Game Of Thrones: Season 7 – Episode 5 ‘Eastwatch’ REVIEW

After the ‘previously on’ reminded us about the Hound’s weird fire-vision of Eastwatch coming under attack, we have a new locale in the opening credits – they didn’t feature Casterly Rock or Highgarden, two of the regional capitals, but now they’re including Eastwatch. So anyone could be forgiven for thinking this place is going to be important.

First off, there’s some decompression after the climactic battle last week. Jaime and Bronn have survived, obviously, and resurface covered in mud, apart from Jaime’s golden hand. Bronn is mainly still invested in the Lannister cause – or specifically, keeping Jaime alive – because he was promised a castle, and dammit, he’s going to get a castle. Jaime broods on what it might be like if Daenerys turns loose all three dragons, since one was bad enough. Despite everything he’s just said, and what he did last week, Bronn claims that dragons are where he draws the line – I guess he did say dragons plural, and can perhaps cope with one.

While Tyrion wanders through the ashes, Daenerys is having a bit of a better time with the aftermath, gathering up the Lannister and Tarly survivors and suggesting they bend the knee while letting them get a good look at Drogon, who’s looking particularly vast today. Randyll isn’t having that, despite Tyrion’s desperate pleas for him to see sense, says that Daenerys isn’t his queen, and tells off the pro-Daenerys faction for being a bunch of foreigners.

As the dothraki drag him off, poor old Dickon pipes up saying they’ll have to kill him too – so despite Tyrion’s desperate pleas for him to see sense and keep their family name alive, this is what they do. Drogon burns both Tarlys alive, which apparently only takes a few seconds, and involves their silhouettes jigging about in the fire before falling over. They only scream once, on the initial impact of the flames, which seems wrong – particularly given Varys’s description of people being burned alive later on, and that time back in series 5 when Shireen was burned.

Jaime has walked back to King’s Landing already and is barely even panting. Cersei takes this crushing defeat very well, and reckons they can just hire a bunch of mercenaries even as Jaime insists they don’t have a chance, particularly since the scorpion only managed to tickle Drogon. However, she’s also willing to consider a diplomatic solution, given that Tyrion owes them one for killing Tywin. She also cites Joffrey, at which point Jaime drops how that was actually Olenna. Despite Cersei’s initial doubts, she’s perfectly prepared to believe it, because she may hate Tyrion, but she really hated Olenna.

Daenerys flies back to Dragonstone, where Jon is waiting in another classic album-cover pose. Drogon moseys on up to him being all scary, and Jon pats him on the nose, which Daenerys approves of. She and Jon talk about how awesome dragons are, and then finally she starts to bring up how Davos let slip that Jon literally came back from the dead – at which point Jorah returns and kills the mood completely. Daenerys is weirdly unsurprised to see his incurable skin condition has been cured, but then she routinely walks through fire, and her new pal, to reiterate, literally came back from the dead, so ‘normal’ doesn’t mean a whole lot to them.

Up in Winterfell, Bran is possessing a whole murder of crows at once and getting a bird’s-eye view of things. This is a far better use of his character than being creepy and weird – if you’re going to write someone as magic, let them be magic. When the crows cross over the Wall, he spots the Night’s King and his zombie army heading for Eastwatch, and is rudely reminded that they exist, so finally starts warning the rest of the country about it.

In the main hall, the lords Glover and Royce are mouthing off about Jon gallivanting off to Dragonstone, and how now they like Sansa better, you guys, despite having been in the meeting when they elected Jon king. Arya overhears it all, then suggests to Sansa they start cutting off heads. When Sansa doesn’t go for this, she accuses her of wanting to usurp Jon. They act impossibly catty for two sisters who are meant to have grown up a bit since they last saw each other in the first series – at one point, Arya attacks Sansa for having taken their parents’ old room, saying this is uppity instead of perfectly understandable – and really, this is just the Jon/Sansa tension redone only making less sense.

You may be thinking ‘wow, Littlefinger didn’t even need to turn them against each other!’ – and no, he didn’t, but he’s happy to fan the flames. Later on, Arya is stealthily watching him get up to evil things. We have no idea what evil things they are, but it’s Littlefinger and they’re doing the evil music, so it’s a safe guess. She sees him get an important document, and breaks into his room to find it’s the letter Sansa wrote to Robb way back in the first series telling him to bend the knee to Joffrey. As she leaves, we see Littlefinger watching her, so clearly he knew she was watching him and wanted him to find the letter. Criss cross.

(At one point, Sansa mentions Ghost. You remember Ghost, right? Apparently the writers do now, though the CGI artists clearly don’t.)

At the Citadel, the Archmaesters have received Bran’s letter – mere moments after he sent it, even though they’re at the other end of the continent – and are treating it with all the scepticism you’d hope they’d apply to someone whose information comes via magical animal kinship, with one of them suggesting it’s a ploy by Daenerys to distract everyone else. Luckily, they have Sam there, who has personally witnessed the white walkers and the zombie army, yet doesn’t lead with that. He tells the Archmaesters to just get on board, and quickly, since they have the reputation to get people to listen. They start smugly laughing about other wackadoodle mystics from history. Once he’s gone, one of them reasonably brings up how the guy’s father and brother were burnt alive earlier – but Archmaester Slughorn hasn’t let him know yet, so it can’t be a delusion borne of grief.

Later on, Sam is furiously doing his homework, while Gilly takes academia far more seriously than he does, approaching learning with a sense of joy and wonder that was meant to be his characterisation. She starts talking about a reference in the book she’s reading to some guy called Rhaegar having a secret second marriage – then Sam rudely interrupts her, because that couldn’t possibly be massively relevant to the story and to Jon Snow’s parentage.

