Game of Thrones - 'Hardhome', 'The Dance of Dragons' and 'Mother's Mercy'

It has reached the point where Jon Snow pretty much needs his own touching
yet generic bromance theme.

'Hardhome', or 'The Wight Stuff'

Cersei refuses to confess, and Qyburn tells her that Tommen has basically become a shut in, with Pycelle and 'Uncle' Kevan Lannister taking control of the Small Council. Arya is sent out to inhabit the life of an oyster seller in order to spy on and ultimately assassinate a corrupt insurance broker. Sam tells Olly that sometimes hard choices have to be made, even if they feel wrong, basically triggering Olly's ultimate betrayal of Jon over the Wildling question. In Winterfell, Reek admits he has no hope of ever escaping Ramsay, but also that he never killed Bran and Rickon. Ramsay asks to take the fight to Stannis' approaching army with twenty good men. In Mereen, Tyrion talks Danaerys out of having Jorah executed, instead renewing his exile. He immediately offers himself as a slave to the pit boss if he can take up the place he won at the great games, while Danaerys explains to Tyrion that she doesn't want to freeze the Game of Thrones with the Targaryens on top, she wants to end the game entirely.

Karsi (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) is awesome, and so

very clearly dead more or less from the off.

The meat of this episode, however, is of course at Hardhome, a Wildling sanctuary 'town' north of the Wall. While more than half of the Wildlings refuse Jon's offer, some accept and begin loading onto Stannis' ships, including the female Wildling leader Karsi, whose entire performance in her sole episode is about building up to her death. The evacuation is interrupted, however, by a massive Wight attack. Jon is able to kill a walker with Longclaw, but as he takes the last boat away from shore, he sees the Night's King raise the slaughtered Wildlings as wights.

Much of 'Hardhome' is marking time, but the titular scenes more than make up for it, with two particularly notable scenes. First, the attack arrives under cover of a snow storm. The Thenn chieftain orders the gates closed on those still outside, leaving them beating on the fence, until the storm arrives and there is a sudden, total silence; eerie as anything. Then, with one Walker dead but the camp on the brink of falling, Jon watches in horror as hundreds of wights leap from an overlooking cliff to form a huge pile at the bottom, and after a few moments rise en masse to charge the remaining defenders.

"Can I get a 'hell yeah!'?"

I am very sad that Karsi doesn't get to be a recurring character. She pops up, all noble and stoic, puts her daughters on a boat and goes back for the elderly, dispatches a mess of wights, then gets mauled by wight children because she can't bear to hit them. I can't say I blame her, and if not for the fact that the people-eating Thenn leader also gets offed, I'd argue that only the shit survive in this world. As it is, it's just select shits who prosper.

Also, I would laugh if the Night's King ended up on the Iron Throne. It would just fuck with everyone's heads if this was the story of the last Winter, and the reason everyone in it seems like such douchebags is because it's the account written centuries later by White Walker historians.

'The Dance of Dragons', or 'Don't Put Your Daughter on the Pyre Mr Baratheon'

And speaking of douchebaggery...

I am legitimately too pissed off to write a snarky caption right now, so here's
a picture of Shireen with the father she deserved.

Arya suffers mission creep after she sees Meryn Trant, the top guy on her list, arrive with Mace Tyrell. She tracks him to a brothel where he requests the youngest girls possible. At the Wall, Jon realises that he's barely rescued a fraction of the Wildlings to resist the greatest army the world has ever seen, and that the Night's Watch now hate him anyway. Stannis, the greatest military commander in living memory, gets bushwhacked and his supplies fired by Ramsay. He sends Davos off on an errand so he can let the Red Woman burn his daughter as a sacrifice, thus dropping him to just below Ramsay Bolton on own list of people I want to 'win' in the end. I still want Ramsay Bolton to be eaten alive by fire ants, but he can flay Stannis first. I'm okay with that. In Dorne, Prince Doran sets terms. Myrcella will go home, but Trystane will travel with them and take Oberyn's place on the small council. Bron will also be spared, if he gets smacked in the face. Elaria is forced to swear she will not harm Myrcella.

Important lessons from history - this is why the Targaryens
traditionally win.

At the great games in Mereen - during a round in which a knight, a spear fighter and a water dancer clash, echoing the major fighting styles we've seen so far - the Sons of the Harpy strike. Their first thrust is beaten back by Daario and the Unsullied, with a helpful surprise javelin from Jorah and with the loss of only Dandy Whosit the political fiance, but the royal party - including Tyrion - ends up surrounded until Drogon swoops in, barbecues some fools and then flies off with Danaerys on his back.

Drogon's rescue flight is of course one of the money shots of the season, but is slightly stymied by being so obvious. Also, it is increasingly apparent that as magnificent as they are in open combat, the Unsullied are a shit police force.

'Mother's Mercy', or 'Causes of the Great King's Landing Fire'

Men of action.

The Danaerys Targaryen testosterone brigade assembles to argue who gets to swan off like a magnificent bastard to rescue her, the funk of machismo enough to almost drag Tyrion into it. Ultimately, Daario and Jorah head off, leaving Tyrion - and the newly arrived Varys - to run the city, with Missande and Grey Worm to be the visible face and shit-kicking boot of Danaerys' regime. The Mother of Dragons herself is back to dealing with a sulky- and wounded - teenager, who doesn't want to play any more, and instead opts to sulk in his room/pit of bones, while Mum goes to Iceland and is waylaid by a Khalasar of Dothraki ninjas (seriously; there is no other way she can have not seen them sooner.)

