Game of Thrones: Season 7 – Episode 7 ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ REVIEW

So, here it is – the final episode before the last season, where Game of Thrones will finally have to throw all possible restraint to the wind and deliver seven solid hours of people having sex and fighting ice zombies at the same time. I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly looking forward to it.

Grey Worm and the Unsullied have finally managed to walk their way back into the narrative – they’re forming up outside the walls of King’s Landing, with Jaime and Bronn watching all worried, and that’s before the dothraki turn up to help. The dothraki’s arrival also puts the kibosh on Bronn’s theories about the motivations of the cockless, although he was mainly confused as to why those without genitals would bother fighting or indeed doing anything at all.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is gearing up for another set-piece battle scene – instead it’s all a big staring-down contest to lay the background for the peace summit at the dragonpit. And we get some half-decent worldbuilding over the course of the episode regarding the dragonpit, with explanations of how the Targaryens kept their dragons in it resulting directly in the dragons’ growth being stunted, and, in a departure from the book canon, placing the dragonpit outside King’s Landing proper to avoid the risk of everyone being eaten or set on fire. Which does at least seem sensible.

Bronn greets the Targaryen party on the way, and we have another game of character mix-and-match, though this time it’s mainly reunions – Tyrion and Bronn, Tyrion and Pod, Brienne and the Hound (the time she nearly killed him being water under the bridge), and not to forget, when Cersei’s party arrives, the Hound and the Mountain, at which point the Hound proceeds to tease them eventually fighting, just not yet. Despite Bronn enjoying being called ‘my lord’, he decides all these negotiations are too upper-crust for him and takes Pod off for a drink.

Tyrion opens the negotiations, and barely gets the first words out before Euron interrupts to taunt Theon, call Tyrion a shortarse, and generally be evil. Between Euron being Euron, and Jaime being the only one in Cersei’s party not to be dressed entirely in black with optional evil metallic highlights, it’s hard to see how they’re not all thinking ‘are we the baddies?’ – but then, Daenerys’s party are dressed pretty monochrome as well. (Speaking of whom, she shows up late and in style, with her dragons, which really shouldn’t have surprised anyone at this point.)

Confronted by the idea of the army of the dead, Cersei makes one of those classic zinger about death being an improvement for most of the population of King’s Landing. Jon tells her to to take this seriously, clearly barely restraining himself from calling her a soft bloody Southerner. She is, naturally, very sceptical about the friendly proposal that she pull back all her armies, so after far more pleasantries than was really necessary, the Hound brings out their prisoner.

Having opened the box, there is a long moment where nothing happens. Ultimately the Hound has to tip the wight out of it, and it instantly perks up, running screaming right at Cersei. Even though she has her entire queensguard with her, none of them think to do anything, and the Hound has to grab the wight’s leash to stop this turning from a peace summit into an unfortunate accident. He cuts it in half, and Jon demonstrates how you can kill wights with either fire or obsidian – even though ordinary swords seemed to be doing the job fine last episode. Qyburn, our resident Frankenstein, is subtly very excited by the whole situation.

Having established wights can’t swim – because falling in the water was also doing the job fine last episode – Euron immediately nopes right out of there and suggests everyone else do the same. Cersei does now start taking the army of the dead seriously, even though as the mirth-makers have been pointing out for the last few weeks, she knows zombies exist, she’s got one standing right next to her.

Cersei is willing to give the truce a go, if the King in the North stays neutral. Now, just as a reminder, the fact of Jon’s being King in the North means he, and the rest of the North, and also the Vale, are in open rebellion against the Iron Throne. Cersei recognising that is actually ceding a hell of a lot of ground – quite literally, given the size of the North. Jon says he can’t given that he’s bent the knee to Daenerys. This prompts Cersei to go off in a huff.

