After an obnoxiously long dragon-riding scene last week, and leading into a large-scale battle, Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff need to save some of that CGI budget in between. So: time for a bottle episode!
Everyone is stuck in Winterfell—Tormund, Eyepatch Fire-Sword, and their crew now included—all of them waiting for the dead to drag their asses over for a showdown teased ever since Eddard Stark wouldn’t shut the hell up about winter coming from the very first season.
As seen in the final moments of last week’s episode, Jaime Lannister has also returned to Winterfell, now with a new perspective and dopier hairstyle. And he’s forced to answer to a tribunal of Daenerys, Sansa, and Jon.
Dany is still pretty pissed about how Jaime got a badass nickname from killing her dad. Sansa accepts him after Brienne’s endorsement of Jaime being a good man she would almost certainly “do.” Jon is, typically, just like, “Yeah, but have I mentioned how there’s an army of ice zombies coming? I’m cool with absolutely anyone helping with that, because it’s an army of ice zombies. Which is weird because ice isn’t even really a thing like fire is. It’s just water that’s cold. Who builds an undead army based on that? But anyway, yeah, that’s fine.”
Thusly, Jaime is in.
Dany heads off to likewise make some uneasy peace with Sansa, but she’s all patronizing about it, Dany clutching her hands over Sansa’s like she gave a child a dollar for being so sweet.
Anyway, now is when Game of Thrones goes full Star Wars, forming a battle plan foregrounded by all these known characters and no one who should actually be involved. Don’t worry about Winterfell’s generals; we’ve got a cool hunk of a Lannister in here now to be our Han Solo, abruptly showing up to go from distrusted rogue to this side’s military higher-up. There are Thanksgiving dinners where you’ll know less people around a table.
After they make the vaguest of plans, so careful to avoid spoilers even in-world, the crew’s most disgraced, disfigured members hand off a couple redemptive apologies to Bran. Theon is all, “Yeah, I’ll protect Bran, because even though the best fighter should protect him, because Bran has been vocally acknowledged as the main goal of the Night King, I should do it instead, purely out of guilt,” and everyone is fine with that. Then Jaime is like, “So, any hard feelings about me shoving you out a window to permanently cripple you for examining my incest?” And Bran is like, “Well, I’ve ascended to that insane level you see near the bottom of the glowing-brain memes, so it’s cool.”
Cool.
Meanwhile, Arya has been repeating last week’s reunions. She checks in on Hound, who’s out drinking on a bridge—soon with Eyepatch Fire-Sword. She leaves almost immediately, because why is Eyepatch Fire-Sword even here, anyway? She, like us, assumes he must have been a bigger deal in the books, because now he just seems ham-fisted in there.
Arya then moves on to her old friend Gendry, to whom she reveals that the Battle of Winterfell is the high school graduation of her wanting to laid before. Finally, they fuck, and she’s nonverbally like, “Egh… That was fine.”
Off in some room with a fireplace, Tyrion, Jaime, Tormund, Brienne, Brienne’s squire guy, Davos (done with his duties at the soup kitchen)—an entire sub-clique of the cool kids—are chugging wine and telling stories. Like that story of when Tormund was sucking on a giant’s tit. But the more important story is the social progress that’s made.
After it’s acknowledged that Brienne isn’t a knight solely because she’s a woman, Jaime tosses out a fact we’ll just assume to be true: any knight can knight anyone else. He has the invite code! So, nearly redeeming what an absolute bottle episode this is, Jaime knights Brienne, and she is tearfully loving it. Who hasn’t done that drunk, though, right?
Later, in the crypts, Jon is gazing at a statue with the same blank sadness he gives humans. Dany is also for some reason in the crypts, and immediately starts going on about the statue’s significance to her family. Jon stops her, though.
“Hey,” he says, “being in these crypts reminds me of how yesterday in these crypts I was told the same hardcore shit I’m about to dump on you: I’m a Targaryen, etc.
Giving a real red flag to her lover, Dany is mostly just concerned about how that will screw with her being heir to the throne. Like, we’re not going to even talk about how that knowledge screws with him, or how she screwed her nephew?
Apparently not. The horns of “those ice fuckers are coming” blow, and everyone’s off to settle that.
What a crazy night! (Of the Seven Kingdoms.)
