Game of Thrones Season 7: Dragonstone
Fitting a show with the finish line in sight, the season premiere of Game of Thrones was pervaded with melancholy. From siblings remembering their dead parents, to soldiers trading stories of the folks back home, to fighters bickering over battles decades gone, Westeros welcomed us back with a trip through old memories. Even the camera got in on the action, recreating the opening shot of the series for the fifth or sixth time when Bran Stark and Meera Reed passed through the Wall and rejoined the land of the living.
When “Dragonstone” wasn’t bittersweet, it remembered old sins less with judgment than with blunt finality. The grim fruits of the Hound’s robberies, the unceremonious cleanup of the last vestiges of House Baratheon, and the debate over the betrayals of the Umbers and Karstarks all reminded us that the road to “Dragonstone” was paved with corpses great and small. Less mourned than catalogued, the dead haunting Westeros were arrayed through the narrative like the faces under Braavos. Their lives made for nostalgia in the mouths of friends and relations, but their deaths are only items on a very long ledger.
It’s Old Man Walder, who runs the amusement park!
This theme began with Arya Stark’s massacre of House Frey, accomplished with only a modicum of gloating. As with last season’s shoehorning of everyone’s favorite delicacy, Frey Pie, the logistics of her mass poisoning don’t bear much thinking about. But David Bradley’s swan song on the show, inhabiting Walder Frey’s skin while that skin was inhabited by Arya’s vengeful presence, was a great touch. And for long-suffering fans of book and show alike, some narrative folds and spindles can be forgiven in the name of giving us what we’ve all wanted…hella dead Freys.
But where did all those weasel-faced corpses get Arya? Where revenge gets everyone in Westeros — reciting old wrongs, traversing old paths, perhaps remembering better rides through the Riverlands where the end of the road held a loved family and an exciting future. In that light, her encounter with Lannister soldiers is less about humanizing the mooks of the regime, and more about rehumanizing Arya, whose tenuous connection to her identity is now mostly expressed through targeted violence. The campfire scene was terrific, an example of Thrones’s strengths in tending to the mundane and coloring in the sketchy edges of George R.R. Martin’s world. And as an inveterate book nerd, it was nice to hear Symon Silver Tongue’s fatal composition out loud. My love and appreciation can be bought with easter eggs.
Another book nod, Sandor Clegane’s turn as a remorseful gravedigger, was a different sort of melancholy. The show’s excision of Lady Stoneheart scooped the Riverlands plot hollow and altered many arcs, chief among them Jaime Lannister’s, in a way that irreparably tarnished the story’s themes. But as consolation prizes go, it’s hard to knock the weary survival of Beric Dondarrion, the show’s roguish take on Thoros of Myr, and their interplay with Rory McCann’s stellar Sandor Clegane. The former Hound has anchored the show’s black comedy and muddy cynicism for years; now, with winter rising, he faced the supernatural stakes of the War for the Dawn head-on, drawn in by the companionship of his fellow wounded, weary soldiers. Their gruff vulnerability was a nice turn away from last season’s affected bloodlust, and actually put all that bickering over executions in a better light. It’s easier to excuse a show for posturing when the posturing is being done by the characters themselves.
There was posturing aplenty in King’s Landing, where a freshly barbered Euron Greyjoy did everything short of drop his pants and invite Jaime Lannister to grab a tape measure. As a fervent subscriber to the Eldritch Apocalypse, and more generally Euron’s place as the story’s grandiose supernatural villain, I remain underwhelmed by his adaptation. Pilou Asbaek is doing yeoman’s work with the material he’s given, but his slippery, slightly unhinged corsair isn’t a patch on the world-spanning ambition and existential madness of the Crow’s Eye. There’s still hope that in fetching Queen Cersei his promised gifts, he’ll show us some horrors behind his sadly metaphorical eyepatch, but it’s as fleeting as a pirate’s promise.
“Wait! I need a haircut. That’ll make me look trustworthy.”
The Lannisters themselves drifted further into paranoia, presiding over a court shorn of its colorful populace as neatly as Jaime’s been separated from his awakened conscience. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau does petulance and frustration very well, but among the many reasons to be melancholy, “Remember when we just thought Jaime Lannister was a whiny, incestuous Elite Mook?” is not among them. But his subtle and profound horror at his sister’s dismissal of Tommen’s suicide leaves hope that the gripping, heart-wrenching clash promised by prophecy is in the offing. Cersei, meanwhile, has achieved her Mad Queen final form and seems to be having the time of her life.
By contrast, Cersei’s northern counterpart seemed to suffer from a lack of posturing. The King In the North unceremoniously outlined his expectations of his new bannermen, and quickly welcomed the surviving Umbers and Karstarks back into the fold. But what court-trained Sansa read as the naivete that doomed the last two Lords of Winterfell was instead an example of the Northern political model which ensured that Ned Stark’s line would outlive him. By overlooking the personal disloyalty of the late Lords Umber and Karstark, and instead calling attention to their families’ generations of loyal service, Lord Snow both reinforced the idea of the North as a realm apart, with its own customs and history distinct from the Andal kingdoms of the south, and stressed the meaninglessness of the “great game.” Related to traitors or not, Alys Karstark and Ned Umber are needed in the wars to come.
It was an act fitting the Jon Snow of the books, a skilled and thoughtful leader endangered by the boldness of his reforms, rather than the straightforward and occasionally not terribly smart Jon we’ve seen in the last few seasons. More of this would be welcome if that fur cloak is to fit him. As for Sansa, a well-considered misstep in an unfamiliar court doesn’t damage her too much, but after season upon season of victimization and mistrust, it’s not too much to hope that Sansa finds her footing soon…preferably at the expense of Petyr Baelish, who looks less useful to the coalition with every flake of snow.
Sophie Turner is taller than 3/4 of the cast now.
For fans eagerly awaiting The Winds of Winter, and the book-canonical version of events, there’s precious little to mine from this episode. We can assume Jon’s resurrection and assumption of power, Arya’s vengeful return, Cersei’s claiming of a blood-soaked throne. If we squint, we can see Daenerys making landfall on Dragonstone, and Sansa rallying the Vale to take back her birthright. But with Stannis Baratheon and Roose Bolton still extant, Aegon VI Targaryen(?) and Arianne Martell as significant players, and the Tyrells plentiful and thriving, the path to all the events we’ve seen in Game of Thrones is long and winding. It’s hard to imagine most of “Dragonstone” taking place in the books in any but the broadest strokes.
But for all that, two scenes in this episode landed with the weight of a fresh hardcover on the doorstep. First was the march of the dead, where the by-now familiar figure of Night’s King, his retinue, and his army was overshadowed by the horrifying immensity of giant fucking wights. You are heretofore forgiven, Thrones, for leaving out the bear, and if you make the big bastards fight well enough, I might even let you off the hook for what you did to the direwolves. The second, of course, was Daenerys Targareyen setting foot and palm on her native soil, a scene so weighty and affecting that it was presented almost entirely without words. I will do the same.
To be honest, the segment went on for a bit longer than it needed to, considering our lack of attachment as viewers to the halls of Dragonstone itself. (This was also true of poor Sam Tarly’s montage of tedium and revulsion, which hit its comic beats ten seconds in and then just…kept…going.) With the end in sight, every minute is precious. But in slowing down, memorializing old friends and foes, and carefully shifting game pieces a square at a time, “Dragonstone” asked us to remember Westeros as it was, in preparation for what it will become. And in a show that has too often forgotten the books’ undercurrent of romanticism while wallowing in spectacle and misery, it’s heartening to be reminded, on the eve of the apocalypse, why we visited this world in the first place.
