Game of Thrones for Noobs II

Welcome back to another Game of Thrones review. Be aware that spoilers are ahead but that I also have no fucking clue about what the hell is going on. Read last week's magical review here.

The Story Thus Far
Tyrion Lannister popped out of a crate and barfed all over the place before learning he probably should go and meet the Khaleesi with his buddy Matt Pinfield. The androgynous lady knight and her young ward (NOT SQUIRE!) hung out on some kind of moor, bitching about God knows what, and that one dude who apparently lost his dick got tricked by a hooker into a serious throat-slittin’. Dragon-Tits’ pets spewed fire in her face as if to say, “Hey! We don’t like being chained up in the basement of your weird, pseudo-ancient Egyptian crypt!” Braveheart Junior (which is what I’m calling the king of those weirdos who live on the other side of the big-ass wall) wouldn’t bow to Stannis “No Nickname” Baratheon, and so he was almost burned to death, but John Snow shot him in the heart with an arrow, which was probably a lot better than writhing in the flames. The moon-faced daughter of Ned Stark is given some coin by some guy and told to go to, uh, some place if she ever needs help.

The Gist
I’ve been told that the fate of Arya Stark, the moon-faced girl, has been in question between seasons, so even this nonfan was excited to see she had joined up with a friendly curly-haired dude to sail to a seaside town with the coin she had received from some kind of wizard. The city has a massive statue guarding its port entrance, and Arya is clearly nervous. Can we blame her? She’s known life to be pretty fucked of late and has been forced to fend for herself for a pretty long time, apparently. Her arrival, unfortunately, is inauspicious. Yes, she has found the House of Black and White (which is either a dormitory for the best chess players or the location in which those cookies were invented), but when the surly old bastard who lives there opens the door, he tells her to get lost. And so she waits through the night for who knows what and rattles off names to herself while it rains. Eventually, she gets sick of it, tosses the coin into the sea and heads off into the city.



Meanwhile, Lady Brienne (the androgynous she-knight) and her young pal are slurping down soup in one of Westeros’ many convenient medieval HoJo locations. Brienne is, as always, acting super tense, and the young man is blasting laser-boners from his eyes toward all the young women hanging out when they realize that Lady Sansa Stark and Petyr Baelish are also there. It’s a bit odd that Brienne told this guy last week that they were far enough away from the danger they’re fleeing (a danger, by the way, the likes of which is still a mystery), because this sighting gets her all riled up. Verbal jabs are exchanged between Brienne and Sansa about how everybody sometimes has to kiss their boss’s ass, and Baelish tries to get Brienne and her buddy to stay awhile. This doesn’t go over well, and the next thing you know, Sansa and Petyr’s bodyguard guys are chasing Brienne and what’s-his-dick through the forest on horseback. It’s a mostly boring scene until Brienne cuts this one guy good and stabs this other guy in the throat. She seems cooler all the time and is stoic about the throat stabbing. Cool.



Elsewhere, Cersei Lannister receives threats against her daughter in the form of locket-wielding dead snakes, and her brother Jamie reminds her that he couldn’t have let their daughter know he was her dad because how fucked up is it that this brother and sister banged!? He tries to calm Cersei and reminds her that their daughter would be pelted with rocks and that, as it stands, everyone is pretty lucky that their incestuous monster isn’t a complete fucking idiot. And anyway, he can’t stay and argue about who raised who, because he is off to visit his buddy Baron Chinstrap (who’s name I didn’t catch) to enlist his aid in a secret mission in the most southern of all southern places. He offers the guy a castle and shit-talks his wife who, to be fair, is definitely weird-looking, but love is blind and all that. The whole exchange simply adds to the whole Lannisters-are-fucking-dicks pile, and it truly seems like they just go around doing whatever the hell they want.

In the realm that resembles Persia or Babylon or whatever nondescript palm trees-and-gardens locale you’d like to imagine, the inbred Lannister daughter kills time in some beautiful estate while the prince’s sister-in-law reminds him that the Lannisters killed his brother/her husband. She wants to cut a bitch and send the pieces back to Cersei, but the prince is just trying to hang out on his awesome balcony and mostly just wants to be a kind and merciful ruler. He’s a man of the people, all right, and he says this awesome thing about how of course he’s sad his brother died and he knew his brother way longer than his sister-in-law did, but she isn’t happy and all but threatens his new position by rhetorically asking him how long he thinks he’ll rule. Nobody is cut, which is kind of a letdown.



But we don’t have to wait long for more cuts and stabbing, because over in the realm of Daenerys Targaryen, her boyfriend is leading a brigade of newly freed slaves to find those responsible for throat-slashing the poor eunuch who just wanted hooker hugs. The former slaves are no good at hide-and-seek, but the boyfriend guy is; before you know it, he stabs a seemingly normal section of the Wall and connects with a guy from the Sons of the Harpy. From his mask, we know he killed the other guy, and soon the Khaleesi has convened her advisers to discuss what they’ll do to him.

