Game of Thrones Series 7 Episode 6: Beyond The Wall (The One Where We All Said 'Holy Shit' A Lot)

Ok, let’s all just take a minute to focus on the positives: IMMINENT JAIME/BRIENNE REUNION. If my jaw literally dropped in a cartoonish manner when The Thing happened in the episode (the first Thing, not the Coda Thing), it dropped harder and faster when I realised Sansa was sending Brienne to King’s Landing. Inevitably this leads to heartbreak, but I have poor impulse control and boundless optimism when it comes to my stories, so here we are.

SO LET’S TALK ABOUT THE THING. I’ll tell you one thing this episode did really well: a series of Events We* Did Not See Coming mainly because they were batshit insane. I did not expect to see Dragons v White Walkers: The Ultimate Showdown at this stage**, mainly because I’d heard the theories/rumours about the bringing-a-wight-home plan AND the ice zombie dragon plots before they happened, and I thought they were fucking ridiculous. But let’s be clear: they’re only mostly fucking ridiculous. The wight plan has been very much the wong plan (wait, where are you going) from the minute it was brought up. It should have been met with a healthy dose of NOPE FACE from everyone in that cramped Dragonstone map room. The entire point of it was to convince Cersei of the reality of the threat, like Cersei has given any indication that she’s prone to rational thinking, now or ever. What’s painfully clear now is that it was all in the service of creating the ice dragon, which is either a) an important plot point from a future book that we’ll absolutely definitely see next year eh George or b) something Benioff and Weiss wanted to do so much that they didn’t much care how it happened (I’m inclined to think it’s a bit of both).

And hey, it’s only mostly fucking ridiculous because as an idea ‘ice dragon’ levels the playing field a little bit (remember how unstoppable Daenerys looked at the start of this series? Way to fumble a 3-0 lead), and also is, yes, very cool. I’m upset that it means we probably won’t get the three heads of the dragon/three dragon riders motif but maybe I’m expecting neatness from a show that actually has been at its best when it blurs the lines of things where the expectation is that they’ll be more clean cut (witness the Flaming Baggage Train Attack being a high point of this series - any of those characters could have died, and we’d have been sad).

It also moves forward the Jon/Dany*** romance, and with a lot of big clanging lines being dropped all over the shop about how Dany can’t have children, I really hope Jon doesn’t have magical undead sperm or something. I’d be way more on board if it turns out that Mirri Maz Duur - the witch who tricked Dany back in the first season and killed her unborn child with magic, also delivering the news that she would never again give birth - was just straight up lying to fuck with her. Either way, it turns out that if you imagine Jon saying “Auntie” at the end of each line from his bed of pain, the scene feels less like sexual tension and more like an aunt caring for her sick nephew WHICH IS WHAT IT IS. I have such a horrible feeling that the show is planning to get them together and *then* reveal Jon’s parentage, presumably accompanied by a sad trombone noise.

"Who's auntie's brave little soldier, eh? Poor wee thing, all tuckered out." 

Ad - on every level - nauseam.

Probably overarching plot-wise, the important thing here is that, as Beric pointed out, the White Walkers have a borg-style arrangement where killing one of them also kills the wights that it animated, and thus killing the Night’s King would take everyone out, Chitauri-style. This gives a clear endgame for either Jon or Dany or both, but also highlights one of several Idiot Balls that characters in this episode were holding at various times: even without this knowledge, the NK is clearly still a pretty big deal up on that totally exposed platform - why didn’t Danaerys target a little more strategically? Why didn’t the NK, for that matter? Why javelin the moving dragon instead of the stationary one that everyone is planning to make their escape on? Why would the Westerosi Maginficent Seven head out beyond the Wall without backup (literally anything - Wildlings, Night’s Watch, their own fucking raven that they could send off so Gendry didn’t have to do a Mo Farah-beating distance sprint back to Eastwatch) beyond a few Obvious Red Shirts who got Red Shirted so hard and so obviously it made Gene Roddenberry go “oh, honey” from his grave? Because it would destroy the story, seems to be the only reason, and that’s distracting enough to be annoying.

