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Tag Archives: The Hound
Game of Thrones: Winter Comes Too Fast “Beyond the Wall”
As Game of Thrones draws to a close, the set pieces are bigger, the stakes are higher, and the conflicts are grander. Gone are the days when different characters could be forever wandering across the map while the audience waited with baited breath for them to cross paths. More and more, our good guys and bad guys are clumped together, fighting the dead, their nearest adversaries, or one another, but now doing so in big groups rather than scattered pairings.
And yet, as the show starts to reach its climax, unveiling meetings and match-ups the fans have been salivating over for ages, I find myself relishing the moments that feel more like the show’s long middles than its grand finales. Those were the days of Game of Thrones where our favorite (and least favorite) characters would schlep all around Westeros having conversations with one another, facing the occasional dust up, and wondering what it all meant and about their place in these big events.
Game of Thrones: “Dragonstone” Offers a Brilliant Homecoming
“Dragonstone” is a homecoming. For Game of Thrones, that means something very different than for the standard alma mater. In Westeros, it means throne rooms, dead bodies, and lush locales in which to do the same thing we do every season — try to take over the world. But the show starts its seventh season with an episode about being away, coming back home, and reflecting on what’s changed, within and without, since you left.
Game of Thrones Explores the Symmetry of Westeros and its People in “No One”
For a several years now, Game of Thrones had a fairly reliable format for the structure of its episodes. We spend ten minutes in one location advancing one character’s story, ten minutes in another, and so forth and so on with little repetition beyond the possibility of some sort of coda for one of the stories at the end of the episode. But the show has been playing around with that format this season (with cold opens, longer segments, and other differences) and that trend continues in “No One.”
Instead of a semi-linear progression from place to place, there’s something approaching symmetry to the order in which we visit our heroes across Westeros and beyond. The episode begins with trips to Braavos, The Riverlands, and Meereen, and finishes by returning to these same places and stories in reverse order. The middle portion of the episode comes close to doing the same thing with stops in King’s Landing and Riverrun.
So why the symmetry?
Posted in Game of Thrones, Television
Tagged Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth, Cersei Lannister, Edmure Tully, Episode Reviews, Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones S06E08, Game of Thrones Season 6, Greyworm, Jamie Lannister, Missandrei, Symmetry, The Brotherhood Without Banners, The Faceless Men, The Hound, Tyrion Lannister
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Game of Thrones: The Broken People, Places, and Things in “Broken Man”
We don’t know who’s pulling the strings that tie the different corners of Westeros together. It may be the Old Gods; it may be The Seven; it may be the Drowned God; or it may be the Lord of Light. Septon Ray suggests they may all be different names for the same thing. But whoever has that power has left any number of those in Westeros and beyond in some sort of weakened state. They’ve taken away people’s strength, sapped them of their power and position, and left them, in a word, “broken.”
