf because she never could, just like Ned Stark could never control her. So yeah that scene was major blue balls.

       

       Lastly, we go to the coast of Dragonstone/ Blackwater Bay or wherever. The ocean where Dany's fleet is sailing to Dorne. We get a scene with the sandsnakes bickering again because they really haven't offered us anything for them personality-wise other than "cool fighters." Then we go to Yara and Elleria Sand having a super awkward lesbian scene with Theon watching that only a dude could have written. Props to the actors for saying way more in their facial expressions than this hysterical dialogue ever could. So Elleria and Yara are tot's about to kiss when bam! evil nuncle Euron shoots their ships with firebolts and boards their ship!

        So how did Euron like...know exactly which ship to hit? How did Yara and Theon not know of thier uncle's giant armada of ships fast approaching in the very same waters they sailed in? Questions we probably wont get answers to because the plot gods blessed this entire scenario with dumb luck, I suppose.

So now we have a rather brutal fight where Ironborn clash with Ironborn and nuncle does away with Obara and Nym Sand. Pretty decent choreography this time around and we're all pretty thankful for that I think. I know I'm just thankful that the showrunners found a way to write off the Dornish tragedy all together. Their story went nowhere because it was mishandled and D&D should be ashamed. Dorne died with Oberyn in my opinion. Anyways, Yara and Theon are holding their own but when Euron beats Yara, Theon is faced with a choice...is this Theon? No, it's Reek taking over. Reek jumps into the water like a coward and Euron has successfully destroyed Dany's fleet. The Gift Euron was speaking to Cersei about, is apparently the Dornish women who were responsible for killing her daughter. I don't know how he would have known of this, hell, I'm still not sure why the Sandsnakes decided to kill one of the biggest bargaining chips in the entire world...but here we are folks, beyond the books and, like Theon, floating away in murky waters. Euron has no dragon eggs, or dragon horn, he's just a hyper-masculine pirate warrior with some big bollocks. I do like that he fights with an ax the way his brother Victarian would if he existed, so I'm still a Euron fan even though he is coming dangerously close to Ramsey territory wherein he's entirely invincible for plot reasons until he isn't. We'll see what happens. I see dragons in his future.

       So there we have it...episode 2 in the books and (holy gods!) only 5 episodes to go in the season. It's starting to feel too real and I'm hoping that a lot of these horribly obvious plot arches get interrupted by, say, an army of white walkers fast approaching?

Afterthoughts:

       The show is lining up for a meeting with Jon and Dany, and I for one hope it goes badly. I want her to tell him to bend the knee or he'll be destroyed and I want him to tell her to eat a d!ck. After all, doesn't Tormond say to him You spent too much time with us, Jon Snow. You can never be a kneeler again. I know that won't happen because the show has been working so hard to convince you that "the good peeps" on all sides of the isle are coming together all of the sudden when the realm is most unstable. I want to see Dany become the Dragon and pay for it. I'm seeing a huge battle that goes poorly for Dany because of some brilliant tactical strategy from Tarly and heroics from Jaime, but I think the show has now turned its back on irony, nuance, unpredictability and foreshadowing to make room for fan service, obviousness and "badass empowerment," you know, everything the author of the books laughs at. Hey, I could be wrong. Overall the episode did its job to shake things up a bit and I look forward to seeing the Battle at Casterly Rock, the meeting of Jon and Dany, and for the love of the old gods and the new, give us more Bran at the wall!

Until next episode ladies and gent's!

-CjM