Given the events of this week’s episode, such as they are, I’m slightly regretting the statistical metrics I’m using. Who’d have thought sex and death could get so complicated?
KILLINGS
None – wait, what? Seriously? Yes, no deaths at all, unless I missed an extra falling from the ramparts in the background. No fight scenes, no blood, and no bodies, which is always a shock coming from HBO, and from Game of Thrones in particular – if you can cite another episode where nobody died I’d like to hear it.
Cersei doesn’t appear, so you can’t even say she’s killing her unborn child with wine. On a similar subject, as the episode’s one sex scene didn’t appear to involve contraception, it’s possible that it actually covered the creation of a life – so I suppose minus one point for that. I realise this is an unusual response to a possible conception
GRATUITOUS SEX
As said, only the one – Arya and Gendry. It’s spun as ‘well, if we’re going to die, may as well’, but it’s the fulfilment of a mutual crush from their younger days. You know, when Arya was literally a child. To be fair, Maisie Williams is in her twenties, but both we and the showrunners have known her as Arya Stark since she was literally eleven, so it leaves a slightly off taste. And the showrunners manoeuvring someone they knew as a pre-teen into a sex scene is uncomfortably reminiscent of the time in season five when they threw all logic and consistency out the window in order to stick Sansa into a rape scene.
The lead-up is similarly foul-tasting, with Gendry being reminded of the time Melisandre seduced him in order to steal his blood (a scene of sexualised torture which the show has consistently played off as a joke), and Arya interrogating him about his sexual history. Yes, it’s on-topic, but put it this way, it doesn’t exactly set the mood. It honestly seems as if the writers have come up with a way to have women disliking other women while only needing to have one onscreen, which will surely save them a lot of time.
DRAGONS
None in this category as well? Bloody hell. Is this Game of Thrones, or Days of Our Lives?
God knows it costs many times a reasonable salary to create the beasts, but you’d think they could have them flying about in the background fairly easily. Then again, there is the real danger of overusing them. Spectacular as they are, seeing too much of them would take out some of the magic – and really, having dragons without the magic just seems vulgar.
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