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When I watched this one for the first time and was screaming “something happen!” at my screen, I did not imagine that in the coming weeks I’d be quietly hiding behind a pillow going “oh, for the days where nothing happened on this show.”

8.02 – A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

(2:00) We open with the trial of Jaime Lannister. Seems logical, you say! Cuts out all that interminable padding of people walking back and forth along corridors, you say! You are correct! It is simply unfortunate that this decision was also made to hide another storytelling omission that will be particularly glaring this episode.

(2:38) This episode does at least remember that Jaime losing his hand was an actual thing. An actual, character-defining thing that matters not just to Jaime’s self-image but to the image other people have of him as well. Dany publicly pointing out that Jaime’s not going to be much of a military asset is one of those things.

(2:54) Jaime informs Dany here, in open court, about the Iron Fleet and the 20k fresh troops. Let’s just keep track of people mentioning this sort of thing, hey?

(3:17) With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Dany’s implied violent fantasising about revenge on Jaime here is meant to help us see her immorality and instability (never mind that most of our still predominantly heroic characters have not just fantasised about violent revenge but actually enacted violent revenge). As usual, Dany snapping at Tyrion here is also framed as a bad sign for her. Yet still Dany has a point. She trusted Tyrion’s read on his sister, and Tyrion’s read on his sister was very bad inded. The potential costs to her of listening to Tyrion’s advice are high. Why shouldn’t Dany be upset that Tyrion has, once again, screwed it up?

It’s also worth mentioning that this is pretty crappy for Tyrion’s characterisation when his positions are approached as correct-by-default. It doesn’t allow show!Tyrion to be a fallible and flawed character on the same terms as every other fallible and flawed character, blinded by love of his family even when he knows his family is shitty.

(3:37) Here’s another nice thing! Someone’s remembered who it was behind the attack on Ned way way back in season one!

(3:45) Jaime’s justification here is…considerably more flimsy. “We were at war”? Justifies everything, I guess, including murdering a bunch of people peacefully going about their business in the streets of a city hundreds of miles away from the current hostilities. I wouldn’t be so bothered if the show hadn’t consistently downplayed the things that make the Lannisters far and away the most culpable parties in the start of the War of Five Kings and some of the consistently worst political actors in the series.

(3:50) Also apparently Jaime would make all the same choices again. Another hindsight moment that we can now see tells us that Jaime’s character development is going to evaporate into thin air.

(4:01) Note the suspicious silence when Bran makes that deliberate callback to what Jaime said at the top of that tower.

(5:00) Brienne speaking up for Jaime, telling them what he’d done for her personally and for Sansa, is a moment that could have been a lot more powerful than it was, and I’ll get to why in a bit.

(5:47) For all the issues I have with Jon’s writing this season, his silence in the first part of this episode is, I think, some of the best writing he got. That silence shows his preoccupation throughout this meeting.

(6:36) More bad signs for Dany’s sanity – she’s upset when her boyfriend walks off on her without a word! Everyone start laying down the asbestos mats, she’s gonna burn everything!

(7:08) Then she chews poor Tyrion out for either being a traitor or a fool, and not for the first time. Well, is she wrong? Yet her anger at this and her determination to find someone who isn’t either a traitor or a fool is a cause of much concern to the men who did follow Dany into this particular hallway scene. Which was, in turn, essentially an elaboration on Dany’s point to Tyrion in the meeting itself, so I’m not entirely sure why we needed this extra bit…

(7:27) Gendry messing around at the forge starts here.

(7:56) Arya enters the scene here.

(8:19) First line of dialogue in the scene here, after a brief exhange of flirtatious glances. So in this densely-written, action packed season, we needed thirty seconds of Gendry working at the forge followed by another twenty seconds of Arya checking out Gendry as he works at the forge, just so we are all extremely clear on the fact that Gendry is, in fact, a blacksmith who works at a forge. The important bit here is Arya checking out Gendry, followed by the open flirting. The open flirting that happens as Gendry continues to work at a forge. Skip to that!

(9:31) “They’re like death.” A buildup of the White Walkers, and Arya’s involvement in the fighting, that will ring very hollow by the end of next episode.

(9:48) “I know death. He’s got many faces. I look forward to seeing this one.” Perhaps it’s my cynicism about the show’s quality speaking, but this line just reeks of written-for-the-trailer. I also continue to dislike the show’s goddamned posturing. You can do it in small doses, but too much and it’s Darkwing Dayne again.

