Each new season of Game of Thrones requires the first episode to deliver a lot of “where are they now” reminders and scene setters. In fact, with so many characters in play, previous seasons have often had at least two episodes devoted to simply reminding viewers of where all the pieces were left and sketching a few events that occurred while we were enduring our own Thrones-deprived winter.
But now, facing a shortened season offering only seven episodes, the opener was forced to hit the ground running. This was helped along by a nifty new feature that provided both an expedited overview and a nifty metaphor—Cersei got a map. We get to watch as one of the desultory survivors of King’s Landing finishes off painting the Seven Kingdoms in a mid-sized plaza of the Red Keep. Then there’s the recurring delight of seeing Cersei literally walk around, putting her heel on the lands of her enemies as she recites the various threats to her position on top of the world’s least comfortable lounger.
It’s a device that saves scads of time—where do those pesky Sand Snakes live? Down here. Where are those tasty, tasty supplies that are under the thumb of the Tyrells? Why, right there. Cersei’s map keeps us from having to have some of those tedious “here we are in Dorne, for no reason other than to make the word ‘Dorne’ appear for a moment” scenes. It’s enough to make it clear why all those World War II movies features table-sized maps of North Africa where nattily dressed adjutants can push around little tanks and wooden soldiers. It’s much cheaper to make that swipe with a rake than it is to warm up a fleet of temperamental Panzers just to show Rommel on the move.
The result is an episode that’s amazingly efficient on the where-are-they-now front. We get at least a glimpse of every surviving Stark, every living Lannister, every Greyjoy … even every last Frey. We also get a fair sampling of Daenerys’ diverse entourage. We do all that and actually advance a few plot points.
Though, of course, there are still things to complain about. So I will.
I’ve tried to make it a feature of these recaps to keep spoilers below the break, even if sometimes I can’t help but let a little slip. But if you haven’t yet watched “Dragonstone” know ye therefore that thou art now in the Kingdom of Spoilers. Be warned.
Arya
The cold open of the episode, make that the stone-cold open, features Walder Frey assembling all the important Frey family members and vassals who participated in the Red Wedding for a nice little feast. Those whose memories of the previous season hadn’t been muddled by an extra long vacation from Westeros were probably on this ruse in a second. Those who didn’t spend the last fourteen months repeat-binging season 6 may have taken two seconds. But was pretty obvious, pretty early that we weren’t watching Walder Frey; we were watching Arya Stark demonstrate that just because she killed her teachers back at the House of Black and White, doesn’t mean she’s lost any of her face-swapping skills. The best part of Arya-as-Walder is that, even as Arya is giving Clan Frey a demeaning, sarcastic “pep talk,” it’s exactly the kind of sour nastiness you might expect of the real Walder.
It’s also nice that, before we cut to the opening theme, Arya spares the womenfolk and servants of The Twins from the poison she spreads among the men. She’s a sociopath, but she’s a sociopath with some limits.
Later Arya meets a group of soldiers along the road. Their cloaks and details mark them out as Lannister-ish, though it’s not clear what House actually put this crew on the road. The incident gives Arya another opportunity to not kill a bunch of people. In fact, the most amazing an effective part of this scene is that it reminds us that when tiny Arya rides into the midst of a bunch of armed and armored soldiers … we fear for the soldiers.
Much less effective is what, hopefully, is the first and last painfully gratuitous cameo of the season in the form of Ed Sheeran as a singing soldier. Hey, everyone loves Ed Sheeran … except when he’s leaning up against the Fourth Wall on a GOT episode, bursting the bubble of suspended disbelief with a grin and a tune. The Arya and soldiers affair is also deflated because every single one of this crew is a walking stereotype of “reluctant soldier with family back at home.” Yes, it’s good to know that there are still just-plain-folks in the world, but whoever cobbled together this band of Lifetime-Goes-To-War rejects (My wife has had a child while I’ve been away, and I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl + I just want to get home to help our dear old Dah + whatever) deserves to spend some time in the kennels with Ramsay.
