The Queen of Thorns
swallows the poison and drops the mic. Before she goes, Olenna Tyrell takes a
few shots at her executioner, Jamie Lannister. (“There are always lessons in
failure,” he says. “You must be very wise by now,” she shoots back). She also
delivers a revelation.
It was she who killed King
Joffrey via poison, Olenna tells Jamie. This may change a lot, since the
Lannisters have been blaming Tyrion and Sansa for years. Or maybe it won’t
change much at all: Cersei no doubt would have found some pretext to call for
Tyrion’s death, and maybe the game is too far gone to make this
misunderstanding more than a tragedy. I will miss Diana Rigg’s shiv-like
putdowns. I also wonder how Olenna would have revealed her poisoning of Joffrey
if Jamie had chosen a less resonant method of execution. She would have had to
find another way to work it into the conversation.
It was a clever plan for
the Lannister army to go after Highgarden, which offers money to the broke
Lannisters, rather than defend Casterly Rock, which has symbolic importance to
the family but apparently not much else. I liked the scene with the Iron Bank
accountant, since it was amusingly mundane to talk about all those debts.
Cersei takes revenge on
Ellaria for killing Myrcella by poisoning Ellaria’s daughter and leaving mother
to watch daughter die. This is a case of everybody being terrible, with one
murder spurring another spurring another. Cersei is a godawful person but she’s
fun to watch and has been doing pretty well so far in the endgame. Also fun to watch:
Euron, who seems like the closest thing this show has to Freddie Mercury.
Fire meets ice in
Dragonstone as Daenerys, woman of umpteen titles, meets Jon Snow, her secret
nephew and man of one title. This was like immoveable object meeting immoveable
object, with Dany holding Jon to the Stark oath of fealty to the Targaryens and
Jon pointing out that maybe the oath is invalid since the mad king killed a ton
of people and besides, he’s king in the North now. Maybe the political
positions are too entrenched for either to budge. What happens to the North’s
semi-autonomy if/when Daenerys becomes queen of Westeros? The two appear to
have reached a compromise with Jon requesting the dragon glass. These two can
still work together by doing different things.
In Winterfell, Littlefinger
is still hitting on Sansa, telling her “Command suits you.” GO. AWAY. He’s
annoying but Littlefinger can still be useful to her, with his advice about
imagining everything happening at once and then never being surprised. The lady
of Winterfell reunites with her sibling but it’s not the good one. It’s Bran,
dragged there by Meera, who I really hope gets a break for awhile. I guess this
kid is supposed to seem remote since he’s the Three-Eyed Raven and he’s
focusing on otherworldly, more important matters, but he just seems ungrateful
and unfeeling when Sansa hugs him and he just sits there. She’s thrilled to see
him and he reminds her of the night her psycho husband raped her. Thanks for
coming, Bran! Bran tells her he can never be lord of Winterfell, and I guess
his work as the Three-Eyed Raven is one reason. The other reason is that he has
gotten a bunch of people killed, people who were just trying to help him.
Sorry but I just don’t like
that kid.
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