This is made worse by the fact I feel show!Arya’s got some of the same credibility gap problems that show!Tyrion does. Not quite so bad – the show demonstrates her skills on a fairly regular basis and doesn’t contradict itself that Arya has those skills – but her achievements in the past few seasons are less in the vein of “survived Harrenhal against impossible odds” and “forged unlikely friendship with an enemy” but “snuck up on minor characters X, Y and Z offscreen and stabbed them onscreen.” Feats of skill and not of character, helped along by showing the results without the effort. Worse, quite a few of the skills that Arya shows off were also honed to their highest form offscreen (when did she learn to change her face? When did she practice with Needle that much?). So it feels like skill without accomplishment, and lines meant to invoke supreme badassery feel more like cheating.

(10:12) Actual colour! Like a poke in the eye!

(10:40) Jaime apologises to Bran for pushing him out a window. Cue conflicted feelings. On the one hand, this is something I very much want from book!Jaime. But not like this. In the context of season eight, a season which ends with Jaime turning his back on the very idea that he might have developed his character any, this moment where he recognises that he did a bad thing for a bad reason is…nothing. Just nothing.

(10:49) “You were protecting your family.” Aaaaaaaugh. Oh boy. First, the reading comprehension issue. That’s fine, that’s fine, I’m cool, we all know that themes are for fifth grade book reports. Second, so fuck what? Because Robert would flip his lid and make with the murders, that justifies pushing Bran out the window? Is anyone going to address the fact that Jaime wasn’t sorry then because he was protecting his family, but now that his family are dead and/or on the outs with him, it’s fine for him to be sorry? That’s more than a little conditional. What the fuck even are these ethics? Seriously! “I did it for love” is not an adequate excuse, and that’s the entire goddamned point of Jaime saying those words as he punts a seven-year-old from a high window!

If I credited the writers with foresight and attention to theme and character, I’d say this was a good indicator of how despite his words, show!Jaime’s still essentially lacking in actual principles, but I don’t, so I can’t.

(11:14) “Why didn’t you tell them?” “You won’t be able to help us in this fight if I let them murder you first.” And there it is. Bran did not reveal that Jaime shoved him out the window explicitly to forestall conflict and moral quandaries amongst our main characters, also known as the things that drive the bloody story. The writers just ducked around that issue so they never had to write the characters struggling to put their money where their mouths are when they say “we need everyone who can hold a sword.” That includes Bran, by the way, where the writers continue to cop out of writing him as a character with things like past experiences and interiority and motivations.

It’s so frustrating that the writers pass up a real conflict based on things we saw happen and positions we’ve seen the characters develop when so many of their interpersonal conflicts this season (and in the last two seasons) were painfully contrived.

This omission is also why Brienne speaking up for Jaime falls a little flat. When Brienne brings up the best of what Jaime has done, it’s not in contrast to the worst. Rather than offering examples of good to balance the evil Jaime’s done, she’s offering good to counter his moral ambiguity.

(11:33) Scene starts here. Tyrion walking through a bustling Winterfell.

(11:58) Tyrion runs into Jaime here, twenty-five seconds later. I know, I know, I’m harping, but we keep getting these looooong establishing shots of the mise en scene making a bid for the starring role. Twenty seconds of watching people bustling around is the TV equivalent of a solid page of description – not intertwined with the central action of the scene, but just sitting there in front of it, the sort of thing an editor would tell someone to either cut or work into the narrative properly.

Incidentally, in the following conversation, we’ll see all this bustling around in the background. So the information still comes across if you cut that intro.

(12:20) “They remember what happened the last time Targaryens brought dragons north.” Yeah, so do we, the wight hunt was memorably silly. Either that or the writers kinda forgot that the North bent the knee back in the day to avoid getting roasted by dragons.

(12:30) More set-up for Dany’s eventual madness and evil, this time in the form of Jaime Lannister going “but is she really different?” Which is some cheating at storytelling, because again, what Jaime knows of Dany right now is that a) she’s still rather upset that Jaime killed her dad, for some strange reason, and b) she did the thing that Cersei absolutely 100% would not do, and put her ambitions aside, even temporarily, to deal with a greater threat. Jaime’s comments make sense for a writer who knows the ending. Jaime’s comments make less sense from a character with limited political interests and limited knowledge of Daenerys.

(12:37) Tyrion here admits that he gave bad advice on Cersei. Admitting there’s a problem still hasn’t solved it.

(13:47) Hey, it’s a callback to one of Tyrion’s season one jokes! Bit wasted, we could end the entire series on a joke like that.

