I remember thinking when season 6 ended with that massive armada sailing to Westeros – 100k Dothraki, 10k unsullied, 3 dragons, and an alliance with the entire South – there’s no way Cersei is going to survive the season. Season 6 ended with her killing a lot of people, and s7 will end with her on the receiving end of well-deserved justice. Plus it will clear the plate of all the Iron Throne politicking and let the show focus the last season on the Others and how that plays out.
Silly me.
I’m fairly certain she had arranged with commands to the Mountain before the meeting to not do it if she said to. Likewise she probably had told him before meeting Tyrion ‘I may yell angrily at him, but don’t kill him’. She’s using him as leverage but doesn’t actually want to strike them down, just make them think/know she could. It did seem odd with the Jaime bit, but that’s the only explanation I can think of.
Regarding the incest, incest is greatly frowned upon in Westeros. The Mad King was mad and it was blamed on the inbreeding so with his ousting it became a huge taboo. I do get a chuckle out of the fact that they are both Targs though.
The wall had magical spells and runes on/in it. The undead couldn’t go over/under/through it without destroying it first and until the dragon they didn’t fully have the ability to do this. they tried with the giants and mammoths. There is probably a reason the previous dragon owners didn’t take their dragons up there to ever deal with the undead. One in their hands was enough.
I’ve read a previous version of the script (after I watched the actual episodes) and there was a much more prominent role for Melisandre in plan for this season. For example, she was the one to meet Arya (on her way to King’s Landing) and tell her that Jon is alive and in Winterfell. But, Carice van Houten got a baby last year and the scenario needed to be changed. At least, that’s my interpretation.
@ ridiculus:
I didn’t want to imply that love triangles weren’t a thing for GRRM, I just don’t think that this particular one will happen or even fits the characters. Jorah would have been the more reasonable option IF you wanted to introduce one but Tyrion?
I mean even if he has feelings for Dany (and that’s certainly possible though I feel like it’s not coming from a romantic angle) he is smart enough to know that there is just no chance in hell of this happening.
It might still hurt him to have real confirmation of this fact but I just don’t see any scenario where a real love triangle would make any sense (there was also not a single romantic hint in any of the conversations between Dany and Tyrion). Imo it’s just too late to introduce such a story element and it would muddy the effect of the whole “tragic incest-love” angle between Jon and Dany.
Yep, the director of the episode recently came out saying the ‘Tyrion traitor’ or ‘romance/jealousy’ theories surrounding this scene are nonsense.
“Is she now going to make choices based on the fact that she has an intimate relationship with him, or is she still going to be as pragmatic and strong as she would otherwise be? All that is a question now, and as her chief strategist — as her Hand — not being able to see what the future holds is a worry.”
I like both of these theories better than “Tryion is dumb”. Earlier it clearly bothered him seeing the dragons used against his kinsman. In his scene with Cersie he admits to his extreme pain over the death of the kids. He finds out she is pregnant. He asks her “What do you want”. We don’t hear the answer. They drink wine together. Fade to black. He must KNOW that she would never just drop all her enmity and play nice. That is so far away from her character, and his thinking that is so far away from his character. I HOPE that it is a betrayal or an extra clever double cross against Cersie. That last scene outside the bedroom was there for a reason, or it had better have been. So bummed that the season is over. By far my favorite thread on Q23.
Edit: Tryion seeks redemption. He has done everything in his power to stop Dany from destroying Kings Landing. The whole “break the wheel” schtick rings kindly lamely. Cercie asks him if his plan was to get Jon to bend the knee to Dany and his reply is “Not like this.” What does that mean?
I think it just bothered him to see all those guys just getting butchered while he sat back and watched. I don’t know if he felt particular kinship with them.
He was pretty clearly worried about Jaime. I think also just the scope of the destruction bothered him. Also add in the Tarley massacre, and he has to be thinking this is what the Mad King was like.
Yes, Tyrion is clearly worried that he is going to lose influence over Danerys. That hallway scene simply cements it. It has nothing to do with being in love with her, or with playing everyone in some sort of double cross, that would be stupid. For this entire season Tyrion, as Dany’s chief advisor, has had the dual effect of curtailing her more destructive instincts (not attacking King’s Landing directly, taking a more patient tack with Jon and the North, etc.) while also presiding over her worst setbacks. His entire storyline this season has been about this struggle, and the conversation he had with Danerys a couple of episodes ago illustrated that. He’s very worried that his recent setbacks combined with Jon’s rising stock could combine to cost him the influence over Dany that he sees as the only thing holding her back sometimes from self-destructive behavior. Tyrion believes in Dany, believes she is the best option for the people of Westeros, and is trying to do things the right way with her. As someone else mentioned, this is his redemption, through her he can save Westeros. He’s worried that’s going to fall apart. What he should be doing is talking directly to Jon, as then he’d find Jon feels much the same way, and together they could cement Danerys as a Queen of Westeros the people would not just accept, but welcome.
