Thrones opener is richly cinematic
Much of the premiere spent plotting, building alliances for final fight for Westeros
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Game of Thrones.
“Shall we begin?”
Those are glorious, bittersweet words coming from Daenerys Stormborn.
In the musty war room of her ancestral home, the steely Daenerys has declared that winter is finally here in the Season 7 opener of HBO’s Game of Thrones.
It also means, after much blood in the sand, the Mother of Dragons is at last on the same continent as her competitors.
Daenerys’s Dragonstone, the seat of House Targaryen, is an impressive, soaring castle, although the deserted rooms suggest it could use a little fluffing from a realtor.
The art director may also have got a little carried away with the Great Wall-inspired entranceway, which seems to go on for miles — you understand why there will never be pizza delivery in the Seven Kingdoms.
With 38 Emmys, Game of Thrones, inspired by the books of George R.R. Martin, is the most awarded scripted series in history.
It is also immensely popular, as proven by HBO’s website breaking down for a while under the traffic during Sunday’s premiere of the show.
The season opener, directed by Toronto’s Jeremy Podeswa ( The Five Senses), is richly cinematic as it picks up on the blockbuster finale of Season 6.
In the opener, Podeswa deftly works with the multitude of intersecting storylines as he brings Daenerys closer to archrival Cersei Lannister.
The episode is titled “Dragonstone,” but it could really be called “A Marshalling of the Troops.” There are seven kingdoms in Westeros (roughly the size of South America) and much of the first episode is a set piece as the two queens build alliances for the fight to come.
Cersei, of course, is doing some heavy plotting herself in King’s Landing. In her map room, she declares she is “surrounded by traitors.”
To distinguish her as the new ruler, costumers have garbed the queen in a black, ready-for-battle outfit that looks, unfortunately, like it came out of the backup dancers’ wardrobe for a Katy Perry tour. Cersei doesn’t need a cartoony black dress to show she is a badass.
Few rulers, short of Donald Trump, have the delicious narcissism of the queen who sits on the Iron Throne. Her son, the former king, committed suicide in the last episode, but she sees it as betrayal.
“He betrayed me. He betrayed us both,” she tells her brother and the father of her child, Jaime Lannister.
Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss promised a quicker pace to the season and so far they are delivering: it starts pretty much as Season 6 ended, with a violent bloodbath.
Arya Stark, not content to take revenge on Lord Walder Frey after slitting his throat and cooking a minced pie with a secret ingredient that wouldn’t win any awards on The Great British Baking Show ( it’s Frey’s sons), disguises herself as Frey — using the skills she learned from the Faceless Men — and poisons all the closest relatives and allies of Frey with wine.
“Winter came for House Frey,” she tells Frey’s young wife.
GoT producers waste no time in that anticipated Ed Sheeran cameo. Arya bumps into him and fellow soldiers from King’s Landing in the woods.
The singer is humming a love song, this time adopted from the books of George R.R. Martin: “For hands of gold are always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm.”
Stark ends up sharing a meal with Sheeran.
And for a moment you think that the entire show will be worth it if she rids Westeros of one more bad singer. You know she’s thinking about it. Meanwhile, in the North, Jon Snow is trying to unite his kinsmen to fight against an upcoming invasion by the White Walkers.
There is unexpected tension between his half-sister Sansa Stark and the new King in the North. Sansa challenges him publicly.
“You are my sister, but I am king now,” Snow says.
“Joffrey never let me question his decisions. Do you think he was a good king?” Sansa asks.
Sansa with a backbone is an infinitely more interesting character and she tells Snow she “learned a great deal” from Cersei.
Meanwhile, while everyone is posturing for power, the man who will eventually save the day is spending his days cleaning toilets.
The demure Samwell Tarley is training to be a maester at the Citadel, where he breaks into the restricted library to discover a map that could lead to a lode of dragon glass: the substance that can kill White Walkers.
After all that work, it turns out that the dragon glass can conveniently be found under the lands of Dragonstone.
That would be sort of like Iran hiding plutonium under a village called Plutonium Village, but I’m just the messenger here.
What is important is that Daenerys is locked, loaded and ready to go. So, shall we begin? Go to thestar.com/television on Mondays to read Tony Wong’s Game of Thrones recaps.