Everyone starts ragging on Jon’s stupid honour. Jon says he’s sick of lies. Tyrion follows Cersei back to the city to negotiate further. They bring out their respective family baggage, but, having repeatedly accused Tyrion of wanting to destroy their family, Cersei understandably can’t bring herself to kill him, even when he tells her to pull her finger out and do it. He also figures out she’s pregnant – which it’s hard to guess if much will come off, as it’s always been hard to guess the timescale. There’s only one season left and it may not span nine months.

Tyrion insists he loved Myrcella and Tommen as well, which Cersei really doesn’t like hearing but inwardly accepts. Joffrey? Well, best not bring that up. Then they get onto the merits of Daenerys as a queen – Tyrion claims he’s keeping her worst impulses in check, and that she’ll make the world a better place. Cersei snaps back claiming she doesn’t care about checking her worst impulses, or about making the world a better place (‘are we the baddies?’) – but that the wight did scare the hell out of her.

It’s a very well-acted scene – it’s been far too long since Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey shared a scene, for one thing, and they are now the cast’s biggest fish – so it’s really just a shame that the writing boils down to them recapping their respective motivations. Nobody needs that reminder. Certainly the fanbase of this show don’t, given that most could tell you what both these characters spent their teen years getting up to.

Back in the dragonpit, Daenerys is telling Jon she should have trusted him from the start while making goo-goo eyes at him. Then Cersei’s party returns, which seems like an awkward commute, and Cersei declares she’s going to help them fight the army of the dead after all. Hooray!

Shortly after, once Daenerys’s party are gone, Jaime is making preparations to lead their army North only for Cersei to tell him it was all a lie, and that Euron didn’t actually nope out of there, he’s ferrying the Golden Company over from Essos. She reasons their best bet is staying out of this nonsense with the army of the dead, since either side would probably beat them, and, via a bit of a reach, has worked out that Daenerys is one dragon down. Jaime finds all this a bit much. She tells him not to walk away from her, but can’t bring herself to kill this brother either – so Jaime heads North on his own.

We then have a brief interlude of some lovely aerial shots of King’s Landing as a little snow starts to fall. It’s filler-y, but if we must have filler (which is a big if in an episode that’s well over an hour) it’s nice that it’s filler that treats this rich fantasy world like a rich fantasy world and gives the narrative some room to breathe, rather than, for instance, a scene of LARPers in the woods practising kissing.

Over on Dragonstone, there’s a minor debate over whether Daenerys should take her dragons up North, or travel with the rest of the gang. Jorah counsels caution, Jon suggests they try and look more like a team. To nobody’s surprise, Daenerys goes with Jon, and also follows his advice (I kid, I kid).

Theon sidelines Jon on the way out, to blurt out all his Freudian issues about being neither fully Greyjoy nor fully Stark. Jon reassures Theon that despite appearances, his life hasn’t been perfect (only his hair), and refers to Ned as father to both of them. Theon brings up how Yara tried to rescue him from the Dreadfort, and Jon asks what he’s still doing standing around talking about it.

So Theon heads down to the beach to try and get the remaining ironborn (seriously, there’s about fifteen of them) to go on an exciting rescue mission. But they have other plans, specifically to find a nice island and get all rapey on the inhabitants. One of them takes a swing at him, and is beating the hell out of him until he makes the tactical error of trying to kick him in the balls. Obviously invulnerable in that area, Theon turns the fight around, beats the guy to death, and gets the others onboard with his rescue mission.

Up in Winterfell, Sansa is a little miffed that Jon has given up being king without consulting with her. Littlefinger points out that Daenerys is said to be real purdy, and that both she and Jon are single – and while he’s bang on the money there, he’s quickly back to his old tricks, using tenuous hypotheticals to try and get Sansa to distrust Arya.

So, Sansa has Arya called into the great hall, and starts delivering charges of treason and murder – only to reveal, shock horror, she’s laying these charges against Littlefinger instead! What a long overdue twist! Littlefinger lamely tries a defence of ‘you can’t prove I betrayed Ned’, only for Bran to reveal he used his mystic mind-powers to see it happen. Besides which, there’s plenty of other grounds on which to execute him, most of which Sansa was there for.

