Episode 7 Review

        Hey folks!!! Here we are at the end of season 7 already. It seemed to fly by this year...I don't know why it seemed so short but-- oh *ahem* right. Well we've come to a close with the longest episode in game of thrones history and you know what? It really didn't feel like it. There were so many reunions to have, plots to tie up, it seemed to fly by at an alarming pace. But here we are, with winter upon us and (it would seem) we may have to wait two whole years to tie this all up! I'm so conflicted about this I don't know where to begin, WRITE GEORGE, WRITE LIKE THE WIND! Anyways... let's go over this packed season finale episode...

        Open up on my man GW and his Unsullied forces outside of King's Landing. They are joined by the Dothraki Horde and Bronn and Jaime are chatting about what life would be like without a cock. Oh the pain. I am a sucker for the banter, however intentionally low-brow. Then we get a nice look at Euron's fleet who has returned from their voyage around the continent apparently. So both Unsullied and Greyjoy army just gave up Casterly Rock I guess? What was the purpose of the barricade? How is Greyworm doing? Is Missandei glad to know the Unsullied are alive? Oh well. Speaking of cockless, hey, it's Theon and Varys! They're on a boat to KL with Tyrion and they're all congregating around the Dragon pit to get on with this ridiculous zombie heist plot. They've brought all their armies, they're showing all their forces, so now there are some stakes in case things go awry. Now all the major players are together in one place including Tyrion, Bronn, Pod, The Hound, Brienne, Jon, Theon, Jorah, Davos, and more. They are, in case we need reminding, there to convince Cersei that the army of the dead is a threat to the living. I don't know why they need for Cersei to help, but since when has any of this needed to be logical.

 Highlights of this opening segment:

"There's more work in the city, and the brothels are far superior." Amen, Tyrion.

Tyrion, Bronn, and Pod all reconnect and it's a lovely reunion and it touched my inner fanboy to see them all together.

The Hound and Brienne meet eyes and speak concerning Arya which was nice. They are in mutual admiration for each other and again my inner fanboy squirmed around remembering times when this show told stories rather than did ...whatever they are about to do.

THE DRAGONPIT.
        Lol at Bronn playing escort and then stealing someone else's squire to get the hell off set because he and Lena Heady have it in their contracts to never be in the same scene together. Still not the worst instance of GoT having characters suddenly need to be someplace else entirely from moment to moment.
        Cersei's entrance hymn then starts playing and all the other wrestlers in the ring know she's about to come through with her gown from Hot Topic, also with Jaime kowtowed behind, and Euron as his typical cocky Brojoy self.
        Then we get this awful fan service scene with the Hound and Ser Gregor and it's so clumsy and not needed. A simple look between the two would have served fine. Suddenly (as if anyone couldn't predict it) Dany comes flying in to the Dragon pit. Here she is to strike fear in the hearts of...oh, awkward, nobody really seems afraid of these giant atomic lizards flying around. It's just a casual waste of CGI to remind everyone how bad@ss Dany is without her having to open her mouth and remind what a bland character she's become. Let's get this meeting underway. Everyone present and accounted for? Good.
        Euron has an outburst and then all the major players get to bounce back a few pithy lines before they bring out the dead (Monty Python reference for those of you who care). So the zombie pops out of the box with a nice jump scare. "We can destroy them with fire or we can destroy them with dragon class." says Jon. "There is only one war that matters, the Great War, and it is here." So all that Winter is Coming Stark nonsense that made all the northerners sound like suspicious coots finally has some validity to the southern knights of summer. About damn time.
        Euron is apparently too afraid to deal with this and he bounces, Jon has a moment of prideful arrogance and announces public fealty to Dany. It doesn't end well. Cersei leaves and refuses to help the "side of the living," and then Tyrion decides to take it upon himself to sway her so this way we can actually get some quality scenes in with character building and emotion and that type of thing.