While Arya is headed south on a less-than-stealthy mission to do in Cersei, the oldest Stark semi-siblings are back at Winterfell presiding over that council of Northmen (that, folks, is one long meeting). While Jon Snow is focused on events north of the Wall, Sansa Stark is more concerned about the folks to the south and the possibility that the Lannisters might march an entirely non-magical army up to put holes in the still-somewhat-shaky northern alliance.
Jon and Sansa
Jon is anxious to mend wounds and get everyone in place to receive the Army of the Walking Dead. Sansa still has room in her heart for a little vengeance.
The best thing about the episode, the absolute best, is that Sansa had me completely nodding along with her kill-’em-it’ll-teach-’em-a-lesson logic, before Jon Snow stepped in to remind everyone about unity, strength in numbers, and not blaming kids for the sins of the fathers. It was a nice speech, and again I found myself nodding in agreement. Though, hold on a second, Jon. Didn’t the Umbers turn over little Rickon and family-friend Osha to Ramsay Bolton, knowing full well that this was going to result in murder and rape, in no specific order? I think I’m still with Sansa on that one—break out the tongs and lemon juice.
After the meeting, there’s a back and forth between the two less-than-half siblings about their in-public conflicts. Sansa is right that Jon has a knack for leadership and is a better king than he knows. Sansa is also right that Jon should listen to her more, and Jon’s dismissal of that idea is the stupidest thing he’s done, including not just deciding to chill with Ygritte.
Sansa has been packing around the Greatest Character Growth Award for at least three seasons running, and Jon would do very, very well to weigh her opinions in his decisions. I’d very much like to think that we’re not about to get a yawning schism between these two that leads to more misery for House Stark, but considering that Littlefinger is still on hand to provide a giant salt shaker for this wound, you can count on increasing woe in Winterfell.
While at Winterfell, we get to see Tormund leering lustfully at Brienne. Because everyone liked that when it happened last year.
Bran
Bran has come in from the cold. Or at least the coldest. The gates of the Wall open and the tiny handful of folks that remain in the Night’s Watch come out to drag Bran back to the side where the dead get up with slightly less frequency (give this show long enough, and it’ll be nothing but zombies, Night King or no).
Bran proves his bone fide through the expedited process of giving speech no non-blueblood could deliver. The best part of the scene is that we see that Dolorous Edd and Meera Reed are both still alive and kicking. I like Edd and Meera. They rarely do anything … except save the main characters from certain death on a regular basis and quietly keep the wheels of the plot spinning even when the big dog’s idiocy would otherwise turn everyone in sight into ground meat.
Cersei and Jaime and more
The soldiers that Arya meets don’t have anything good to say about King’s Landing, and this is one case where it doesn’t seem to be just country folk making sport of the big city (And hey, did you get catch that soldier mentioning the dragon pit, a location we’ve never seen? In case you did, he mentioned it again. Just so you can know it’s coming soon to an episode near you.) With half the town still a smoking ruin, what we see of King’s Landing is mostly a scene of a very somber throne room and Cersei’s this-map-was-made-for-stomping.
Jaime Lannister seems mostly stunned, resigned, and not a little fearful. However, Cersei is clearly … enjoying seems the wrong word. She’s like an adventure junkie who has just discovered sky diving, only Cersei isn’t just power mad, she’s clearly enjoying the fact that she’s at the pointy end of every arrow. She welcomes their hatred (sorry, Franklin).
Jaime rightly points out that with all the Freys busy taking a long, long nap thanks to Arya’s personal-best mass murder, the Lannisters are running short on men, money, supplies, and allies. But Cersei has a new player for Team Gold—Euron Greyjoy. Euron, last seen ordering up a 1,000 ship fleet from the people of his poor, treeless islands, has apparently finished a busy building season and is on hand to trade his sword in exchange for Cersei’s hand in marriage.
Since any reasonable prediction of a marriage between Cersei and Euron would have one of them dead before the word “do” had stopped echoing around the throne room, you can bet on them celebrating their 70th anniversary … if either of them lives long enough to walk the aisle. But before that can happen, Euron has to go out and secure a dowry in the form of some big prize for Cersei.
Who out there is looking particularly prizey?
