THE GAME’S AFOOT
High-level meetings with foreign emissaries promising damaging gifts. Sibling squabbles and staff intrigues. Awkward toasts where you watch in horror for what the host will say next.
No, it’s not Trump White House Season 1 (“The Learning Curve”). It’s the Season 7 opener of HBO’s Game of
Thrones. This hugely popular show’s final season (which, as John Oliver joked, has turned the cable giant into a “dragon-based economy”) is split into two this year, with seven episodes to be followed by a lull, during which everyone will discuss what the hell just happened, before wrapping things up with six final episodes. All conceivably aired before Papa George R.R. Martin even delivers his long-promised final installment, The Winds of Winter, to the “Fire and Ice” canon.
The GOT7 season begins with a colder opening than usual, with Walder Frey (seemingly in flashback, as his gullet was sliced open by Arya Stark in last season’s finale) toasting the proud men of House Frey who carried out the brutal Red Wedding in Season 3. You’ll recall that’s when Lady Catelyn, Robb Stark and his new wife and the rest of the Stark wedding party were slaughtered in the very same dining hall.
The scene shifts to King’s Landing, where Queen Cersei and her understandably less-than-cheery (after Cersei burned down half of King’s Landing, including the High Sparrow and all his flock, in an explosion of Wildfire) brother Jaime Lannister entertain Euron Greyjoy, who appears to be seeking a queen’s hand in marriage. The Ironborn from which Euron sprang are not so much a kingdom as a collection of trailer parks, to paraphrase Jaime — they are, in a sense, the white trash of Westeros — and Pilou Asebek is great at capturing the slouching insouciance of someone who’s got nothing left to lose. He boasts to Cersei that he’s got “a thousand ships and two good hands,” a direct slam against Jaime. Ouch. And he also promises Cersei a “priceless gift.” Is it those missing Hillary emails? Stay tuned.
Over at Winterfell, Jon (Kit Harrington) and Sansa (Sophie Turner) are having a bit of disagreement over proper punishment for traitors to the Stark name. It may be a sign of internal division, a whiff of which Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) quickly catches and swiftly sidles up to Sansa to offer his “services.” Sansa’s having none of it, though she can’t help needling Jon about his lack of strategic thinking (i.e., the nearly disastrous assault on Winterfell to retake it from sadistic demon seed Ramsay Bolton). (Let us pause for a moment to relish the ineffable memory of Ramsay Bolton being fed to his own dogs last season…)
Meanwhile at the Citadel, Samwell Tarly (John Bradley-West) is going through basic Maester training — feeding people slop, emptying their bedpans and stacking books (or as my wife puts it, “Clean, retch, repeat”) — in a comical montage that may make you rethink a career in Maestering. He needs crucial info on dragon glass, one of the only things that apparently kills White Walkers, but he hasn’t graduated from latrine detail yet; so he steals the keys and slips out a few precious volumes under his burly Maester-in-training wardrobe. As Cersei has divined (in an earlier scene standing atop a large map of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros with brother Jaime), Dragonstone to the south is the place to be this season — all interested parties seem to be converging there. It’s like the new Coachella.
We learn in a quick bit of Bran-trance that the White Walkers are not only gathering their armies of the dead to sweep south, but have also recruited a few recently fallen-in-battle Free Folk giants (Oh no! Wun Wun!) to do their bidding. “The dead don’t rest,” as more than one character warns us.
We meet up with The Hound, Sandor Clegane (the inimitable Rory McCann) as he decides what kind of soul he has left in the new company of Lord of Light follower Beric Dondarrion (“Look into the flames”). And we briefly catch up with Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), who is heading to her Mad King father’s burned-out palace in Dragonstone. The place where all roads lead, this season. In short, we get the usual opening head count (including Brienne, Tyrion Lannister and even Jorah), with fewer heads left to count, that is, after last season’s ritual finale culling. They say you can’t take your eyes off the trainwreck that is taking place in Washington? Try taking your eyes off this final season in Westeros.