(15:16) As much as I love Brienne (in the books, anyway), her commanding the left flank is a clear case of main characters doing everything, and damn the worldbuilding. Being able to fight real good is a different skill from command. Something something “Loras will lead the van” back in ACoK. Which also goes to show the differences between show!Brienne and book!Brienne. Book!Brienne is waaaaaay too short on confidence, and the setting is far too consistently misogynistic, to just shove an untested female commander in charge without considerably more resistance.

(15:44) The actors really do have good chemistry, though. That helps an awful lot.

(16:21) In terms of background detail, we can see here there is at least one woman practicing with a spear. Which shows us something about the setting without the extra nearly thirty goddamn seconds of someone walking through a yard.

(17:36) “[Tyrion] owns his [mistakes] and learns from them” could also have been a pretty powerful argument…if it wasn’t contradicted by pretty much everything we’ve seen him do. Did I imagine him denying he’d made any mistakes in his handling of Meereen, back in season six? I don’t think I did…

Incidentally, this is now dialogue exchange three between Dany and her advisors going over the point that Tyrion’s given some shitty advice. This is the most useful of the three, because it expresses the central problem and depicts one of the parties actually making a decision about how they’re going to handle it. It’s also the third goddamn time in under twenty minutes we’ve been over the same issue with more or less the same people in the same political context.

(19:20) I can forgive the failure to get to the point here because the awkwardness and the dancing around does actually show something pertinent about these characters and their lack of relationship.

(20:01) “Men do stupid things for women.” This is the sort of line Sansa would have been using on Joffrey, watching it fly right over his head. Which raises the question: why is Sansa treating Dany like she would have treated Joffrey?

(20:35) Dany’s response that she came here to help, and Sansa’s admission that she may have been a little out of line when Dany rocked up was a glimmer of hope. Including the emotional vulnerability and the fact that they shared a bit of a laugh. No, it’s not passing the Bechdel test – this is about Jon – but for a moment it was better than what we had last episode.

(21:31) And then we get this. Sansa asks, “What about the North?” and a) somehow Dany doesn’t have a clear enough grasp of her own political position and her own diplomatic capacity to, like, respond, and b) Maester Wolkan walks in before Dany can fumble around for an answer, once again forestalling things like discussion. Tension. People hashing out their problems and attempting to resolve them.

Imagine that instead of talking about Jon, or hell, in addition to talking about Jon, these two actually compared their political visions. This scene spends a good few minutes establishing the emotional issues and political tensions between these characters, and cuts before they can actually have it out. It’s incredibly unsatisfying.

(22:01) Theon’s arrived back in the plot! We don’t even care about teleportation now, do we?

(22:47) This is also a moment of real warmth from Sansa that’s been incredibly lacking from her show depiction. Last I can remember she showed this sort of emotion was when she hugged Bran.

(23:13) Whoa, whoa, who’s this? Davos? He’s still in this show? He does things?

(23:44) And Gilly? Wow. Deep cuts. Minor characters making themselves useful around here!

(25:06) Dolorous Edd? The Night’s Watch is still here too! In consecutive episodes!

This is a little ham-handed, like we’re going down the appendix and ticking off the people present, but even so Bryan Cogman’s definitely the GoT writer of latter seasons who seems to refer to the books for guidance and think about tidying up plot threads. Which turns out to be high praise in the context of the season.

(25:25) Good bit of showing here too. Jon has manly hugs with Tormund, manly hugs with Dolorous Edd, shakes hands with Beric, notices that Sam’s there…and steps back looking away. Take your skilful screenwriting where you can, folks, it’s in short supply here.

(25:21) “We met up at the Last Hearth.” “The dead got there first.” And that right there tells us about as much as we were shown in the bereft-of-lighting actual meetup we saw at the end of last episode.

(26:37) Jon here setting out some reminders of why the dead are such dangerous foes. Not that we’ll be seeing all that much of these qualities Jon’s so scared of. The visual representation with the tiles is a good move, keeping the reminder of the scale of the problem in sight.

(27:22) As far as kludges to explain why the Night’s King would risk everything to kill Bran, this one could have been worse. Bran and Sam did at least make the case here for why the Night’s King killing Bran is not optional; a force so antithetical to humanity cannot allow humanity’s memory to remain. Okay.