Tyrion hasn’t lost any of his wits, he knows damn well Cersei is not going to do what she says, and he will advise his allies accordingly. When/If Jaime shows up confirming this, it will help heal the rift between the brothers, and in the end I highly suspect one of the two of them will be the one to kill Cersei, most likely as a desperate act to save someone else important, and/or the lives of thousands of people.
A lot of the writing since we left book territory has been mediocre at best, but whomever is penning the Tyrion/Cersei/Jaime stuff is doing a very good job of keeping those characters interesting and on track. Their storyline is one of the more complicated plot threads in the entire series, and so far it’s paying off very well.
The double-cross theory for Tyrion was mega-dumb. There was no way Tyrion would’ve made some secret pact with Cersei to betray Dany because he damn well knows Cersei will have him killed when the scheme is completed, plus she’s crazy and will get everyone else killed to boot when the White Walkers attack. Tyrion is absolutely sincere when he says he believes Dany is the best hope for the future.
Is he worried she’ll fall too much under Jon’s penile influence? What would the practical likely results of that be? Bad tactical strategy on the battlefield? Stupid f’n ideas like marching north to hand-pick a lone zombie out of an army of zombies and get away with it? Bad sex with someone who expects Dany to grind like a wildling girl?
Dany has a thing for bad boys after Drogo and Daario, so even in teh series the expected hook-up with Jon is a bit of a stretch for me.
No less dumb than him thinking that Cercie would have a truce to fight the White Walkers without betraying them all. Pick your poison. Why was he there, talking to her?
Because the one weakness Tyrion has always shown is a wee bit too much confidence in his own cleverness.
They made that pretty clear. He was there on a last-ditch mission to negotiate a truce after Jon Snow blew it up by not swearing to Cersei. Tyrion thought he sincerely convinced Cersei to accept a truce because he deduced that she was pregnant, and therefore would do it to protect her unborn child.
Was Cersei smart enough to place her hand on her belly at that moment to prod Tyrion into thinking he’d been clever when he was really being led into her trap? Maybe. She was certainly clever enough to have Euron put on a show of leaving when he was really directed to go get the Golden Company.
I’ll argue the counter to this: Dany had a thing for bad-boys, which is why she fell for Daario. But last season (or Book 5 if you prefer) was much about her realizing that such feelings and her attraction to him were not the way to go if she wanted to be Queen. She specifically left Daario in Meereen because she knew that he would not be a partner who would… further her career, if you will.
Jon Snow, on the other hand, must be a pleasant surprise for her. She expected to have to wed someone barely viable (from an attraction perspective) for a political alliance; possibly someone she didn’t even respect. Jon’s refusal to bend to her wishes for halfway noble reasons, his obvious dedication to his people, and the fact that he’s ALSO young and hot and controls half the continent are pretty much winning the political hook-up lottery for her.
And she saw that he had taken a knife in the heart for his cause. That fact impressed her enormously.
I liked this article on the possible endings of the series.
I still think that if the books ever do get finished, there’s a possibility of a subversive ending, even though that’s not where the TV show is going.
Eh, the article’s making a meal out of nothing. Surely it’s not that hard to have a “bittersweet” ending - Jon + Dany are together as per standard trope, yes, but Dany could die in childbirth (which I think is what’s likely to happen as it fulfils the prophecy that she’ll be childless in a typically sneakily prophetic way). Or you could have a “good” ending with the Whitewalkers defeated, and Tyrion more or less in control of the kingdom in one way or another (so it’s kind of good for the people of Westeros), but lots of the main characters we love die. Or you could have the Whitewalkers winning in Westeros but our main heroes escaping to Essos and surviving/vowing to fight another day.
Numerous ways of both serving and subverting the typical tropes at the same time.
I hope the ending is at least somewhat happy so I can watch the series. I own the Blu Ray versions of GoT for seasons 1-4 and have not even cracked season 2. It simply is too grim for me to continue to watch. There are so many good characters and they all get killed in horrible ways while evil is allowed to linger and then thrive. I simply do not want to get invested in characters only to see them all die. There is enough of that in real life for me to not want that in my TV shows. I am very interested in the series though. So I will wait another year to see how it ends. If the ending is not exceptionally horribly depressing then I will watch the series straight through.
Should probaly stop if characters dying matters that much. There’s a core group that will last but a GoT main theme is about its “rotating cast” shall we say. This is a brutal and blunt world where when bad things happen there isn’t some crazy coinsedence to save people all the time like some generic network show.