Game Of Thrones Season 7 Discussion Thread (Spoilers up to and including the latest episode!)

@cornfed40: He got stabbed multiple times (with either very short swords or daggers); supposedly all of their weapons are poisoned.

I dunno about the books, but on the show only the one who mainly uses daggers has been shown to use poison. She was the one they took alive.

Yeah I don't get how he wont be dead in the next episode. They sliced him up all over his legs and abdomen with their poisoned weapons. He should be dead already.

Obara had the spear, Nym had the whip, neither of which I remember really doing anything to him in that fight. To my memory, most of the damage and cutting he took in that battle was from other Greyjoy sailors on Theon's side, not from the snakes. Ill have to watch again as ill admit I was a little groggy.

Either way, I'm thrilled to see half of whats left of Dorne gone. Was never sure how anyone was supposed to have much sympathy or affection towards any of them, they (the show's version of them) have struck me as some of the more despicable characters

I actually think his flee was tactical. I think he realized that he could not save her, but also that he could not kill Euron. I think he fled so that he could survive and kill Euron later. I also think that he will return to Dragonstone to report on the destruction of the fleet and also the new weapon- the giant crossbow- that Cersai has in her arsenal.

There was nothing he could've done to save his sister and he wouldn't have been able to kill Euron. As cowardly as his move was, it was also survival for himself and his information.

quick thoughts:

Theon actually fought well, he was shown killing the most enemies, so he might be cowardly but he does know how to fight

Euron might as well be magical in the tv show as he easily intercepted the ships, lost almost none of his ships and somehow had 1000 ships built in how long? a couple months?

@deathstriker: Euron was metal as fuck. I know he's almost certainly going to die, but I hope he's around long enough to do some more damage.

Euron just fucks people up but then again he beat up a couple of little girls- not as tough as he thinks it was. Theon would've taken him one on one but he looked around and saw four or five or Euron's psychos ready to kill him and made the right move.

I thought it was pretty obvious he was having a panic attack. As soon as he started seeing people getting tortured around him, he started shaking and his eye was twitching.
His entire demeanor changed from bad-ass to what we're used to see from Reek. He's also not aware of the ballista yet, that's probably gonna be kept a secret until the big battle.

I need to get this off my chest.

I love Game of thrones, but i'm coming to terms with the truth that it is a bad show in a ton of ways, no character with the exception of tyrion has any major depth, the acting itself is often very woody, (Sometimes dinklage has a kickass monologue though.) and lets be honest, no one really gives a hoot about any of the major story arcs besides how do we beat the white walkers and is dany gonna be queen?

Like it borders on camp at times, its a shock show and i absolutely love being shocked, but if i were to compare the writing and performances of this show to most other flagship tv shows, it can't hold a candle to them. If it wins emmys it should purely be for the effects and costuming/sets. I will continue to watch every week and be beaming the whole time, i just am doing so with lowered expectations. I like to think i'm not the only one feeling weird.

This is a wicked fun show, that is great to share and talk about with friends, but my god I wish they'd spend more time on the characters and on line delivery.

@mikemcn: You're not wrong.

This show is just Wrestling now, isn't it? Or has it been Wrestling all along?

I think it's the best parts of wrestling though!

But even the best wrestling plot-line would never compete with something like The Wire or True Detective. And that's fine!

I suspect it has always been like this but something about this season forced me to face it.

@dgtlty: Watching the older seasons with my dad, I can say with complete confidence: the writing in seasons 1-3 were of a markedly higher quality.

I really liked that in one scene they've shown Euron to be no small potato. I hope Theon does get some heroic moment down the line with the war against the White Walkers, but if not I'll settle for him seeing Bran again and breaking down for what he'd done.

Noooo! Don't say that!

Might be they were just chillin on a boat so they hadn't applied the poison? I don't think their weapons just emit poison or anything. This show's fantasy, but it's not that fantasy. Flaming swords mean nothing.

@mikemcn: I don't think that's true. There are plenty of fleshed out characters with rich backstories and believable motives. Take someone as simple as Varys. I can absolutely believe he wants to serve the people and not a king or queen. I understand Sansa, I understand Jon, I understand... actually, these characters are way more believable than most other shows. They all have experiences things that changed them and influenced their actions going forward. They all started naive and grew to use their experience to judge situations.

I think the problem with the show is that they have completely changed their narrative thread. They used to have long expositions of development and left little to the imagination early in the show's life, but they have moved to a whole lot of implied storytelling in this and partly last season. They have started to not show a lot of things and just imply they happened. They are racing to finish the series instead of trying to tell the story. It's funny you mentioned Tyrion as he had the worst writing in the past episode. 'I can't speak to prophecies, but I like Jon Snow'.

What? Really? If this was a few seasons ago, Tyrion would return to Daenerys in private and tell her the story of how he met Jon and how he gauged that Jon was not just a powerful ally, but a just one. He would make a point that him being king while he has bastard-status meant he truly was worthy. A pretty hefty conversation where he would convince Daenerys Jon was the way to go. But what did we get? 'I like Jon Snow'.

It's a pretty serious complaint I have, but I still like the show a lot.

I agree with a lot of what you say, though I think with a few expections the acting in the show is still really good with for me the biggest (most noticeable) execption being Emilia Clarke who was never the best actor on the show and has only become worse these last seasons as she has started putting on a blanked face, monotone, "badass" way of acting. Neither she nor the script manages to pull that off.

It was definetly not always this way though. The early seasons had a lot of really great characters with depth, smart politicking, clever and suprising tactics, and good storyarcs. It`s the last two or three seasons (in my opinion at least) that the writing has really gone down in quality. In since coincides with them moving completly away from the books I am tempted to say thats the reason, but they have done good stuff that wasn`t in the books before like the Arya/Tywin scene and extending the Arya/Hound storyline. Maybe it`s coming up with completly new story arcs they are struggling with or maybe they didn`t plan it out well enough, so now they have to rush to the end and have characters they don`t know what to do with. It`s probably a bit of everything.

