7.7 The Dragon And The Wolf Much like the show, the characters are also moving with serious energy and purpose. While Game Of Thrones is bumping up against time constraints, the characters are fighting to keep up with an army that doesn’t need to eat or sleep. The Night King’s forces are constrained to move at walking speed, but aside from last week’s distraction, they seem to be moving steadily south. In the relative warmth of King’s Landing, seven season’s worth of warring factions are trying to find common ground, while in Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, the dead are only growing stronger with every squabble and scrap. Time is not on the side of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, but the show is making great use of expanded episodes. The Dragon And The Wolf is nearly an hour and a half of screen time, and it packs so much into that running time that it feels like a blur of familiar faces, tense show-downs, and some brilliant acting. The whole season has been a cavalry charge towards the series finale, but while the show is picking up the pace, it seems like no sub-plot is being neglected in its attempt to square things away. Every character seems to have history with every other character, once Euron stomps off after seeing just how dangerous a zombie can be. Brienne and Jaime Lannister have a brief reunion. Tyrion, Pod, and Bronn come back together for a reminder of the old times. Daenerys and Cersei have their first face-to-face meeting. The Hound gets to talk to Brienne about how she nearly killed him and how Arya is still alive and more than capable of taking care of herself. Tyrion, unsurprisingly, makes the point of the night: all they have between one another is death and suffering and loss, and if they wanted more of the same, they wouldn’t be holding a meeting to try and turn their collective attention towards the real threat to the Seven Kingdoms. There might be a bigger threat to the north, but it’s clear from the very beginning of this episode that none of these people really trust one another. Daenerys shows up with force. The Unsullied and Dothraki march right to the walls of King’s Landing. Cersei has her battlements manned and prepared, right down to having boiling oil and pitch ready to dump on the screamers and eunuchs. The harbour bristles with Greyjoy sails and ships, a massive fleet the type of which hasn’t been seen in Westeros in decades. Daenerys even keeps Cersei and Jon waiting while she makes a grand entrance on the back of one of her two dragons. It’s posturing. Cersei, being the most astute politician of the bunch, has to prove that she’s the biggest, baddest, and most dangerous of the bunch, and that’s where Lena Headey’s acting brilliance shines through in almost every scene. In many ways, The Dragon And The Wolf is a throwback to the show’s earlier seasons. Mostly, it’s characters talking to one another. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have a deep bench of interesting characters to bounce off one another, and they maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of character histories, so that when Bran starts reciting moments from the first season or Bronn references Pod’s impressive, err, Pod, it’s a fun moment for the fans that doesn’t involve #boatsex or special effects. It’s character comedy, at its essence, and it lends the show’s slower, heavier moments more weight. A lot of these people are friends with one another, and due to life’s machinations, they’re going to be standing on opposite sides of a battlefield from one another eventually. While Cersei’s machinations feel more organic, the Stark sisters coming together to recognise the threat in their midst doesn’t work quite as well. Yes, it’s fun to see Littlefinger squirming beneath the glare of Sansa Stark, and Aidan Gillen is great as Baelish’s smooth facade turns to outright begging—it’s a credit to him that even when he’s begging, Baelish feels like he’s working an angle rather than legitimately afraid for his life—but it still makes the awkwardness between Sansa and Arya in the previous episode seem like drama for the sake of drama. Similarly, the big reveal of Jon’s true parentage, which is known by everyone who watches the show but not by the show’s characters, seems slightly unnecessarily heavy-handed when inter-cut with scenes of romance between the King in the North and the Mother of Dragons. Granted, it’s only a small part of the episode, and Jeremy Podeswa doesn’t linger in Winterfell or on the boat for too long, because there’s still a giant ice dragon out there to contend with, and the Wall won’t stop a flying cat that breathes blue fire. The human beings seem to be aligning, aside from Cersei and Euron. But the threat that they face is bigger and more dangerous than even those who have been north of the Wall realise. Weirdly, only Cersei seems to know just how bad things are for Daenerys and her nephew, and she’s still bound and determined to stab her living allies in the back all the same. She’ll learn her lesson next season. Wickedness can’t go unpunished, even in Westeros, there’s no way Tyrion actually believes his sister’s sudden change of heart, and Jaime needs his heroic redemption arc. Just making eyes at Brienne from across a ruined dragon arena won’t be enough. Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, Beyond The Wall, here.
