Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5 Discussion Thread: “The Bells”

Jon Snow will continue to be the useless little shit he is, & Arya will kill Daenerys. Jon will be all mopey on the Iron Throne with Tyrion as his drunken & depressed Hand. 

Iiiiiis Arya dead? 

That was Cersei’s death!??? After all she’s done? Why does she get to die being held by a loved one? , she deserved far worse….wtf

I have watched 8 years for THIS????

And Cersei died much too easily & comforted by Jamie.

 Is there even an iron throne left?

Very disappointed…

Episode three of season eight had the most utterly incompetent battle plan I have ever seen depicted on television and movies, and that’s saying a lot given how utterly asinine they usually are. It absolutely blew my suspension of disbelief. Then in episode four, well, I probably don’t have to describe it’s litany of faults. Add to that half Danny’s army has apparently resurrected itself from the ashes. Now along comes episode five. The scorpions which were SO powerful, a mere handful on a dozen ships were able to perfunctorily dispatch one of Danny’s dragons, are now destroyed with impunity by the hundreds. And Danny, who has been the sole beacon of hope for seven and a half seasons, has virtually instantaneously transformed into the worst villain in the entire series. I could not possibly be more disappointed in this. For shame.

Drogon could only get one pass at flaming the army of the Dead, but now has enough to flame the Iron Fleet and ALL of Kings’ Landing?  (Okay, so the Dead outnumber the latter no matter how many passes.  But still…)

Thinking about the fact that Sandor made the decision to throw both of them into the fire.  Hard choice, but inevitable when fighting someone already dead.

Why is everyone acting like Daenerys is some kind of villain? For 8 seasons know every sensible character has gone on and on about how Kings Landing is a cesspool that smells like feces from 10 miles out. Everything north of the Red Mountains is an Ohio trailer park when it comes to diversity and tolerance but now we are supposed to wash our hair about Dany breaking the wheel for real. I say  “Let’s burn this mfer down pookie!“ Winterfell next.  

I don’t know. I have actually liked where the show has gone this season – I just think it’s all been too rushed. I find the Dany-going-mad storyline to be fascinating, I just wish we’d had more time with it. That said, I don’t think it comes completely out of nowhere. Dany has been ruthless before, such as when she decided to crucify all the masters. I also totally buy the reason Varys gave for her descent into madness – her unshakeable faith in what she perceives to be her destiny, her right to rule. She continues to use her vision of a “better world” to justify her actions, even now that those actions go directly against her ideals (she claims that she is still holding true to being “merciful” – if not now, then she will be to future generations). 

In other words, I don’t believe that it was Missandei’s death or Rhaegal’s death or Jon’s rejection that suddenly turned her mad. I don’t think it was about her being emotional at all. I think those things helped tipped her over the edge (as well as the loss of Jorah, because in the past he has sometimes been able to talk her back from the edge). 

But for me, this madness didn’t come out of nowhere. I can’t claim to have foreseen this turn five seasons ago, and yet, it doesn’t feel unearned to me now, and I can only assume that’s because it was seeded, in some ways. I think of the fervor and the conviction Dany spoke with when trying to convince the Thirteen in Qarth how special she was. I think of how she unflinchingly burned the masters in Astapor and in Meereen. Burning thousands of people to death is nothing new to her; it’s just in the past, she did it to “bad” people, so we cheered her on. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t monstrous. 

So although I was never one of the fans who supported the theory that Dany would go mad – and certainly since the last book came out, there have been book readers with that theory – I do buy into it. But I can understand that that can be a very subjective thing. There are certainly other characters beats that have no felt earned to me, that have seemed to come out of nowhere. And I do agree with your review when you say that it was very rushed in these last couple of episodes. I just think there have been some hints of where she was going earlier, in the first couple episodes of this season, in last season, and even in previous seasons. 