"Fine! Sulk. But don't come down looking for dinner when you
get hungry."

Cliffhanger!

The Red God appears to be making good as the snow around Winterfell thaws, but Stannis is hit with a series of body blows, as he learns in quick succession that the sellswords have run off with the horses on account of their commander is a crazy bastard who sets fire to his own daughter, that his wife has committed suicide after he set fire to their daughter, that Melisandre has booked it back for the Wall since sacrificing his daughter hasn't worked out, and that, oh yeah, you set fire to your own daughter you fuck! Rather than wait for his slightly sad force to lay what they laughingly call siege, the Boltons sally forth and massacre Stannis' forces. Under cover of the confusion, Sansa breaks out and signals for help, but Brienne misses it as she runs off to kill Stannis and avenge Renly, which I guess at least spares him the flaying.

It's like the end of Sightseers, but slightly funnier and less
unpleasant.

As she tries to return to her room, Sansa is ambushed by Ramsay's psycho lover Myranda, but Reek intervenes, throwing Myranda off a wall before he and Sansa jump off in the other direction, which frankly looked just as terminal to me. I guess we'll find out next season when they'll either be on the run and trying to out-Northern Ramsay Snow, or being mopped up with a sponge.

Cliffhanger!

Basically, everyone in this scene is being marked for a
horrible death.

Cersei confesses her sins - well, incest and fornication with Lancel at least; she's keeping mum, as it were, on the Jaime and the bastards charge - and is permitted to return home and see her son, if she atones. This atonement is to walk naked through the streets while the populace throw insults and filth. She is met at the Red Keep by Qyburn, who presents the newest of the Kingsguard, an armoured behemoth with blue skin, who is either the half-dead revenant of the Mountain or a really good blag on Qyburn's part. Being a man of the world who know what women want, he assures her that this man is an engine of death to the enemies of the crown.

Not much of a cliffhanger, as we can be pretty certain that Cersei is going to be 'taking steps' against the Sparrows and her life isn't in immediate danger.

As Jaime sails off he tries to confess to Myrcella, who already knows the truth, embraces her father, and drops down poisoned. I was disappointed that Bron didn't swipe Tyene's antidote while they were saying goodbye, because a) as a father I am suffering from serious 'daughters getting murdered' fatigue and b) it felt like such an obvious move. And because I wasn't traumatised enough, in Braavos Arya steals a face to assassinate Meryn Trant. Jaqen seems to take poison to atone, but she rips off face after face from the body until she reveals her own and then is struck blind.

I feel the camera should be spinning and something by
the Doors playing.

At the Wall, Sam persuades Jon to send him off to the Citadel to train as a Maester, taking Gilly and baby Sam with him for safety. Thus isolated, Olly lures Jon into a circle of officers of the Night's Watch who each stab him once, declaring it is 'for the Watch', before leaving him to bleed out on the snow as the lighting turns blue.

Cliffhanger?

'Mother's Mercy' is a pretty grim episode, wrapping up a pretty grim season of an increasingly problematic show. The not-a-rape-honest of Cersei, the rape of Sansa and general reveling in the vileness of Ramsay Bolton, the murders of Shireen and Myrcella, the latter by a group of women who were otherwise pitched as 'brutal but humorously slutty Amazons', the zombie children of Hardhome and the tonal awkwardness of the great games, in which a man was decapitated for laughs before a brutal (and messily shot) massacre which segued into a triumphal moment with the arrival of Drogon.

As I noted a few episodes back, Game of Thrones is losing track of its tone. It doesn't know anymore if its violence is supposed to be epic and awesome or bloody and horrible, and I suspect that as they deviate more and more from the source material, the showrunners are feeling a certain amount of pressure to keep shocking the audience in order to maintain their buzz. The showrunners argue that outrage over Shireen's burning displays the hypocrisy of an audience who only care when Stannis burns a character they know and like, but this somewhat overlooks the issue that he is burning his daughter, an innocent teenage girl. Stannis has never been the good guy, but he might have been the right guy, just about, until now, and claiming that this doesn't cross any lines that he hasn't crossed before is disingenuous.

In these final three episodes of Season 5, 'Hardhome' was far and away the best, with the massacre at Hardhome a standout for the series, let alone the season. Placing that in episode 8 unfortunately left the final two episodes with nowhere to go but down. 'The Dance of Dragons' and 'Mother's Mercy' also had too much going on, and ended up with big climactic moment after big climactic moment, undercutting each by immediately plodding off to do another one. Shireen's death was horrible, but followed by the almost slapstick great games, and there is a definite numbness setting in after the death of Myrcella which makes it harder to care about Jon Snow, because damn it I'm out of emotional investment just for this evening.

The creators swear up and down that Snow is dead dead, as does Kit Harrington, which usually means he isn't, but who can tell. The internet reaction makes it clear that everyone saw what they wanted to see in that shot, from that blue light to a change in his eye colour. I'm waiting for the first person to claim that if you play the soundtrack backwards you can hear the words 'Stone Heart'.