Can we talk about how Varys's explanation of his plans and motivations makes absolutely no sense whatsoever? It's pretty typical for Benioff and Weiss to have a character just completely lay out their entire motivation in one speech because they can't seem to abide ambiguity or subtlety when it comes to character motivation, but even by their standards this was just weird and not convincing at all. Remember them having Littlefinger (he of the wandering accent, which seems as bad as ever this season) doing just that whilst metaphorically twirling his moustache like some archetypical villain a while back? This was kind of the mirror image of that with us being told that we can safely put Varys in the box marked "Good Guy".
So, the plan. Apparently, Varys and his "friend" (Illyrio Mopatis, who we've not seen since they were conspiring together in the basements of the Red Keep in the first season) decided that Robert was "a disaster as king" and needed to be replaced for the good of both the smallfolk and "the country"(?!), replaced by someone that the nobles would take seriously but who would also be capable of ruling compassionately. "Peace and prosperity for the realm" is what Varys wants, apparently. Ergo, Dany for the ruler of Westeros.
First of all, for someone that wants peace, Varys sure likes to instigate war a lot. If Robert was such a terrible king then why did Varys try to save him by telling Ned what the Lannisters had in store for Robert? If it was merely to precipitate conflict between the Starks and the Lannisters (as Varys said to Illyrio at the time, "The Lion and the Wolf will soon be at each other's throats"), then he clearly doesn't give a toss about peace, prosperity or the smallfolk, who of anyone suffered the most in the war since they're the one's who got screwed from all sides during the conflict. The entire point of the "Brotherhood Without Banners" stuff was to show that, apart from them, nobody was really concerned with fighting for the good of the smallfolk at all. It's just rival families wrestling for power and bugger the consequences for the ordinary folk.
Also, why was Robert, in Varys's words, "a disaster as king" and a disaster for whom? I mean sure, Robert was a lecherous drunkard with little interest in or aptitude for politics, so I guess you could say he was ineffectual and obviously a lamb to the slaughter as far as being able to resist the Lannisters taking over is concerned, but a disaster? Compared to whom? If Varys and Illyrio were working to achieve a Targaryen restoration, then it looks to me like they were initially backing Viserys NOT Dany given that she was being used merely as barter in order to gain Drogo's Dothraki army for an invasion of Westeros (more war and destruction: does anyone really imagine an invading Dothraki army being nice to the smallfolk?) If you want to call anyone a disaster when it comes to being a prospective ruler of Westeros then Viserys would have been it. The one good thing that you can say about Robert is that he got Aerys off the throne, a man who used to burn people alive for looking at him wrong and whom even Jamie thought deserved nothing better than a sword in the back. Viserys would have just been more of the same, and hardly the type to bring peace and stability to Westeros.
Finally (yeah I know, at last), it seems Varys must have only moved his allegiance to Dany pretty late in the game. Let's not forget that it was Varys that told Robert that Dany was pregnant, thus prompting Robert to attempt to have her and her unborn child killed. The only way that makes sense is if Varys thought that having Dany killed on Robert's orders would give Drogo the motivation he needed to move to invade Westeros and perhaps put Viserys on the throne. If the plan was to have the attempt fail, then that seems like an incredibly risky ploy given that Jorah didn't seem to know much about it and only intervened by chance to stop Dany drinking the poisoned wine. In fact, Varys had secured a pardon for Jorah so that he could return to Westeros at that point, so it may even be that having heard of Viserys's death they'd given up on the plan. I don't see that Varys could know one way or the other whether Dany was going to be a capable and compassionate ruler until she had a chance to prove her mettle in Slaver's Bay. Before that, for all he knew she (or more to the point Viserys) could have just been another Targaryen nutjob, the product of centuries of inbreeding and no more desirable a ruler than Aerys was.
It's possible that Varys isn't been honest and just saying what he thinks will be persuasive to Tyrion, but I don't see why Varys would believe that this would be any more convincing to Tyrion than it is to the viewer. In fact, Tyrion cuts through Varys's lament about the powerful exploiting the powerless pretty sharpish, as he's just not the type to swallow that stuff even for a second. Either Varys has got some other motivation that he's not willing to reveal to Tyrion or the writers have fumbled this badly...
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