by Eric Blume
In this season’s best episode yet, Game of Thrones head creatives David Benioff and D.B. Weiss display their astounding aesthetic taste and uncanny ability to know exactly what viewers want to see. This episode featured one powerhouse match-up after the next, giving us duet after duet of characters we want to see together, talking about what we want them to talk about, in exactly the way we want them talking about it. The episode also features particularly fine writing, an element of Game of Thrones that often goes unsung despite being one of the show’s strongest features.
The show opened with a funeral segment and an extended banquet scene that paid tribute to last week’s monumental battle...
The show is always certain to show the weight of death and the consequences of battle, very responsible about the violence. The episode focuses largely on the waning power of Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), seen here in a variety of manipulative scenes that give this character and this actress more to do than in the past two seasons. It’s fun to see Clarke get to play something more than imperiousness, and she runs with it.
We also get to see the long-delayed hook-up of Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Brienne (Gwendolyn Christie), as well as their inevitable dissolution. Benioff and Weiss know what a special actress they have in Christie, and they’ve given her just the right amount of featured material. And Coster-Waldau continues to flesh out Jaime in a series of fascinating dualities…it’s incredibly subtle and intelligent acting, and the Emmy really should be his if there’s any justice this fall.
This episode also gave us a great war room scene where all the key actors are together and a variety of motivations are revealed. Other highlights involved a terrific scene of the remaining Family Stark members and John Snow’s farewells to his closest friends. About Kit Harrington -- he’s often ridiculed, but I’d argue that he finds a surprising amount of flavors within the confines of his role. It’s not easy to play The Hero without being super boring, and Harrington conveys a huge self-doubt and troubling moral weight in his scenes that a lesser actor might miss.
But everything leads to possibly the series’ most compelling actor: Lena Headey, as our Big Bad, the climax that will determine the outcome of the show. Headey has been missed this season, completely out of the last two shows (by design), but coming back at the end of the episode in grand style. Headey and the show’s creative forces have keyed into Cersei so keenly that the actress registers like a silent movie actress: most of what she does is conveyed through silent processing in the actress’ mind, which we somehow see. It’s a miraculous thing they do with this character: she’s a lightly-psychotic kitten, a deeply sexual woman, a scarily maternal lightning bolt, and a host of other forces that compete with themselves. Her transitions during the scene upon the castle are spectacular… acting can rarely be called delicious, but with Headey it applies.
There’s no guessing what might transpire over the last two episodes of this beautiful show. Ben will be here to guide you through the penultimate episode, and then we’ll be together to discuss the big finale in two weeks. Please leave your non-hating thoughts in the comments section to celebrate the deeply fine, hard work these artists are doing this season.