On another note, Cleganebowl was the dumbest thing ever, because they left it so late – with the city falling down around them, who cared? There were no stakes. And Jaime and Cersei’s end was incredibly anticlimatic and disappointing. The show has just been determined that Jaime continue to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, and Cersei? Honestly, I don’t know why they didn’t kill her off last season. (Oh, wait, yes I do – because she was the impetus for Dany coming to burn KL.) Seriously, if I was Lena Heady, I’d be super pissed with this last season, because they gave her nothing. Her death has been one of the most anticipated, and it was a total letdown.

Oh, also. Cersei’s death was fine, if not amazing. Her world literally fell down all around her. She died beaten and despondent. Good enough for me.

Dany will forever be my queen, my unburnt, my breaker of chains. She is compassionate, just, and while she doesn’t always succeed, she tries to do good in the world.

This season, that’s all been thrown out the window. “Oh she’s a Targaryen, they all go crazy” NO. She was never that. “Losing Jorah and Missandei sent her over the edge” again, no. She would take harsh and painful revenge for Missandei, but that revenge would only ever be directed at those who truly deserved it.

The city surrendered, and she would have accepted that. Through her pain, her loss, her anger, she would have struggled but she would have shown mercy. She was never destined to be queen of the ashes. I am disgusted with how all her development, all her lessons, her triumphs and losses were just swept aside so we could have a dramatic city-burning. 

My Daenerys hasn’t been in the show for a long time. I can only hope the books do her justice.

@36 I don’t think anyone who really follows the show – not to mention the books – expects a happy ending. We all know what happened by the end of season/book 1 and we are still surprised by that.

The thing is: D&D just don’t want to write a good story anymore, I believe. They surely have lots of pressure on them, the producers, the audience, all of us. (let’s skip the CGI budget interfering in storytelling, if that’s really true) But if you have been working with a set of strong characters for so long, shouldn’t you know how they would act and react to certain things? And if you’re stuck and can’t think of a good, powerful ending to all this – ask for help! I’m sure lots of people had amazing alternative courses for this story, ones that would amaze us just like killing Ned, Drogo giving Vyseris a crown, Daenerys coming from the fire with three dragons and so on.

We don’t want happy endings, or fan service. We want a good story to end the way it’s progressed for this long.

And as for the books, I don’t know if GRRM cares about what people say about the story – and he shouldn’t. But I also don’t think that after someone else writing an end for his epic he still has the interest in writing his own.

Loved the episode and the season so far and here is my reason why –  – 

Game of Thrones works best when it doesn’t do fan service. If every prediction in a comment section or Internet post was the reality of the show what fun would that be? Now everyone is mad – Jamie didn’t kill Cersei, Ayra didn’t kill Cersei, Dany went mad, etc etc. It wouldn’t matter HOW this all ended – people wouldn’t be satisfied. The world had become a place full of entertainment critics instead of entertainment connoisseurs.

My 2 cents.

 “how dare they make the woman crazy?”

just because it’s a tired old trope in a show that made its name by doing the unexpected? 

If GRRM really has finished the series and is holding back publication until the show finishes, maybe that deal includes the show runners completely pissing off viewers so the ending doesn’t tank the market for the books? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As sucky as the show writing has become, enjoy the finale however you can, because that’s the only ending we’re ever getting. GRRM has clearly passed on that great burden (as he sees it) to the TV show. 

Whoa! First half hour of this episode really had me. All was forgiven. This is how GoT is to be run. Strong characters intrigating and making tough life changing decisions for all the wrong reasons … sort of. 

But then they let the silliness loose unfortunately. The dragon that was oh so vulnerable in last episode suddenly is totally OP. Impossible to hit and knocking down countless solid stone walls with its breath (Big Bad Wolf would definitely be in ave). Flying back and forth over the city for quarter of an hour burning everything, like a British bomber armada in WW2. Yeah I’ve seen people burning by know. Please bring the story forward instead.

Same with the battle scenes. Sure it is possible to do interesting battle scenes, even if I usually find them lacking. This episodes battle was not as dumb as in previous episodes, but this running around killing randomly appearing enemies again and again is boring in the long run. Cut it out and enter some character playing instead, I say.

