Game of Thrones season 7 power rankings: Gendry, where are you man?

Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham, background) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have been kept extremely busy in Season 7 of "Game of Thrones." Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham, background) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have been kept extremely busy in Season 7 of "Game of Thrones." Photo: Helen Sloan/courtesy Of HBO Photo: Helen Sloan/courtesy Of HBO Image 1 of / 44 Caption Close Game of Thrones season 7 power rankings: Gendry, where are you man? 1 / 44 Back to Gallery

Two episodes into the seventh season of "A Game of Thrones" and most of the tension remains coiled rather than sprung. But enough has happened to prompt a little shuffling around in our weekly "GOT" power rankings. For one, I mistakenly assumed that because I thought Cersei was doomed that she'd go swiftly. She will not, obviously. And I greatly underestimated her potential alliance with Euron Greyjoy, who concluded the second episode in grisly, epic fashion by ambushing his niece and nephew and wiping out their forces with relative ease.

He still strikes me as a narrative tool rather than a power player. But narrative tools -- especially chaos agents -- often stick around a while on this show. So Cersei moves up, Euron moves up. And a few others returned or made some minor moves: Varys, Melisandre.

And we head into the third episode with Jon Snow heading to meet Daenerys, which could be interesting or disastrous.

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Andrew Dansby is a pop culture writer at the Houston Chronicle. But as a young editorial assistant at the Spectra division of Bantam Books in the mid-1990s working with George R.R. Martin's editor, Dansby attained a unique distinction among all "A Game of Thrones" enthusiasts: No person spent more time Xeroxing manuscript pages for the first volume of Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. Seven hundred book pages amounted to well over 1,000 manuscript pages, a tedious and epic conflict at the copier that resulted in scores of paper cuts. That doesn't give him any particular insight into how the televised version of Martin's story will play out in its two final seasons. It's just proof that his love for Martin's story was more begrudgingly earned than yours.