In a fit of impotent rage, he breaks into the restricted section of the library again, ransacks it for scrolls that look important, and then skips town with Gilly and little Sam. If you’re not keeping track, he left Horn Hill last series after another serious act of theft, but amazingly, didn’t steal anything when he left Castle Black, which is the exception rather than the rule at this point. As with his dangerous experimental surgery on Jorah, it’ll probably ultimately turn out he was right to break every rule in the book.

Back on Dragonstone, Tyrion and Varys are drowning their sorrows. Varys draws a comparison between Tyrion watching the Tarlys burn, and how he, in the days of the Mad King, watched a whole bunch of people burn, while telling himself that it’s not him doing it. Varys seems to be the only one who remembers the last Targaryen ruler who went around burning people horribly – even Jaime only went for Daenerys in the heat of battle (and of course, he seems to have forgotten how Cersei burned down a large portion of King’s Landing).

His last-ditch hope is that Tyrion’s counsel can hold her back from the brink. This seems oddly optimistic for their resident practitioner of realpolitik. Tyrion has, so far, been utterly unable to restrain Daenerys’s more, shall we say, dragonish impulses. More to the point, though, the writers are depicting Daenerys as completely deranged when she doesn’t have men telling her what to do at every turn, so there’s the ‘representation’ they’re always talking about. And Varys and Tyrion are being presented as completely in the right when it seems what they actually want is a puppet monarch, doing exactly what they want.

Jon gets his copy of the letter from Bran, and is a little stunned – if nothing else, at the revelation that Bran is alive, and so is Arya. Then they finally get back to dealing with the army of ice zombies. Daenerys won’t help because it’d give Cersei the edge, so the plan quickly becomes ‘prove to Cersei there really are ice zombies’. While she won’t listen to Tyrion, Jaime will. This still leaves the matter of actual proof, so Jon starts planning an exciting adventure beyond the Wall to capture a wight.

Davos takes Tyrion on a quick jolly to King’s Landing. Despite it being wartime, they have absolutely no trouble sailing over there or getting inside the walls. We get a mention of how Tyrion’s wildfire plan killed Davos’s son, then it never comes up again. With Bronn’s help, Tyrion meets up with Jaime – it’s still a more heartwarming reunion than anything Bran managed, particularly as they move past Tyrion killing Tywin pretty quick.

Davos himself has gone off to meet up with everyone’s favourite meme, Gendry, and literally says he thought he might still be rowing. Gendry, who’s been back at the smithy the whole time, is eager to leap back into the plot, and appropriately for a meme, is bringing along a cartoon hammer. Two gold cloaks catch them on the way out, cheerfully take a bribe and a mouthful of fermented crab aphrodisiac – which Davos brought for some reason, possibly to fill time – and are all ready to let them go, when Tyrion turns up and expects not to be recognised. Luckily, Gendry smashes their heads in.

One of the gold cloaks is played by Kevin Eldon, who we last saw on Game of Thrones as head of the acting troupe Arya kept watching when she was meant to be learning to be a ninja. It’s entirely possible this was just some kind of rehearsal, and Gendry has killed two innocent mummers – well, not innocent, since they were impersonating policemen and soliciting bribes, but still.

Jaime goes to Cersei with Tyrion’s proposal for an armistice. Cersei had already known Tyrion had come to talk, and remains confident that no matter what fantasy beast gets thrown at them, they’ll be fine, because apparently her brotherlover wasn’t nearly roasted alive a short time ago. Her plan, as discussed last episode, is to bring in mercenaries. Then she casually drops that she’s pregnant, and is going to let everyone know that Jaime is the father. It’s not as if they’ve been trying to keep it secret recently anyway.

She also warns him to never betray her again, which…he hasn’t. He met with an emissary of an opposing force. Granted there’s personal history, but that’s perfectly kosher, that’s why people say ‘don’t shoot the messenger’. Beyond that, he’s repeatedly gone to bat for her, while she teases the idea of getting married to Euron (and how are they meant to square that with this new incest baby?).

Davos gets Gendry and Tyrion back to Dragonstone, and suggests Gendry not just disguise his heritage but go round calling himself ‘Clovis’, which lasts about five seconds. In the obsidian mines, Jon and Gendry meet and bond over being not just bastards, but the new and improved versions of their respective fathers. At the sight of boats, Tyrion and Jorah reminisce fondly about the time they were captured and enslaved. Daenerys comes out to wish them all luck, and then they’re off up to Eastwatch.

They arrive, meet up with Tormund, and also with the Hound, Beric, and Thoros, apparently the only members of the Brotherhood without Banners to survive the snowstorm. Gendry hates Beric and Thoros because they gave him to Melisandre, Tormund hates Jorah because he’s a Mormont, the Hound presumably hates everyone in the room, and this sort of mistrustful Dirty Dozen dynamic could have been a fun thing, but it doesn’t get the chance – Jon tells them all to stop being stupid and get with the program. So they head through the wall and off into the snow, without horses. They could even have sailed round, since they came up by boat, but no, they’re going on foot. This isn’t the Fellowship of the Ring, guys.

 

Predictions for next week

– Jon’s party freezes to death – ok, not really, but it’s likely they’ll come across more than one wight. Possibly lots more.
– Daenerys continues down the path of madness, because apparently only Tyrion and Varys have any awareness about that.
– Arya and Sansa have a tedious squabble and may or may not finally get around to killing Littlefinger.
– The baby adds a whole new level of internal conflict for Jaime.
– Sam is arrested for petty theft, or, more likely, becomes Lord of Horn Hill in spite of both his Night’s Watch and Maester’s vows.