Tyrion and Jaime: "I suppose we should say goodbye one idiot to another"

KING'S LANDING

        Tyrion approaches Cersei. Their exchanges are always some of the best this show has ever had to offer and it was an exchange well worthy of these two brilliant actors. Though it was undercut with this feigned sense of danger that just didn't need to be there. When you are having your characters talk about "oh this is dangerous I'm gonna die," they probably aren't. Did anyone think that Tyrion's plot armor could possibly be penetrated in those moments? That aside this scene was old school Game of Thrones power play with two wonderful actors exchanging soliloquies and insults and are very clearly hiding their true intentions from one another.
        So Cersei comes out and changes her mind, she's going to send her armies North to Winterfell. So we basically farted around for 10 minutes just for a false sense of suspense. I did enjoy the Tyrion Cersei scene but, as par for this season goes, the payoff of her sudden mood swing made it feel contrived.
        Cut to Dany and Jon not being subtle at all about laying plot points of Dany possibly having children. Why would Jon have reason to doubt that Dany can't have kids? That's absolutely ridiculous. Also the show never expressly says she will never bear children again does it? Pretty sure the witch only ever said "only death can pay for life."
        Continuing our soap opera writing, Cersei gives us another dun dun dun plot twist and has actually made Euron go to Essos to hire the Golden Company and apparently never intended to send any troops north. She was just lying for the sake of lying. Anyways it's more telling rather than showing in this visual medium. No, no it's fine. Why didn't Cersei just send Euron to begin with? Why did Euron even show up at all to the meeting if he was going to Essos to hire the Golden company? Cersei could have just not revealed his whereabouts to her enemy and he could have left ages ago. I guess it was to fool Jaime and her commanders as well? So Jaime then tries to talk Cersei into her senses and we get an almost identical scene with Jaime as we did with Tyrion. Right down to the empty Sir Gregor threat; again, nobody thought Cersei would actually harm Jaime so we feel nothing. The thing that kills me the most is that this little tiny plot point is what sends Jaime to finally leave his sister...the fact that she threatened him and conspired with Euron. Not her coldness towards their dead children, not her tendency to blow up giant religious and historical landmarks and kill thousands of innocent people...It's the colluding with pirates.
        Well, they just needed him to get out of King's Landing and join "the good guys" so we can get a really cool shot of him riding solo with the snow falling on King's Landing and a boy's chorus humming melodies we recognize. It's well produced and the cinematography is astounding...but again, it's a very hallow character shift that should have been dealt with many episodes ago. If they had gone with the idea that Cersei claims the Sept blowing up was an "accident," or even that Dany and her dragons were somehow responsible, it might have worked, but Jaime sticking by her side this long withour us getting a hint of conflict from his character, and then him just buggering off...yeah, not good writing.
         Anyway, why is he putting a glove on his golden hand...gold doesn't rust, and it's not like he can feel it freeze I literally laughed aloud when they showed that. If it was symbolic of him "covering the shame of Lannister gold" or something...well it was lost in translation. I have a feeling I'm adding way too much subtext than that scene deserves though. Anyways, this is supposedly a triumphant moment for Jaime but it really falls flat. I want to feel something. I know I'm supposed to. PLEASE!

WINTERFELL

        Sansa is mad that Jon bends the knee. Littlefinger tries to plant more suspicions in her head. With all the machinations and surprisingly well crafted dialogue and the bombastic "dun dun dun!" music, I'm almost swept up into the drama of actually thinking Sansa might believe Arya to be betraying her. Well done. I mean Arya's been clearly out of character all season and I admittedly jumped to conclusions thinking they were going to pull some dumb crap with my Arya. Instead, I guess it was all some dumb ploy to...expose Littlefinger? But he hadn't been acting any different from how he's been acting the past 4 seasons so why now?
        Sansa stands up on the ramparts in a hoody for a really cool shot of winter in the north and then she demands Arya to come to the great hall. There are a lot of holes here. Did we miss a scene between Sansa and Arya because we sure as hell needed it. I don't buy this setup. One moment Arya was saying the creepiest sh!t imaginable to her sister and the next she's going to devise some false trial and turn it around on Littlefinger?
        Basically what happens next is they murdered a man with only hyperbole and hearsay to go off of. Without due process, they went off the words of children and slit his throat. "Give me a chance to defend myself." No, because vengeance from empowered women is bad@ss and false character acts and soap opera twists are way cooler. Won't the honorable Ned Stark be proud of his knife-happy daughters. "How do you answer these charges *turns to camera* LORD BAELISH." Yuck.
        You know, if you watched that scene out of context you'd think the Stark girls were evil. Think about it, a group of people in positions of power surrounding a man and sentencing him to death with not so much as a thought. I know the guy was a scumbag and a conniving little power-grabber, but how can you claim to be a more righteous person without giving him a fair shot at a trial? Littlefinger literally says "none of you were there" and then Bran just says another quote from season 1 but that doesn't actually mean anything. They can't just convict a man based on a magical teenager's visions that nobody else can see but him. Are there no prison cells in Winterfell? Ugh. Very disappointing, underwhelming and rushed ending to a beloved villain.
         Arya and Sansa had apparently became friends again off screen and are now reminding everyone how strong and capable they each are. I find myself wondering at this point, didn't Arya give Sansa the dagger? So how did Arya end up with the dagger again? Am I supposed to try and make sense of it or am I supposed to just stare at the snowscape from atop the parapets and feel stuff? If I abandon all reason and do that, I find myself almost moved by their reminiscing of Ned Stark, but I wish they would have actually learned a lesson from him about "honor" instead of letting vengeance get the better of the two girls as it has time and time again. They're, again, intelligent young women in positions of power so you'd think their story would have been more of them rooting out an actual plan where Littlefinger is trying to get the Lords to conspire against them because of all the craziness happening in the world (LF thrives on chaos), and they work together to stop him? At the end of the day I think that they dumbed down LF in order to make a thin plot work, and that sucks. Oh well, Winterfell is so pretty and so are the vengeful, catty Stark girls. The end.