My Epic highlights of the episode:
– The trial and death of Varys (good acting of Varys and Tyrion and Danys hardness on a slippery slope to madness)
– The Golden company line up in front of the gates (I am all in favour of good looking armour)
– Jamie and Cersei (I don’t care a bit if they deserved it, but it was good acting and even somewhat in line with their characters).
– Arya riding out through a burning city (I’m a poor lonsome cowboy and a long way from home…).

And Theresa; stop whining about them making the women stupidly emotional at the wrong moments. Do I have to mention Jon? Or Jamie? Danys madness was logical anyway. An effect of
1. Not beeing loved by the people she considered herself the saviour of.
2. The betrayal from her advisor.
3. Not even beeing loved by her true love (getting pretty lonely at the top).
4. (most imporatant) A hardness combined with a fanatical belief in her right.  

I can agree that they overdid it though.

D&D said that the reason Jaime went back to Cersei is because he always loved her and needed to be by her side. Even though the books clearly showed us early on that he was completely done with her and her manipulations and evil nature. Sure, the show isn’t the book, but they continued with the idea until they decided not to, and gave no reason for it. It’s not believable.

Dany, sure she probably would have ended up this way naturally, but it was too fast. It’s just not believable that in a space of a week she goes from trying to save everyone to killing babies. They didn’t want to take the time to make it more believable because that would lower the shock value. And in doing so, they didn’t earn her breakdown. 

Arya was the same way. She rides down from Winterfell with the Hound, and she’s going to kill Cersei the entire way, for weeks, and gets all the way into the keep, then the Hound gives her a sentence and she just ups and says OK and leaves? How about some discussion between them leading up to that? That’s just bad.

Jon is as bland as always. I have no arguments about how he’s portrayed. I never expected anything out of him.

Cersei was perfect as always. But as for her death scene, D&D decided how to frame it. I’m fine with how she died. But they framed the whole thing as a romantic tragedy, which is just ewwww. It’s like someone making a movie where Hitler and Eva Braun’s last moments are them swooning in each others arms as music swells, which is just inappropriate.

Tyrion has obviously been losing brain cells to drink. There’s nothing that excuses his mental lapses of the past season or two. At least they acknowledged this by Sansa making fun of how stupidly he’s being written now.

The whole Euron debacle was ridiculous. He served no purpose whatsoever in this episode, and his ability last episode was completely reversed and negated by Drogon’s power boost and the scorpions’ power loss. And why didn’t Winterfell get completely obliterated by dragon fire if it can now explode buildings?

There has been problem after problem with this season, and no amount of hand-waving can make it seem like the writers are doing their job well with the way they’re skipping along the tops of waves to get to the end as quickly as they can.  They’re the ones that wanted 6 episodes when HBO offered them ten plus more seasons. 

Can we talk about the crosscutting in the scene where the Hound fights the Mountain, and Arya escapes the Keep and while it’s stylistically very impressive ultimately the Hound and Arya having the same blocking comes across as hollow because it’s suggesting there’s a larger connection between the two (such as the suffering of one is linked to another, or that at the moment the Hound either dies or is victorious will be the moment that Arya is saved) that at least to this viewer doesn’t pan out.

I wasn’t able to watch the episode last night, so I’m very late to this. I agree mostly with 22, 25, and 33. I think 36 is right that the storyline is pretty much where the books are headed (though with more buildup). @39: I’ve thought for some time that it was possible that GRRM’s contract with HBO prevented him from publishing any new books. That doesn’t mean it’s true, but I do think it’s possible.

