Game of Thrones - 'High Sparrow', 'Sons of the Harpy' and 'Kill the Boy'

Cersei chances her arm with the piety card.

In 'The High Sparrow', Queen Margaery's ascendance sees Cersei Lannister seeking new alliances. She pushes to dominate the Small Council, and when the fanatical 'Sparrows' humiliate the High Septon, chooses to side with them and have their leader (played by Jonathan Pryce, a man who more than perhaps any other can blend humility, gentleness and sinister zeal in the same facial expression) the High Sparrow made High Septon. This is a jack move by the Queen Mum, who has not previously been notably pious, and aimed especially at 'that smirking whore'.

Heterbromance FTW!

In the North, we learn that Roose Bolton and Petyr Baelish have arranged for Sansa to marry Ramsay, to secure the Boltons' precarious hold on the North. Sansa is horrified, but Petyr sells it to her as a chance for revenge. Brienne and Pod bond as they tail Baelish. Meanwhile, on the Wall, Stannis makes a last bid to get the Night's Watch to fight with him, and Jon snow asserts his command of the Watch by having the insubordinate Janos Slynt executed. Still taking his cues from Ned Stark, he wields the blade himself.

In Braavos, Arya is learning that being a Faceless Man is not all shivs and face-changing, but involves a lot of sweeping. After a confrontation in which she is persuaded to give up Arya Stark's possessions (retaining only Needle, which she conceals; I suspect that this is, like, important) she graduates from sweeping to washing corpses.

And in Volantis, Tyrion's progress to meet Danaerys Targarean is interrupted when Jorah Mormont kidnaps him to take him to Danaerys Targarean.

"Excuse me, could the King possibly come in and speak to the High Septon for
a minute if it's no trouble, please."

'Sons of the Harpy' of course takes us back to Mereen, where Danaerys is struggling for control against the fanatical Sons, who mirror the rise of the Faith Militant in King's Landing, an armed sect of the Sparrows given authority to 'protect the common folk'. Having arranged the creation of this group, Cersei sicks it on Loras Tyrell for being gay. Although this is a clear blow against Margaery and her family - who are threatening to replace the Lannisters as the money men of the Seven Kingdoms - it looks set to backfire already, as Tommen's attempt to free Loras is resisted, and the King called a bastard by unseen hecklers.

Northwards, Sansa is pondering family. Melisandre tries to seduce Jon Snow, who tells her to sling her hook. Go Snow. More painfully, he has to ask the Warden of the North for troops, despite the Warden being Roose Bolton.

Fan service. I'm sorry, it just is.

Jaime and Bron arrive in Dorne and almost immediately have to kill some guards. SUBTLETY! Elsewhere, Ellaria and three of Oberyn's bastard daughters, the 'Sand Snakes', are plotting to murder Mircella and post her home to King's Landing in a series of small boxes. The irony of Oberyn being motivated in part by his conviction that horribly murdering someone's innocent and defenceless sister is a line one should never cross is still lost on them.

I have decided that the best I can hope for the characters I like
is that they won't die like punks.

And then the shit really goes down in Mereen, as dozens of Sons of the Harpy in their gold masks start stabbing up Second Sons and ambushing Unsullied patrols. Grey Worm's squad is surrounded in an alley and mostly die like punks, but he holds out until Ser Barristan Selmy - who has spent the rest of the episode being a cool uncle to Danaerys and reminding everyone he's awesome - arrives for an epic back to back-type stand which leaves them both bleeding on the ground, surrounded by the bodies of a whole load of dead Sons of the Harpy (they get half a dozen apiece as personal kills, easily, plus the ones the rest of the patrol take out.)

"Well, that's not something you see every day."

Oh, hey; I forgot that Jorah mugged a fisherman and had a tense punching conversation with Tyrion. In 'Kill the Boy' they're still sailing, heading for Valyria, home of Valyrian steel and Targareans. It had a Doom, it turns out, and Tyrion and Jorah bond over epic poetry and the holy shit moment of watching Drogon do a fly-over. And then they fight lepers, or rather 'stone men' - rocking the final stages of Greyscale, Westeros's super-leprosy - and Jorah gets infected! This would be even more worrying if we hadn't had Stannis explaining to his daughter how her Greyscale was cured an episode ago.

The rather grim title of the episode is actually a reference to a
piece of advice from Maester Aemon to Jon: "Kill the boy, and
let the man be born."

Speaking of, Stannis ships out for Winterfell, taking his daughter - with her permanently scarred face - and his wife - with her permanent bitch face - with him rather than leaving them at Castle Black surrounded by killers and rapists. Fair. Jon Snow, meanwhile, is heading north with Tormund Giantsbane, intent on selling a peace with the Wildlings and allowing them to settle in the North rather than swelling the ranks of the Wight Army. This is not happy-making for the Watch, who have after all been keeping Wildlings out of the North for centuries as a matter of life-consuming dedication.

Sansa finds out about 'Reek' and after a scene at dinner, Roose prompts Ramsay to shape up, stop being a childish bully, and become a manly bully like his father. Meanwhile, Brienne and Pod are watching Winterfell.

In Mereen, Grey Worm recovers from his wounds, but Ser Barristan doesn't, so Danaerys feeds one of the heads of the great families to her dragons. Then she gets her shit together and decides to marry the great families' principal envoy, Hizdahr zo Loraq in order to make peace with Mereen.

So, one of the things that interests me about this set of episodes, bringing us up to the halfway point in Season 5, is that people keep talking about Rhaegar Targarean. Petyr Baelish talks about the tournament where he gave the crown of love and beauty to Lyanna Stark, whom he later abducted and raped. So the official (Baratheon) histories state, anyway; this actually squares poorly with what other people say about him. Barristan's last hurrah before the battle is to tell Danaerys how he and Rhaegar would go down into King's Landing incognito and Rhaegar would sing to the people like any other minstrel. I would guess that we're going to get a revelation before long.

The other thing of note is the increasing complexity of every situation. Even Brienne, who clearly wants a simple life, is basically trying to protect Sansa against Sansa's wishes, with the aid of a squire she doesn't want, and having sworn to kill the man who represents Sansa's best chance of freedom. Jon Snow, Danaerys Targarean and even Sansa began the series as little more than puppets of fate, but all are now making major policy decisions. Meanwhile Cersei is winding herself into a web of schemes that may be her undoing, or may resolve in a Xanatos Gambit of near-epic proportions.