DRAGONSTONE

        Dany's council decide to sail north. She's going to meet with all the Northern lords in Winterfell so we'll see how that plays out. About time Jon checks back in with Winterfell for sh!t sake, he's been back and forth from the wall like three times and doesn't seem to even care how things are going aside from a few texts to his sister. "Oh ps. we have a new queen. l.y.l.a.s. -Jon."
        Then Theon gets permission to go after his sister. I love Theon so so so so so so much. Though I'm getting a bit tired of these hackneyed "I've done such bad things man. Me too, we've all done bad things man." scenes. It always leads the characters down the same stupid rabbit holes. Reminiscing and coming to terms with one's past is one thing but not every reunion has to be some slick meta commentary does it?
       "I always wanted to do the right thing." says Theon in typical Alfie Allen fashion, layered with such a vulnerable sense of remorse and a deep need to understand himself. I guess his speech to Theon about being Greyjoy and a Stark is nice foreshadowing for Jon's gripping with being Stark and Targaryen, but did you have to literally spell that thematic parallel out for us in such a tactless way? "You're a Greyjoy and you're a Stark." Why can't he just be Theon? Wouldn't that be a somewhat interesting revelation for him to realize that he's been struggling with his identity for so long with Stark, Greyjoy, Reek, that he realizes that he doesn't have to placate to all these rules, all these identities. He can at last be simply Theon, brother to Yara and he can go wherever he needs to go and do what is needed of him and help the ones he cares about. I think they might have tried to do that arc at one point, but, like with Jaime, they need to stall and circle back with characters because they don't have time to give them all "stories".
        So Theon has this beach battle with some random Ironborn that I'm giving a name to a face: let's call him Nute because I always liked that book character. Nute kicks Theon's @ss but then tries to finish him off by nailing him in the balls but wOooOo he doesn't have any! I feel like getting punted in the gory gash where you were mutilated would still hurt though...like a lot. No? Well Theon wins. How is this any kind of redemption though? He rolls over to the brutally violent Ironborn culture and "earns their respect" by beating a guy to death? I know that they don't respect him and they all think he's a craven and the Ironborn follow only the strong and pay the Iron price, but does this really have to be the way he gets his "manhood back"? Like he can't just say "Screw you guys, you're a bunch of sickly reavers who gave me over to Ramsey at the drop of a hat. I'm going after my sister with or without your help." Wouldn't that be an interesting power play? That he oversteps their macho-ness so he can save his sister and then the Ironborn soldiers all come to realize that their love for Yara is far more important than whether or not Theon abandoned ship in order to save her? I mean, none of them saw him jump overboard, they are just assuming it... and not only that, but this cowardly act ended up saving her life, so isn't that worth something?
        I'm glad he's going back for Yara at least. His Theon re-redemption arc will hopefully be complete and he can set out to save Yara as she set out to save him. For continuity purposes, Theon saw Euron "head to the Iron Islands" so that sure as sh!t better be where he's heading. I'm tired of all these characters knowing exactly where their enemies will end up, I thought Bran was the only one who could do that.