My $.02: I’ve thought from the very beginning that Dany was unlikely to be a hero, and I’ve been describing her for years as “a conqueror not a ruler”. I love the character, and I love Emilia, but I’m not surprised. The one thing I’d say is that I don’t see Dany as “mad”, notwithstanding Varys’ effort to sell that. What I see is that the Khaleesi who would listen to her advisors and to those whom she knew loved her, has been stripped of any support over the last few seasons. Barriston, Jorah, Missandei, Daario — all gone. She rightfully stopped listening to Tyrion after he has consistently given her bad advice for 2 seasons now. She gave her heart to Jon and he pulled back from her. In short, she lacks the restraints which held in check her worst impulses, and that’s what we saw last night.

It didn’t surprise me that Jaime returned to Cersei. I never saw him as being on a redemption arc, neither in books or show. 

I agree with whoever it was who said that the little character moments are the best of the season. However, I loved S3, think it’s one of the best of the series, and think most of the “military” criticisms of it are nonsense. I also think last night did a brutal but realistic job of showing us what the sacking of cities looks like. Whatever the merits of those 2 episodes, Sapochnik deserves an Emmy for his direction.

Oops. S8, E3, not S3.

7/10.  

Plot SETUP was stupid.  

Character bits (undoubtedly enforced by GRRM) were gold.  

The Hound sacrificing himself to save Arya’s humanity, going to a fight he knows he’s going to lose to give a traumatized child soldier an object lesson of what will happen if she keeps on her course, was pure fucking gold.  Great acting by Williams and McCann.  Cleganebowl itself had some bland choreography but I still cried.  Good work there.  

I really don’t get why people are surprised by Daenerys going nuts.  She’s always been extremely brutal to her enemies, burning and crucifying them, even had her own brother’s brain cooked.  She’s a teenager with WMDs who thinks she’s a messianic hero and is obsessed with “reclaiming” her “birthright” of an entire continent of people to be quasidivine absolute ruler of.  No WONDER she snapped!  She’s so used to being adored and sucked up to that she can’t handle people who don’t immediately do that.  

I think the lead-up to Daenerys flipping was clumsy and poorly handled both in previous seasons and in this one, and a lot of characters like Tyrion and Varys are way the hell out of character this season, but Emilia Clarke used her sparse material well and the cinematography on the shots of “insane teenager uses WMDs on populated city” was solid stuff.  

Overall, the plot was meh but the character work was better in the second half of the episode (where it counted).  I’m genuinely surprised that so many people seem to have been sucked into Dany’s messiah cult, though.  It’s pretty obvious in the books that all she actually does is swan into a place, break shit and kill people, declare herself Supreme Leader, overthrow the existing society, and torch anyone who disagrees.  Over and over again.  And she never fucking learns.  

We didn’t mind when it was just slavers that she was torturing and slaughtering.  But to her?  The citizens of King’s Landing are just the same as those slavers.  Because they didn’t bend the knee to their rightful Queen.  

She pulled back from Jon first. 

Maybe. She pulled back when he foolishly insisted that he had to tell his secret to Sansa and Arya. So yes and no, I guess.

Really, because the last thing we saw Jaime do was burn Cersei’s request to come save her.

I don’t see that as part of a redemption arc. For me, at best, it’s a sign that he’s thinking about whether redemption is possible for him, something which he’s been doing since at least his time in the bath with Brienne. After all, he continued to be the commander of the Lannister armies after he sent that letter, and I can’t see that as redemptive because it’s in service of Lannister (that is, Cersei) rule.

@90 has a good point, though I would add that Daenerys’s descent into open madness has been heavily foreshadowed in the books.  I’m not sure what the technical term is, but she has an unshakeable high opinion of herself as The Heroine, and doesn’t have the capacity, for whatever reason, to self-analyze her fundamental perceptions and understandings of the world.  