What this still doesn’t answer adequately is why the Night’s King has to kill Bran now. Or tomorrow. Or even the week after. We can see from that board there that the Night’s King is in a pretty good position! For an enemy that supposedly doesn’t feel, our main characters are gambling a lot that the Night’s King will have such an ego and such an irrational hatred that he’ll take literally the first available shot at Bran even if that risks his entire cause.

(27:34) This pause in the planning session to say nice things about Bran and his importance in the grand scheme of things may or may not be attempted setup for the end of the season.

(28:15) Theon defending Bran, whether or not it happens in the books, is a logical thing for the character trying to make up for some of the bad shit he did earlier.

(30:07) And this conversation here between Tyrion and Bran definitely may or may not be attempted setup for the end of the season.

(30:52) I mean, it’s not like the depiction of the North as really xenophobic was accidental. We’ve got the white kids running away because eeeek, scary black lady. We’re about to have a scene where Missandei and Grey Worm both acknowledge how uncomfortable they find the metaphorically chilly reception.

And yet we’re still supposed to be sympathetic to Northern independence and the desire of the Northerners to insulate themselves further from the outside world?

(31:47) Missandei says she wants to see Naath again, Grey Worm says he’ll take her there, we all know that one or both of these people aren’t surviving.

(32:15) While show!Sam has good reason not to like Jon’s girlfriend, and an understandable reason to think of hurting her while being rather oblivious to the pain his friend is in, I think it’s worth mentioning here that Sam only speaks about the R+L=J thing in terms of politics and its impact on Dany. He will not be alone in this. Jon’s reticence and awkwardness this episode look like they bamfed in from a different (better-written) series. Jon and Jon alone right now is treating this as a major blow to his sense of identity, but because nobody else does and the plot thread goes nowhere this doesn’t come across very well.

(33:23) Another neat encapsulation of why show!Sam is a terrible adaptation of book!Sam. Book!Sam doesn’t need to prove his worth through acts of physical courage; book!Sam’s intelligence and emotional courage were valuable and praiseworthy the entire time, and it’s about him recognising that. Not even proving it to his buddies.

(34:02) I’m honestly surprised that Cogman didn’t go for a variation of Edd’s “We’ll defend the Wall to the last man.”/“Probably me” joke from ASoS.

(34:48) The implicit “look how different we are now” Jaime and Tyrion are doing might work better if Jaime’s character development wasn’t subject to rather abrupt retcons.

(35:16) Tyrion’s declaration that whoremongering is not an option for him anymore is one of those things that makes me thing that Cogman at least saw the script for the final episode. Imagine if the bombshell that Tyrion’s in love with Dany came all the way out of nowhere. Instead of most of the way out of nowhere.

(36:11) It’s also a good way of showing Brienne’s feelings for Jaime in this public setting where the character would be more reserved that where she has no trouble saying “nah, not interested” to sitting down for a drink with Tyrion, when Jaime asks she’s all “sure, okay.”

(36:24) But then, as if to announce “this is where the secondary will be keeping themselves busy while the A list do more important things,” Davos wanders into the scene. Tyrion and Jaime got the extra minute because they used to be plot-relevant. Remember those days? Things were simpler then.

(36:34) Because the Tormund-likes-Brienne thing wasn’t content with remaining annoying, it takes a turn for the creepy as Tormund advances into the scene, leering, behind Brienne whose apprehensive face is in focus.

(39:24) I know the Arya-Sandor dynamic is apparently a fan favourite but for the life of me I do not understand the appeal. Especially in latter seasons, when Sandor’s turned his back on character development and Arya’s pretty much an empty shell. There’s nothing to contrast anymore.

That, and in the past few seasons the writers’ idea of deep conversations for Sandor and Arya has involved a lot of swear words, a reasonable amount of ableism, and misogyny running the gamut from veiled to naked. So appealling!

(40:22) Characters seeking comfort in their faith before a battle? What sort of nonsense is that? Again, this is a worldbuilding issue. A world in which the Sparrow movement got to be so powerful is unlikely to be one where characters are so thoroughly unempathetic and profoundly lacking in understanding of why people find comfort in religion.

(41:02) Arya practicing archery at Winterfell is anothere nice callback to season one.

(40:08) Urgh, yeah, this is precisely the way to start a romantic scene, have one party coldly ask the other if their sexual assault was the first time they’d had sex. It’s a tone thing – if Arya was sympathetic instead of brisk, then it sounds like she wants to share a good expereience with him, instead of running roughshod over any pain and trauma that being tied down and having leeches put on his genitals caused Gendry in search of information about how good a lay he’s likely to be.

(42:53) Valid reason for wanting to jump someone’s bones.