Also distracting enough to be annoying is how poorly the other plot of the episode was handled, namely the ongoing Arya and Sansa conflict. I just don’t get what’s being achieved here: either Arya and Sansa (or Arya or Sansa) are doing a massive fake-out of Littlefinger to expose him once and for all as a Lying Liar who Lies, in which case this is a painful disservice to watch these characters go through these motions, or they’re really actually being strung along by him, which is a painful disservice to seven seasons of character development. Notably absent from the series has been any conservation about what exactly the women have been through while away - if it turns out that they’re playing Littlefinger and this conversation happened offscreen, that’s shitty as I’d rather have seen that conversation than almost anything else; if they haven’t, then that’s even shittier as why the fuck not instead of dropping oblique hints you don’t all have to be Bran, and that includes Bran and where the fuck is Bran and his all-seeing eye anyway is he still on a comedown in the godswood because I swear to the old gods and the new I will cut a bitch. Any which way, I’m inclined to think Sansa is sending Brienne away to protect her from Littlefinger, who clearly has her in his sights as a big obstacle to his Happy Gaslighting Ending with Sansa.**** I’m now rowing back on Cersei as one of my big death predictions for this season (unless next week takes A Turn) but it’s still possible that Littlefinger will get it. It’s fine, he’ll still have a rich and compelling story line when we get the next book (*laughs bitterly forever*).

As a note to end on, I just want to register that Jorah was really the only person I cared about not getting killed in that episode (and Gendry, but that’s more because it would be mean to bring him back after so long only to kill him). I fully expected both Thoros and Beric to go down swinging, and honestly I’m a little surprised that Beric didn’t also - but I guess the Lord of Light isn’t done with him yet (RIP Thoros, a drunkard among drunkards). In my most Most Unpopular GoT Opinion, I was sort of hoping for a swift goodbye to Tormund and an end to all this Brienne nonsense, but that’s a deep indicator of how unpalatable I find that particular plot, because away from all that Tormund is delightful and #pure #ginger #kissedbyfire.

But then also, maybe I’m just a massive hypocrite because I love Jorah, and that is hundo p because Iain Glen plays him with such dignified gravelly pain. I really shouldn’t love this character because isn’t he just another man desperately hanging around an uninterested woman hoping that she’ll love him through sheer persistence? Is it really any better than the Tormund and Brienne storyline? But the first four to five seasons of gradually building trust, of yearningly intoned “Khaleesi”s, of betrayal and friendship and uncertainty, are one of my favourite relationships in the show, and probably one of the most complexly drawn, or at least one of the longest lasting. Their reunion earlier in the season felt textured and complicated in a way that was entirely earned, and it’s a hallmark of the pace that these final two seasons are moving at that we likely won’t get such relationships from any of the new alliances being forged.

Oh buddy.

Anyway, the stage is set for next week’s season finale (a whole 90 minutes of it!) to be some good old fashioned vintage Intrigue At The Red Keep style GoT with it being literally anyone’s guess how all this goes down. I’ll leave you with a single word of excitement though: CLEGANEBOWL.


*We = self (have read books) and partner (has not read books, plays on phone during show, asks me what just happened at a rate of knots, is still alive only because I really like explaining Game of Thrones)
**For a hot minute there I thought we were going to get The Climatic High Fantasy Battle then and there, and the subsequent final season would be given over to King’s Landing intrigue and people skulking in corridors, and in that moment I really, strongly wanted that to be the case. It won’t happen though, mainly because it’s harder to write, and B&W want to go and make their super sensitive hot take on slavery (it was bad, you guys).
*** Look, can you be bothered to type and spell check ‘Daenerys’ every time?
****By the way, did we ever get any follow up on Littlefinger’s ‘I want to be king of everything’ speech? Like, how he was going to make that happen? Because he is so far from the Iron Throne. The throne is a dot to him. (I think probably this is just another indicator of the show not quite knowing what to do with him in open warfare storylines given that castle-based skulking is more his metier.)