Also, given that she has 2 parents, 2 grandparents, and IIRC 2 great-grandparents…and her great-grandfather’s older brother was stark raving nuts to the point he drank wildfire trying to turn into a dragon…and her older brothers were both mentally ill, one obsessive well beyond even the OCD that I suffer from and the other basically being Platinum-Blond Puyi…and her father was a psychopathic sadist…and her grandfather in the books, Jaeherys II, suffered from apparent inbreeding-related genetic issues…and her great-grandfather’s grandfather was the worst King in Westerosi history due to his megalomania and sadism…and that guy was one of the more sane Targaryens…and Maegor the Cruel, Rhaenyra, Aegon II, Aemond Kinslayer, Bittersteel, Maelys the literally physically deformed Blackfyre…

look, House Targaryen makes the Spanish Habsburgs look downright genetically diverse.  It’s frankly a miracle that Daenerys was even able to get pregnant and wasn’t born with severe physical abnormalities.  

All things considered, self-obsession and a messiah complex aren’t even that serious issues with that family history.  But when the person with those issues has WMDs and is a teenager surrounded by sycophants…things can get VERY bad very fast.  

I have to say that I mostly liked this episode.  However, it all hinged on Dany’s turn and I didn’t like that particular moment.

I’ve always questioned whether Dany would go Mad Queen (it’s literally a comment I’ve made out loud while watching during previous seasons), but the moment in this episode lacked something.  It didn’t even need to be much (two options that come to mind: 1)that could have been the moment Rhaegal dies by a lucky shot or 2)some KL citizens are trying to hit her with a bow from their windows as she’s sitting there).  Just a little more so that when she first unleashes on the city I’m not asking “What? Why?”.  The broad strokes of her turn work for me, but the specifics fall short.

I also wished we had gotten something from her after her turn.  Emilia Clarke acted the hell out of not much.  What did work with her turn in the moment was solely due to her acting.  I’d have liked the episode to end on her face and see what that looked like. Thing I’m most looking forward to next week is how she’s plays it in the aftermath (really kinda hoping she leans HARD into it and pretty much puts everyone including the audience on blast for calling her Mad Queen when they named Aegon ‘the Conqueror’ for doing the same and more and were cool bowing to Bobbie B after the Sack of KL and called Stannis ‘the Mannis’ after he had been burning people alive and killing with blood magic).

I’m surprised so many people didn’t like the Arya/Hound moment.  In that moment, and especially in a KL courtyard like that, I immediately thought ‘Not today’ as she made her decision to not follow.  Totally seemed in character for me.  She’s an assassin, yes, but she was always a survivor first.

Cersei’s death was strangely fitting, for me.  I think I like it more and more as I think about it.

I’ve seen lots of folks thinking that Jon’s going to be all sheepish going back to Sansa with a ‘You told me so’.  I don’t see it that.  I really think that Jon’s going to place a lot of blame on Sansa for this happening – betraying his secret that she swore to keep and pushing Dany further away.

Favorite moments: Golden Company goes out in less than 10 sec and Harry Strickland gets the Jon Snow treatment – before turning tail and running away; Qyburn dying so quickly that I literally turned away from the screen for a second and missed it – had to rewind.

I read someone saying that you could only believe in Dany if you only took into account what he said, because what he did since season 1 was truly appalling. How many innocent people has she killed? Sam’s brother? The witch in S1? Since the beginning it was clear she would do anything and kill anyone to get the throne.

@106 Ohhhhh Varys trying to poison Dany makes SO MUCH sense. When my mom and I rewatched the episode (we always rewatch when they reshow it an hour and a half later lol) she seemed confused about what the little girl was doing, and I was like, uh, spying on Dany, I guess? But that didn’t really jive with how worried she was about Dany’s soldiers watching her. That totally makes sense. 

And yeah, that line from Jaime pissed me off too. I was like, that is such a lie! Obviously he cares about the innocent of KL; that’s why he killed the Mad King!

One final note. If the author ever finds time to end this series I pray that he leaves John Snow dead. That guy is as dumb as a post, and Westeros is better off without him.

I’m torn. On on hand, I was all good with Dany turning tyrant. There are precious few good rulers in GoT after all. Power corrupts and kings have to be ruthless, or else they wouldn’t stay kings for long. (Speaking of which, I think Jon would be an absolute crapshoot as a king in this particular setting. He’d be eaten alive and his people sacked and looted yet again.)