Both Bran and Sansa get a go at throwing his own words back in his face, and his appeal to the Vale forces – always tenuous, resting on one disturbed and slightly dim boy hundreds of miles away – is naturally shut down. So he begs for his life, and Arya kills him, which, yes, it’s well-deserved – but it doesn’t quite feel earned. The Starklings worked together, which is good, but the process of them working together happened entirely offscreen but for the eventual payoff. Since they reunited, what we’ve actually seen of them is Sansa and Arya hating each other, and Bran basically off doing his own thing.

Speaking of which, Sam then shows up in Winterfell (how’d he know to go there, instead of to the Wall? They’ll probably explain later) and reunites with Bran, the only person there he actually knows. Bran announces, as is his way, that he’s now the three-eyed raven, which Sam responds to with utter bemusement. Then he finally reveals Jon’s heritage to someone else, a full series late. We get a flashback of Rhaegar and Lyanna tying the knot, as was suggested by the annulment Sam discovered earlier this series, and Jon’s real name is revealed as Aegon Targaryen.

As this is happening, we cut away to Jon knocking on Daenerys’s door and them immediately having sex. Tyrion lurks down the corridor, presumably as vindicated by this development as all the fans who’ve been clamouring for it, and not to forget all the reviewers who’ve been telling them to just fuck already this whole series. As the camera does a discretion cut to the outside of the ship, Bran declares in voiceover ‘we need to tell him’.

This encounter bears a striking resemblance to a passage from Alan Partridge: Nomad, in which Alan tackles the thorny subject of inbreeding: ‘in centuries gone by, before technological advances such as the motor car or Tinder made it easy for people to make more genetically advisable choices, it was inevitable that on a cold winter’s night, when everyone else in the house was asleep, a randy brother might walk down the corridor and gently knock on his sister’s door’.

(Due to centuries of Targaryen inbreeding, Jon and Daenerys actually share far more genetic material than the average brother and sister – even more than Jaime and Cersei, in fact, which is particularly impressive given that their parents, Tywin and Joanna, were first cousins.)

We do now get a scene where Sansa and Arya aren’t actively spitting bile at each other – in fact, they manage to say some nice things. Arya notes that she just killed Littlefinger, and it was Sansa who gave the order. Think back to the first series and you may remember this as the exact opposite of how Ned taught the children to rule in Winterfell, though to be fair he only told the boys that. Anyway, now perhaps they can focus on the looming threat of the huge ice zombie army, instead of contrived family squabbles.

Finally, up at Eastwatch, Tormund spots the army of the dead coming up to the Wall. This is enough to panic him – then the Night’s King rocks up on zombie Viserion and starts breathing blue fire on the Wall, which doesn’t just melt it but blows it apart. With a big hole torn through the Wall, the endless stream of wights walk right through and into Westeros proper. And since Tormund and Beric were on top of the Wall when this happened, I don’t fancy their chances much.

So, that’s that. All the pieces are in place for full-on dragon-on-zombie warfare – and, even better, dragon-on-dragon action. Whether this will actually be taking place at the same time as Jon and Daenerys doing each other and never stopping remains to be seen.

 

Predictions for next series

– Obviously Jon and Daenerys have an unpleasant surprise coming their way – particularly as Jon has a better claim to the throne than her.
– With Dragonstone now vacated, Euron and the Golden Company may take it over, since it’s right there on their way to King’s Landing, or they may just ignore it like apparently everyone had been doing until Daenerys arrived.
– With the benefit of being a named character, and with Jaime AWOL, Bronn is now the Lannisters’ nominal field commander – just as soon as he and Pod get back from the pub.
– Cleganebowl. Obviously. They had the Hound unsubtly hype it up in this episode, after all.
– As they’ve gone to the trouble of actually casting a Rhaegar Targaryen, we might get some more flashbacks to Robert’s Rebellion? Though this is less likely since they’ll be wanting to save that for the spinoff.

All images courtesy of HBO