While this is going down, Tyrion and his buddy Matt Pinfield (Varys) are heading to Meereen in a luxury wagon and doing that nerd thing where people who nobody wants to fuck are like, “They’re just jealous because we’re geniuses!” Tyrion is drinking too much and would rather be out in the fresh air, but Matt Pinfield won’t let him because he heard Cersei has a bounty out on his head. So Tyrion just whines like a punk. All we know is they’re going to look for someone to become the new ruler of…ummmm…some place.

Smash cut to Cersei inspecting a severed dwarf head, and her spooky court alchemist or wizard or whatever-the-hell he is is all like, “I’ll keep that dwarf head, girl. I can use it in my work.” This is gross, but Cersei has to check in with her council and offer the Master of War position to this guy who basically wrote the book on misogyny and won’t accept until he hears it from the king, who is apparently busy but isn’t he also a pre-pubescent boy so, like, what the hell does he know? Once again, we almost feel for Cersei, but ultimately cannot, as she is an incestuous monster.



Meanwhile, Stannis Baratheon offers Jon Snow the surname of Stark (a quick Google search taught me that his last name is Snow because he’s a bastard, and bastards in this universe are given arbitrary last names based on where they’re born), but he tells his pudgy friend he won’t do it because he swore a vow to the Night’s Watch. Again, Jon Snow is a good guy who really sticks to his convictions. And this pays off, as it turns out, because there just so happens to be an election to see who their new leader will be, and they elect John Snow, because apparently one of the other guys pissed himself during a battle, and the old guy in charge of the election process seems to like Jon Snow. Things are looking up for this bastard.

We rejoin Arya Stark as she hunts pigeons for food in alleyways and talks shit to street toughs. It seems like she must be having a hell of time, so it is very convenient that the guy from the House of Black and White shows up. She follows him to find out he isn’t some grizzled old black guy after all, and he’s the guy who gave her the coin in last year’s season. What!? It’s confusing big time, but she finally gets to go inside. What will happen to her? Who the hell knows?



Back in Daenerys’ town, we discover she’s all about the justice system and demands a trial for the eunuch murderer, but it never comes to be because some hot-headed former slave goes to visit him in jail and totally kills him. He’s pretty smug about it, too, even after Daenerys tells him that it wasn’t his place and he’ll have to be punished. She calls the whole damn city together and tells the people that this guy should have let the trial go down, and now he has to die. Does it seem odd that the Sons of the Harpy guy was, in Daenerys’ eyes, deserving of a trial while this former slave guy isn’t? Perhaps it was because he was so blatantly unapologetic for his crime, but it still seems like the Khaleesi’s behavior is growing more and more erratic. It’s almost like she is making snap decisions out of a fear of seeming weak or ineffective, which  kind of makes her look worse. In a relatively short amount of time, she seems to have gone from confident to indecisive, and it’s almost like she shouldn’t be in charge.



Anyway, she has the guy beheaded, and everybody starts hissing at her, which totally sounded like maybe there was blood gushing out from the recently decapitated guy’s neck stump, but it was just the people. Maybe in the world of GoT, hissing is like booing? Anyway, she heads home and is pensively surveying her city when a dragon appears, who she refers to as “Dragon.” Either this is one of the dragons she locked up in her basement or it’s a new one we haven’t met yet. Newcomers couldn’t possibly know. Either way, if she named one of her dragons Dragon, then she sucks at naming things even harder than she sucks at listening to her people when they ask her not to behead someone. The dragon takes off into the night, and she watches him go, while we are left with more questions than ever.

The Bottom Line
It’s pretty obvious that each of the storylines in this week’s episode are trying to slowly but steadily ramp up the suspense for what we can only hope will be a major payoff. That said, it’s still frustratingly complicated, and sometimes they don’t even tell you the names of certain characters. More throat slashing definitely helps with the pacing, but there is still more talking and complex politicking than fights and dragons, and that’s a shame. Why on earth that guy from the House of Black and White made Arya Stark hang around in a strange city when he was someone she knew (at least according to the “Previously on…”) is baffling, and Sansa Stark seems like a whiner. The more interesting plotline came with Daenerys’ knee-jerk behavior and willingness to kill someone who betrayed her trust. Either she is growing up and embracing harder decisions, or she has risen to the level of her own incompetence. It would also be cool if the dragon who showed up did some more dragon stuff soon, and if we don’t get more Peter Dinklage ASAP, some of us are going to be bummed.

Pros
There was some serious stabbing this week. Jon Snow deserves (and gets) nice things. The dragon action seems to be ramping up. Certainly all the groundwork being laid down in all the plotlines will lead to something big?

Cons
Who the hell are all these people? Who the hell is that dragon? That guy from the House of Black and White seems to be jerking Arya around, and it seems pointless…almost all of her screen time was super-boring.

The Grade
C Plus: For an episode where a whole lot seemed to happen, mostly nothing happened.

Now, come get your treat, Drogon. Good boy!



Game of Thrones airs Sunday nights on HBO. GIFs via giphy.com