Anyway. I would have been totally on board with Dany getting mad revenge on those she thinks wronged her, maybe concocting a horrifying personal punishment in the style Aerys. She could’ve torched Jon, Tyrion and the rest and I’d say alright, fits her character.

However, her torching innocent kids just for the lulz doesn’t fly with her particular brand of ruthlessness. It’s a total character derailment and against everything we’ve seen her do in the series. She treats people she perceives as her enemies horribly, true – but she’s not an insane mass murderer just because she felt peeved this morning. The writers really wasted a good believable heel turn here.

But the stupidest, most inconsistent character arc must be Jaime’s. Jesus Christ. It’s like they couldn’t decide what they wanted to do with the character and so decided to DO ALL THE THINGS!!!

@116 Wonderful summary, thank you very much!  

I will also note as someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder that even by my standards, Dany’s older brother Rhaegar Targaryen was unusually obsessive and unwilling to consider the consequences of his actions.  So much so that I don’t think he had OCD, but rather some sort of more serious personality disorder.  Call it sociopathy, megalomania, whatever, but (in the books, at least; the show portrayed it very differently and IMO far more problematically) Rhaegar Targaryen was single-handedly obsessed with being the center of a magic prophecy as the father of the savior of the world, to the point that he raped Lyanna Stark in a tower and set off a war that destroyed his entire family and a bunch of innocent people including (although this wasn’t his intent) his own children, in his obsessive desire for a second daughter to marry his son.  (yes, Jon was supposed to be a Visenya.  I don’t know where the show got “Aegon” from because Prince Aegon was the kid that Gregor Clegane smashed on the stone floor of the Red Keep until his head cracked open)

Even leaving aside that her father was starkers and tried to burn down his own capital in a suicidal temper tantrum before Jaime Lannister iced him, there was already a very clear roadmap for how Dany’s obsession and megalomania would go in the series, and boy howdy did it go badly.  

@121: Explain to me how a grown man who already has a wife and 2 kids locking a 14-year-old girl away in a tower for a year so she can have his baby (who’s only conceived about 3 months into the whole guarded in a tower and not allowed out thing) ISN’T rape?  Look, the most logical conclusion from the evidence the books have given is that Lyanna was 14 and rebellious, she ran away with the pretty boy because she quite reasonably didn’t like the Westerosi tradition of arranged marriages, and Rhaegar took advantage of her, kidnapped her, and raped her until she got pregnant with his magic prophecy baby.  

Then, being 14 years old and on her first pregnancy with insufficient medical care even by Westeros’s low standards, Lyanna died in childbirth, while Rhaegar and his minions were killed in battle, leaving Ned Stark the only guy who knew the truth and now he’s dead.  

As for Jon’s name, he was almost certainly named by Ned Stark after Lyanna’s death.  His INTENDED name is pretty damn clearly supposed to have been Visenya–Rhaegar wanted a daughter to be the second bride for his magic prophecy baby.  Given that Jon came out a boy, well, let’s just say that Rhaegar probably would’ve started attempts to make a Visenya again immediately and had the surplus baby dealt with by one of his mooks.  

“a 14-year-old girl away”

The book wiki has her dying at 17, so she would have been 16.  Ser Barristan thinks Rhaegar loved her, which is supported by one of Dany’s visions. Less data on what she thought, but ‘rape’ can hardly be taken as proven fact.

The sequence of events was, Jon told Dany, they fight the war, Dany sees Jon’s devoted troops love him, she approaches him in his room, asks if he’s too drunk, makes a move, then backs off, asking him to not tell Sansa. 

If you’re right about the sequence, then I agree. I remembered it as Jon insisting on telling his siblings first, then her backing off. In my memory, she pulled back first to ask him about it, which I saw as conditional. Only when he insisted did she consider that he’d betrayed her.

