The penultimate episode of the penultimate season of Game of Thrones lived up to the hype of previous “episode nine” craziness.
As (most of) our Game of Thrones heroes once again find themselves on the right side of the still standing Wall, there were some epic moments during Sunday night’s episode that had us dropping our jaws faster than the show runners dropped the biggest twist of the series that even George R. R. Martin himself has denied will happen in the books—the undead dragon. But let’s back up a minute first to go through some other shocking events that unfolded Sunday night.
Arya’s Bag of Tricks
You know that feeling where you’re trying to find a scroll you lost, and you instead stumble onto a satchel of faces? No? Just Sansa? In what continues to be a confusing and frustrating storyline in Winterfell, Sansa goes searching in Arya’s room for the “incriminating evidence” against her—a note she wrote 10 years ago as a hostage (…really HBO? Did Arya just forget she was a cupbearer for TYWIN LANNISTER HIMSELF??). Instead, she finds another piece of evidence that points to Arya being every bit as dangerous as she’s been menacingly implying. I mean, she got into that room unheard, moments after Sansa opens the same door with a huge squeak. Creepy. Oh, and here’s that dagger of clear importance, sis.
Husband to Bears
There may not be a maiden fair within a hundred miles of the party, but there certainly was a bear worthy of a song beyond the Wall. This behemoth of a killing machine smashes through a couple of nameless redshirts before mauling Thoros (R’hllor in Peace, Red Priest). Even the Hound is rendered useless, once again too overcome by his past being “kissed by fire” to help. And in the end, Jorah, the bear of house Mormont finishes off the bear of the Night King. BTW, quick question, can Beric just set any weapon on fire? If so, maybe he should do that and hand them off to the other members of the party for future battles.
Uncle Benjen… How?
Jon seems even more shocked than we were to see Coldhands, the half-wight Benjen Stark turned into at the hands of the Children of the Forest—the same Children of the Forest that created and gave the Night King his power. Last seen saving Bran and Meera from certain doom and pledging to do “what he can, as long as he can,” Benjen manages to carve a path through the army of the dead with his flaming thurible (religious motifs, anyone?) and get Jon a horse just in time…even though Benjen’s horse returning to the Wall is how we first learn of his disappearance… guess there are a lot of wild horses up there? Benjen sends Jon off, then turns to meet his fate and make his last stand, leaving one less Stark in the world.
The Westrosi Games
Okay, so this was technically a number of different hard-to-process feats of athleticism, but we lumped them together into one big suspension of disbelief: Gendry, doing his best Carl Lewis impression, manages to sprint miles and miles at an epic pace for a guy that’s never seen snow before, let alone run through it; squawking ravens can apparently travel as fast as actual tweets; Dany can fly halfway across the world faster than water can freeze in zero degrees, which, apparently, is mere moments; The Night King calls his shot like Babe Ruth then medals in the ice javelin throw. It really makes us wonder how things would have gone down this episode if the Hound hadn’t botched his second shot put throw…
Episode 66 (season 7, episode 6), debut 8/20/17.
photo: courtesy of HBO
That. Freaking. Ice. Dragon.
And from the depths of the frozen lake comes the fallen dragon, Viserion. Fans of the books have had ice dragon theories aplenty for years—there’s one in the wall, there’s one under Winterfell, there’s even a book about an ice dragon that GRRM wrote himself. The group did, technically, accomplish its mission, and got some bonus points for Sandor impaling the wight on one of Drogon’s spikes. However, we can’t help but feel that losing a Red Priest capable of resurrection and one of the three remaining dragons in the world—let alone giving it to the Night King, making the dragon count 2-1 instead of 2-0, let alone the 3-0 it was before this stupid quest—just wasn’t the wight choice.
Next: Game of Thrones season 7 fashion: Daenerys and ‘Beyond the Wall’
Also, whether that undead dragon still breathes fire or some weird ice-breath (that will still for some reason be capable of melting ice, because why should we expect anything less at this point?), the Wall is coming down soon. If not to finish this season, to start the next. And then “the only war that matters” truly begins. Unrelated, the Hound survived all this so there can actually be a #CLEGANEBOWL #GETHYPE.