ENTER THE DRAGON
Friendly encounter hints at king’s secret in latest Game of Thrones episode,
Warning: This story contains spoilers for Game of Thrones.
There was some heavy petting going on in Westeros. And it was sorely needed.
After the fire and fury of the last episode, where Daenerys Targaryen incinerated the Lannister army, it was nice to get back to some normalcy: to make a human connection amid the carnage.
In this case, it was dragon to human, as Jon Snow, the King in the North, stroked Daenerys’s Drogon. And we all know the way to a girl’s heart is through her kids.
But this was something more. It seems that like the Mother of Dragons, King Jon’s Targaryen blood is showing, which explains the bond with Drogon.
The queen and king seem headed to a love match.
When Jon leaves on a mission, he tells Daenerys: “If I don’t return, at least you don’t have to deal with the King in the North anymore.”
“I’ve grown used to him,” she responds.
For the icy Daenerys, that is tantamount to saying, “I have the hots for you even though, according to People magazine, those furry rugs you are wearing for a costume came from Ikea.”
And Dany’s and Jon’s relationship seems sure to get even more complicated.
Just before they flee Oldtown, Samwell Tarly’s love Gilly finds a passage in former High Septon Maynard’s journal that suggests Dany’s slain brother, Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, annulled his marriage to Elia Martell to marry someone else in a secret ceremony.
That someone wasn’t revealed, but it’s a safe bet it was Lyanna Stark, who apparently is the mother of Jon Snow via Rhaegar, although nobody knows that yet except Bran Stark, the Three-Eyed Raven.
If Rhaegar married Lyanna, then Jon isn’t a bastard after all and has a stronger claim to the Iron Throne than Aunt Dany.
If he and Dany hook up it would up the ick factor, but interbreeding has never been an issue in the series.
In fact, brother and sister Jaime and Cersei Lannister are apparently expecting another child.
Queen Cersei broke the news to her brother this way: “Dead men. Dragons. And dragon queens. Whatever stands in our way we will defeat it. For ourselves, for our house, (patting her stomach) for this.”
So far, the series’ pacing has been spectacular, with faithful fans receiving a big payoff as the threads come together.
Back in the north, where Jon has left Sansa in charge, it seems Littlefinger is doing his usual thing, sowing the seeds of chaos: this time between Sansa and her sister Arya by planting a letter in his room that he wants Arya to find.
And showing how impressively deep the plot lines go in GoT, Gendry, bastard son of the late king Robert Baratheon, has returned to help Jon Snow. We haven’t seen Gendry since Season 3.
In what seems to be the only offkilter, time-wasting subplot so far, Jon decides to take a team beyond the wall, including the Hound and Jorah Mormont, to capture one of the White Walkers so he can bring it back to show his enemy Cersei that they have a bigger foe to face than each other.
“I’ve come to believe an accommodation with the dragon queen would be in our interests,” says Cersei.
The dragon queen is still doing some on-the-job training, it seems. The more Daenerys says she is not like her cruel father, the more authoritarian her response becomes.
She also has a fetish for a man on bended knee.
After defeating the Lannister army, she gives a soaring speech to the captured soldiers about how unlike crooked Queen Cersei she is.
“Join me and together we will leave the world a better place than we found it,” she says in words that could have come from Obama’s Yes We Can campaign.
The speech works great but ends with “Refuse and die,” which is more Sopranos, less Bernie Sanders.
At that point, and despite the protest of her adviser Tyrion Lannister, she has Drogon incinerate the two Tarly men who are fighting for Cersei: Randyll Tarly and his son Dickon.
The execution has the intended effect and restores some faith about characters of consequence being dispassionately dispatched in the service of plot.
Given that last episode’s dragon fight spared the lives of so many crucial characters, including Jaime and his right-hand man Bronn, GoT was looking suspiciously like an episode of MacGyver, with the protagonists getting out of trouble conveniently in the nick of time. Thankfully, there are no paper clips in Westeros.