I can’t put the fact that Jaime still maintains loyalty to family, while being split on Cersei, as anything but redemptive

I see it the opposite way — as long as he was fighting for the Lannisters, he couldn’t be redeemed. For me, this is especially true when it comes to Tommen, who is the fruit of his misdeeds.

“If I ever go CRAY CRAY you better betray me too” 

I suspect that most people who say that don’t actually want to be betrayed — they are overconfident and think they are so superior to the previous case that they will never be called out on it, not that they really think there is a chance they will end up evil and want to be stopped.

@132 Thanks for that Billcap. I suppose with my background in Forensic Psyche I am really interested in what makes someone dangerous, and this filters what I take from what I see. But broken is a good word for Dany. I can see how she ends up a mass murderer, but I can still feel very sad that anyone has to go what she went through. I think broken is a good concept for Martin’s series and grimdark in general – using fantasy/sci fi to explore how awful things can break and remould people, and how people end up doing these awful things.

On a completely different note we have to remember to judge these people in context. The culture the Targaryans come from and carry with them doesn’t see incest and inbreeding as a bad thing. Like the Egyptian Pharaohs they see it as something good – keeping the special nature of their blood and not watering it down. So in that context Jamie and Cersei can be seen as a bittersweet romance just slightly out of place and Jon/Dany as the obvious thing to do.

Another bit of important context – medieval and ancient cultures didn’t usually have a period of adolescence/ young adulthood/ teenage as the tail end of childhood. Once you hit puberty you were an adult. Usually they waited till the girl’s menstrual cycle had settled down to be a bit regular – perhaps because getting pregnant too early on was not only unusual (as the girl ain’t producing eggs yet) but dangerous as the pelvis is still too small. However girls could hit puberty early – even as young as 10 or 11. So marryinjg a 14 year old wasn’t disgraceful or statutory rape – it was ordinary normal behaviour. If the 14 year old had no say at all then that’s another story.

@131: Permit me to doubt that any of your sins approach Jaime’s.

I get the emotional pull of “for my children”, but in Jaime’s particular case it’s pretty hard to separate that from Cersei. And I’m dubious of Jaime’s apparent rationale that “it’s ok for me to kill lots of people and to force submission to the Throne (read Cersei) in order to protect the result of my incestuous and treasonous relationship with the principal beneficiary of what I do”. I thought Bran was full of shit when he said that too, though I doubt Bran’s sincerity in many things these days.

For me, an actual redemption arc for Jaime would have required leaving Cersei forever — which he never did in the show; we’ll see in the books (maybe) — and doing actual good deeds for others outside of his family. He can’t be like Spike in Triangle, refusing to feed off of bleeding disaster victims simply in order to impress the one he loves. There has to be more to it.

Just for consideration, does anyone remember the look of triumph on Dany’s face when Drogo declared he would murder the sons and rape the women of Westeros, carry them off into slavery, and declare his son the “Stallion who mounts the world” alllll the way back in S1? Nothing about her return to Westeros has ever been couched in peace or benevolence.

I was also put off by the way Dany suddenly knew how to avoid and destroy all the Scorpions.

Wait a minute. Last week the criticism was that she failed to spot the attack and reacted foolishly to it. This week she gets criticized for attacking intelligently? That seems like a can’t-win situation.

I don’t see this as a case of consistency. I see Dany’s changed tactics as evidence that she *learned*. 

Personally, I don’t agree that the show this season is badly written. 

Yeah, that’s still open in the books and if you’re right then there’s still a chance for him. That doesn’t mean I think he’s actually on a redemptive path yet in the books, but that he could be on one soon.

Depends on whether you think the shots that brought down Rhaegal were good shooting or good luck. I view them as luck, that the improbability was the success last time rather than the failure this time. This time, Dany did at least 3 clever things: she made her initial attack out of the sun so that they couldn’t see to aim well; she kept moving up and down, which forced them to constantly change the elevation of the ballistae; and she approached the fixed ones from the flank, forcing a swivel which delayed the chance to get off a shot.