WINTERFELL/ R+L=A

       Sam has come to Winterfell so he can have one scene with Bran. He walks into Bran's room with all the purpose that the plot begs of him. "You're a good man, Charlie Brown" Bran says to Sam because his character knows everything in the most uninteresting way plausible. "I'm not sure that I am," he responds just as awkwardly as anyone would when such a strange, fellating comment is directed at them from someone they've only ever seen one time. "I'm the three eyes raven now," says Brandroid for the eight-millionth time. Then comes the big reveal that we are already well aware of because the show decided to expose that revelation already in a go-nowhere scene with Gilly so there is really no mystery in it: The marriage between Rhaegar and Lyanna is legit. So this plot hole is perhaps the most frustrating one of all. Why is Sam here? It can't be to reveal about Rhaegar's marriage, because he doesn't even remember that until Bran tells him about Jon's parentage, and that's something that could have just been sent via raven anyways. This scene reveals that indeed, Sam's entire season was just plot service. Doesn't matter though, because R+L=J or rather R+L=A because Jon's name was intended to be Aegon and that's, I'm told, exciting.
        Here's a thought: why didn't you have Bran Warging at the Rhaegar wedding while Gilly was uncovering that potentially groundbreaking news? Then we. as an audience could have had at least something to go along with that huge reveal instead of you just winking at the camera in the 5th episode while Sam pouted about having a stupid plot? Now you just have Sam conveniently walking in to speak with Bran only in service to exposing things that we already know, and there is absolutely no weight to any of this information because, as I've said time and again, these two characters are no longer characters themselves, just plot tools, so we don't really care about their exchanging of information. I suppose it's fitting that their last scene is them finding one another, these walking plot tools, and having one last disappointing exposition scene before we close out the season.
        This is all awkwardly cut over by Kit Harrington's man @ss suddenly pile-driving the Dragon Queen. Apparently Dany invited Jon to her cabin to bone but we don't get any kind of build up unless you count the last 6 episodes of terribly, terribly forced onscreen chemistry and dull conversations that they shoved down our throats. No first kiss, no sexual tension, just..."the fans expect this so..."
          George Martin's carefully crafted A Game of Thrones, with all its subtle hints, and all its complex plot weaving is tossed out the window so we can get to fan service sex and zombie battles in between meandering characterizations and cringe-worthy dialogue. I think I had the same despondent, ill-willed face as Tyrion had when he was creepily listening to the fumblings and moanings of Jon and Dany, but I don't know what we are supposed to take away from him witnessing this, unless we are just supposed to gear up for more boring scenes of Tyrion chastising Dany for stuff. Oy, I hope not.
        So Dany and Jon f@ck. Boy if ever there was a duller sex scene. There was no dialogue between these two characters because, well the writers have nothing profound or sentimental or romantic to say unless coupled with glib undertones or a "shocking death" waiting around the corner, so they don't even write a scene for our two (sort of) main characters. He just knocks on her door and gives her "the look" because we don't have time to develop a passionate love affair between them, just small talk and Bran's voiceover as the soundtrack for this Song of Ice and Fire. I'm so moved. Talk about the worst decision to make this huge reveal into bland cut scenes and flashback.
        Last year's Jon snow "reveal" was strange enough because it only worked out of context of the show and if you were watching it with a friend like me who read the books and spent hours researching R+L=J theories. But as far as the actual given show material is concerned, they negate all connection between Jon and Lyanna and wait until now for Bran to beat us over the head with something that they could have given honest exposition to last year.We never are actually given exposition to the fact that Jon is Tararyen until aunt and nephew are copulating, so any and all viewings in 100 years, people watching season 6 will be baffled at the cut scene, and people watching season 7 will be bored to tears with Jon and Dany, and then utterly repulsed at the sudden incestuous cut scene. 
        To end the season, the Night King Burns down the wall with some pretty stunning visuals but as a book reader I'm offended because I thought there was supposedly some epic magic that Bran was supposed to unearth that would lead to the calamity and fall of the Wall. Oh well, CGI was cool. I think that's been their general feel for the scenes this year so it's fitting that they ended the season on that note: messy, chaotic cut scenes with no dialogue and crazy expensive CGI dragons.  The army of the dead has arrived, finally. We made it through what I can now safely call the most incongruent, rushed and nonsensical season of Game of Thrones to date. We made it.  

-CjM