Sam
If the powers behind the thrones were clever enough to expedite the episode by way of cartographic magic, they certainly lavished a large amount of the resulting time on Sam Tardy. Sam’s scenes of bedpan scrubbing, book shelving, and eating slop from disturbingly bed pan-shaped bowls were certainly effective in getting across the “I came to the Citadel to be a Maester and look at the tedium I’m stuck with” nature of his new life.Those scenes were also icky enough to make people who would sit threw a sword fight flee the room. Sam also has a nice turn with the Arch-Maester.
However, all of it seems to be just a very long way of saying there are books at the Citadel that might help in the North, but the stick-in-the-mud Maesters don’t want to help. It’s absolutely unclear how we’d be worse off if the whole thing had been reduced to just the scene of Sam and Gilly, with a couple of lines added to indicate how hard Sam worked to get those books.
Though we would have missed delightful scenes of bedpans. Oh, and we might have also missed getting to see the piteous arm of Jorah Mormont jutting from a cell to ask whether Dany had yet arrived—a scene that mostly generated a reminder that time runs at different speeds in Westeros depending on what part of the narrative you’re living in. It took Sam approximately two years to get from the Wall to the Citidel, while Mormont made it across the sea and got himself locked up within a week.
The Hound
The slightly-less-gianty Clegane is still hanging with the Brotherhood without Banners as part of his less than enthusiastic path to redemption. This week the Hound is forced to revisit that home where we saw him be particularly cruel to fearful regular-folk a couple of seasons back. He finds the skeletons of the poor father-daughter pair and eventually gives them a good burial.
Sandor Clegane is the runner up to Sansa in that character growth contest. While most of the characters have become just more of who they were to start with, these are the two who have really changed.
We get a couple of reminders that the Hound’s visible (and internal) scars come from an encounter between his face and a hot brazier. But with a bit of urging Sandor stares into the flames and sees as vision of what’s clearly the army of the dead closing on Eastwatch—where Jon conveniently just sent an army of Wildlings in a previous scene.
We can now expect that the Brotherhood will be marching north, which isn’t exactly a surprise as the trailer for the season showed Beric Dondarion swinging Thoros’s fire sword somewhere with a lot of snow. Still, that’s a long walk, and it sets the Hound going in the wrong direction for the Clegane-off we all want to see.
Daenerys
Dany, her vast armada, and her dragons all arrive at Dragonstone. When Stannis Baratheon marched off to the North, he apparently did so with commitment, because he left not so much as a chambermaid behind to tend the massive castle captured from the Targaryens shortly after Dany’s birth.
After a “Westeros, I’m home” scene on the beach, Daenerys is able to stroll through the gates, drag down a few dusty banners, and take up residence without firing a shot or even inspecting the servants. The whole scene is done in effective silence, except for Dany’s comment that brings on the closing credits, which certainly brings a sense of solemnity and importance. Here’s the final scion of House Targaryen, coming back as her something-something-great grandfather did before her, bringing dragons and determination to capture the whole affair.
Dragonstone is a neat seat of power—and comes with a seat where you know Dany is going to look powerful sitting on for several episodes to come. It also happens to be sitting on a horde of the dragonglass Jon Snow needs for his fight in the North, so expect those empty halls to soon be graced by guests.
Dany has her own map, but it’s at chest level, not underfoot, and she gives it a loving stroke in passing. A nice contrast with Cersei.
Overall, the episode gets the job done. It’s certainly not as breakneck with events as the end of season six, but then, if it was we’d wrap this whole thing up by Thursday. It puts the last pieces in place, raises the banner, and gets things set for someone to bellow “Now, fights!”
Lyanna Mormont
As we learned last year, Lyanna Mormont is the biggest badass in the Seven Kingdoms and she doesn’t disappoint in season seven. Everyone should just put her on that throne by proclamation and the rest can go home.
Pre-packaged, freeze-dried scorn
It’s just a television show! It’s not important! Why possibly devote precious pixels to this stupid fantasy when there are So Many Better Things To Talk About. This is stupid/pointless/demeaning/distracting/destructive/many, many other words starting with “d” and I certainly didn’t read all the way to the end of this idiotic, wasteful recap.
There you go. You’re welcome.