(43:53) I know this scene made a fair few people uncomfortable, since they still saw Arya as a child. This is not helped by the show not giving a good sense of the passage of time. Tommen overtook Arya’s aging. Cersei’s been pregnant for how long now? So it’s incredibly unclear how old Arya’s supposed to be.

Then there’s the fact that the last time Arya saw Gendry, she was unmistakeably a child, and her crush on him was a child’s crush. The last information we got about Arya and romance she was processing why she liked looking at him with his shirt off and why she wanted him to keep travelling with her. In the time they’ve spent apart, none of Arya’s development has even touched on her sexual maturity. The relationship went from the Westerosi equivalent of “he’s not my boyfriend! I just happen to be here every time he’s working in the forge shirtless!” to “let’s fuck in the courtyard” with only a few scenes of flirting to cover the gap. This is a case where a relationship picking up where it left off really could have used a little more work, I think.

(44:12) That said, I’m not sure cutting to another Tyrion-led scene of people drinking and making small talk is an improvement. I got enough of that in Meereen season six.

(44:48) Tyrion brings up the fact that Davos survived the Battle of the Blackwater. Tyrion. To Davos. And Davos makes a quip. I guess the writers kinda forgot about Davos’ only son dying a horrible fiery death as a result of Tyrion’s plan to defend the city.

(44:54) Don’t really care that Jaime is now the hero of the siege of Pyke. Whatever. He stole that from Jorah a while back.

(45:24) Here’s where another “oh god, another Tyrion party” becomes the best scene in the episode and, for whatever it’s worth, probably the best scene in the entire season (even though I think it’s narratively important to Jaime’s arc that he recognises Brienne’s worth independent of the prompting he gets here; oh well never mind since his character arc’s going to be disintegrated it doesn’t matter, I’m glad we made something of his character while we had it). The acting and direction here show the lie of Brienne’s denial that she doesn’t even want to be a knight.

(46:08) It’s also a nice touch that Brienne looks to Pod to see what he makes of this; after seasons of her berating him and kicking him around like a bloody football, it’s something that shows her affection for him.

(46:54) And I do like the choice to show the closeup of Jaime’s remaining flesh-and-blood hand on his sword. Chemistry between the actors, direction, music, all come together to get something genuine and emotional out of this moment even when the show’s stripped down all discussion of what it means to be a knight.

(48:05) Okay, good scene over. It’s all downhill from here. Unless you count the credits to this episode, they’re also pretty good.

(48:27) Cogman did remember that these two are both Mormonts.

(49:25) While arming a main character with a Valyrian steel sword right before this big important fight is clearly a good idea, this again reminds me of the conflict foregone at the end of last season where Jorah was absolutely fine with the idea of Jon. Never mind that Jon’s got the Mormont sword from Jeor’s own hands and was winning the love of the woman Jorah wanted. Jealousy? Nah. Jorah’s fine with the fact that Jon got everything Jorah wanted in his adult life. Who needs conflict in their story anyway!

And also this reminds me that there were precisely no consequences for Sam taking Heartsbane.

(51:00) And another good moment here. Finishing ‘Jenny of Oldstones’ is definitely the best thing Weiss did for this season. Montage works here too, no complaints.

(52:29) But we’re not done yet! Oh no, that would have been a good place to leave off. This being season eight, we’re not going to do that. With all the couples in the montage having their moment, we’ve got our leads wanting to have theirs.

(53:48) So Jon goes through the reveal with Dany.

(54:27) Ugh, we’re still going with that Aegon Targaryen name, as well as the ‘real name’ business. Is that what you think of yourself as?

(54:54) Dany goes through the idea that the sources here are a little suspect. Thanks for applying some critical thinking! You’re in season eight, you don’t need it.

(55:13) And Dany reacts with the political implications. Much like Sam did, and Bran as well. Much like Sansa will. There is no exploration on what this revelation means for Jon personally, nor any examination of what this tells us about Ned.

Oh, and also, I’m just going to get the fire foam out, because Dany’s realised that this revelation may pose a serious threat to her goals, and clearly her dismay means that she’s one step closer to lighting major population centres on fire.

(55:26) Before we can discuss any of this, any of the politics, the emotional issues, the surprise incest, the horn goes and the dead arrive. Having brought up one last real point of conflict, Cogman has the entire army of the dead knock on the door, nopes out of dealing with it, and ends the episode.

On the upside, we get the Florence + The Machine version of ‘Jenny of Oldstones’ to play us out.