Game of Thrones season 7: What’s Melisandre’s plan ‘to die in this strange country’?
What exactly is Melisandre’s agenda at this point in Game of Thrones? Is there any real agenda left? Her scene in episode 3 further complicates matters.
Melisandre appears for one scene in Game of Thrones‘ most recent episode, “The Queen’s Justice.” In the short term, her presence on the cliffs brings Varys up there to learn about what exactly has happened to Daenerys Targaryen’s fleet. If you focus on the long term, though, she drops some very tantalizing clues.
The first is less of a clue so much as a warning that we as an audience may not see her for a little while. She informs Varys that she’s literally leaving the continent to go to Volantis. As the Game of Thrones fan-run wiki reminds us, and as we’ve heard about in the show, Volantis has a large population of adherents to the Lord of Light. We’ve also met one of Volantis’ most powerful priestesses already, as that wiki also mentions: Kinvara.
It could be that we’ll see brief scenes of Melisandre and Kinvara discussing what exactly is going on in Westeros, because Melisandre’s generally operated for presumably religious motivations. She relays a significant prophecy to Daenerys in episode 2, after all, and it helps explain a lot of what she’s done.
Perhaps more tellingly, though, she also says she has to come back to Westeros:
"“Oh, I will return, dear Spider. One last time.”“My lady —”“I have to die in this strange country, just like you.”"
Take a moment to contrast this with her discussion of how she’s behaved under the prophecy in episode 2. She explains to Daenerys that she hasn’t necessarily interpreted the idea of the “prince(ss) who was promised” correctly, borne out by her bouncing from a dead Stannis to a resurrected Jon Snow. To use a bit of a clichéd phrase, Melisandre is only human, after all.
However, in this episode, Carice van Houten delivers this line with a grim sort of certainty. For some reason or another, Melisandre believes she knows that her long, long life will come to an end in the Seven Kingdoms, which is a long, long way from home.
Why does she know this? Has some sort of vision come to her that predicts — or maybe even shows — her own death? She doesn’t deign to share that with Varys, or with us. Perhaps it’ll come up in this putative discussion with Kinvara that may or may not happen in the next few episodes.
However, van Houten started talking about this a week before her character did. Last week, an interview showed her talking about “the end of [Melisandre’s] journey.” At the time, yours truly guessed that she may meet her end standing in front of a dragon. With this set of three lines, that prediction still feels like it might hold some weight. I don’t think it’d be wise to call it a prophecy, for what I suspect are obvious reasons.
Mild potential spoilers follow:
A few months ago, van Houten also posted an image of her presumably wearing her old age makeup for Melisandre. Even if she does merit death-by-dragon, could it be possible that she chooses to die appearing not as she chooses to be, but as she truly is? If she’s about to meet the Lord of Light, shouldn’t she not do so without any pretenses?
That’d certainly be a way to go out, wouldn’t it? She might end up shocking everyone, and they can’t even ask her how or why because she’s probably dead.
Spoilers end.
Next: GoT S7: 5 predictions for episode 4
Also, check Melisandre saying that Varys is going to die too. When a character gets a prediction like that, the odds seem quite good that we will see it happen on screen.
Otherwise, there’s no real payoff, and what would be the point of that, Game of Thrones?