I know the show is doing something about trauma with Theon, but dude, c’mon. The guy drops his sword and leaps over the side of a ship when Euron has Theon’s sister Yara in his clutches. And perhaps the biggest loser of all on Dany’s side is. But this is a tough way for things to turn out in the first major battle in whatever we’re going to call this new war. The loss at sea is going to weigh heavily on Dany’s chances - especially since she seems to have also lost most of the Sand Snakes (making further reinforcements from Dorne less likely) - and will presumably buoy Cersei’s hopes.Īll is not lost, and Dany has many more cards to play. Now, granted, she doesn’t know about the White Walkers just yet, but she also clearly underestimates the wiliness of Cersei, or the willingness of similarly desperate players to try to get on Cersei’s good side.
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But Tyrion’s plan to strike King’s Landing with the Greyjoy fleet and the Dornish, while the others in Dany’s army complete their task, goes up in smoke because nobody was counting on Euron Greyjoy popping up out of the darkness.ĭany, apparently not having realized there are 11 episodes left, rather thinks that taking Westeros will be easy. Now, this is only a short-term setback, I imagine, especially since Team Dany is sending a bunch of her forces to try to take Casterly Rock. Loser: the Daenerys coalition Dany and her friends suffer a huge loss.
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It’s pretty crafty, and I’m impressed with how skillfully the show pulls it off. But because they’re doing so in slightly new permutations and groupings with every new week, it feels like a lot is happening. Pretty much all that’s happened this season is that characters have gotten places they were always going to go. This allows the show to feel like it’s moving forward much more quickly than it actually is.
GAME OF THRONES SEASON 7 EPISODE 2 WATCH SERIES
Thus, the series can keep going back to Dragonstone, and when it does a scene focused primarily on Missandei or Grey Worm, it’s nevertheless still spending time with Tyrion and the others. Now when you check in on Dany, you’re also checking in on Tyrion and Olenna and Varys, etc., etc., etc. In seasons six and seven, however, the series has figured out a way to hack that problem: It’s just collapsed a bunch of its stories into each other. That led to incredibly decompressed storytelling, akin to a daytime soap opera, where characters would fret and stew about the same problem for weeks at a time, then eventually move one step forward in solving that problem. One of the biggest things that hurt Game of Thrones in its fourth and fifth seasons was that its story was spread so far and wide that it was all the series could do to check in on everybody in an episode, much less go back to someone facing a weighty choice. Here are eight winners and four losers from a good but mildly uneventful episode of Game of Thrones. And yet because the show is so near to the end (by most accounts, there are just 11 episodes total left after this one), it gains a certain power from that proximity, lending greater weight to every choice made. Episodes like this are necessary in the grand scheme of the show, but they do leave the viewers feeling as if they’ve watched an entire episode of things that are about to happen, rather than an episode of things happening. “Stormborn” is also hurt, just a bit, by the way the show seems to be trying to conserve its budget for later in the season (about which more in a bit), which results in a giant sea battle that’s just a little hard to understand at some key moments.Īll of this might sound like complaining, but it’s not. But all of this implied momentum suggests the story is moving at a faster clip than it actually is. To the show’s credit, it’s realized that we’re too late in the story for a lot of screwing around. Dany will order Tyrion to send a raven inviting Jon Snow to Dragonstone, and then in the very next scene, he’ll be reading that missive.
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This means it’s also one of those episodes where seemingly three weeks passes in every scene transition. It’s about setting the table for what’s to come.
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“Stormborn” is one of those Game of Thrones episodes where everybody talks a lot about what they’re going to do, but they don’t actually get around to doing most of it.