The show still has some great spectacle and I enjoy watching a lot of the actors go at it even though the diallogue is quiestionable at times.

Dude, you are not alone. This show has had a ton of problems right from the outset. Some of those problems have been remedied (thank god we don't have gratuitous sexposition scenes anymore), others got worse. Daenerys was actually fine in the first 1 or 2 seasons. Not great, but not what she is now. The show has always balanced between schlock and genuinely excellent television, but starting in Season 5, the schlock has been reaching critical levels, while the moments of brilliance are rarer (but still present).

I think an interesting case study is Tyrion. Remember back when Tyrion was interesting? When he had characters like Bronn, Tywin, Joffrey and Cersei to bounce off of? Now he has Daenerys, Grey Worm and Missandei, if has time to interact with characters at all aside from the bare minimum required by the plot. He is highlight of the good seasons, dull at best in the bad seasons. Strong character interactions are the glue holding this show together despite it's serious pacing issues with the plot. This season seems like it pretty much just has the Hound, Beric and Thoros for your interesting character dynamics. Cersei and Jaime might get interesting, but I'm really not holding out hope for the imminent Jon and Daenerys interactions.

@mikemcn: Both of those plot lines have boring, predictable conclusions though; which just makes the show even worse. But until they kill Littlefinger everything isn't absolutely set in stone. Once that happens its pretty much GG from a surprise front; nothing interesting will happen for the rest of the show. But it'll be an okay ride I suppose.

It's definitely way better than True Detective and way worse than the Wire.

The show wins Emmys because its big and popular; even if the earlier seasons were better.

I have bad feeling that the meet up with Jon and the Queen of the Dragon's is going to be the money shot for this season and they are going to hold that back as long as possible. There really is not really anything interesting left here? Maybe they kill of few minor characters or one major but will it have impact anymore? Rest is going to be boring talk filler (like with Jamie and lord Whatewers).

End fight with warping stealth ships was pretty neat though.

Yeah, it was like a Transformer movie fight scene... ok maybe that's too much of a burn, but I think the bar is exceptionally raised after getting the battle of the bastards.

I want Euron to be hit by a Black Lincoln and I wanna hear all about Jon Snow's ghost problems.

I'm not sure how they'll hold up the Jon/Dany meeting back as long as possible when they're meeting next episode. Also, from looking at the season trailer, the climaxes of the season will be Jon and the Brotherhood Without Banners going north and fighting white walkers, plus Dany taking Casterly Rock (next episode) and whatever battlefield Jamie was on looking like he was about to die. Plus the stuff not shown like all four Stark kids being back together. Jamie talking to Lord Tarly (Sam's dad) was pretty interesting to me. Nice to see someone who isn't a snake, he's an a-hole, but not a schemer.

I disagree about it being wrestling (since wrestling sucks) and it's not all about shock. Tyrion/Obyern talking in the prison cell, Jamie/Brienne in the bath, Tyrion's confession, even Jamie in the Riverlands with the Tullys were all great conversations plus dozens of others. I think the dialogue can be just as good as, if not better, than the deaths and fights. If we're talking about overrated shows then that would be West World, not Game of Thrones. WW is pretty good, but definitely way too slow, too much of mystery, no likable or even all that interesting characters besides maybe two, and a few other big problems. I don't know why anyone is bringing up Emmys since they suck, they ignored The Wire, BSG, Fringe, and a lot of other good shows. They randomly handed nominations to West World like candy while ignoring The Leftovers and continue to nominate Modern Family every year while ignoring way better comedies.

If GoT is so underwhelming or flawed I'm interested in someone listing 15 shows that are better from the last 10 years. To me, it's easily in the top tier of TV with Breaking Bad, The Wire, and Mr. Robot. They hardly even have peers.

@mikemcn: Let's be real here: if we don't count the writers, there isn't a single person on this planet who is interested in whether or not Daenerys becomes queen.

I just can't get over that a ballista is suppose to be a surprise...

This a world where dragons have been a thing forever.. And they have bow & arrows already, nvm whatever giant flaming balls those ships were shooting or other similar cannon fire we have seen.

And then this guy has the audacity to reveal a fucking ballista?

I guess he had to run out of magic green potion solutions? For a moment I seriously believed he had made a frankenstein dragon. Then I saw the ballista and though AH HA! It's a *green poison* Ballista! But no. It's not. Ah well..

Also, that was a pretty poor example wasn't it? Hitting a stationary target 100m away ain't shit. WHATEVER. Too much thought into this one scene.

As a whole I thought it was a slightly better episode than the 1st one.

haha yep, feels really irrelevant.

@deathstriker: OK, cool. I have missed practically all the pre season hype and "in the next episode" bits, so it is nice to hear that there is actually more stuff coming. I just figured that Jon's journey would take longer due to the general pace and geographical distance, but everything (like ironborn ships) seems to travel at the speed that writers need.

@geraltitude: Yeah. Ballista is a new idea in world where there are crossbows? He might as well have revealed a *dramatic music* throwing spear.

Yup! When they were panning the camera over that huge dragon skeleton they were talking about Aegon's dragons, I totally thought "This dude is about to reveal a zombie dragon!" After the Zombie Mountain, it's not even that much of a stretch of the imagination. Feels like a real missed opportunity. I did laugh when he showed the ballista though, so they got that out of me at least.

The writers have kinda just given up on caring about distance and travel time for a while now. Both information and people arrive when the story needs it to.

The ballista thing is especially dumb because (in the book universe at least) ballista have existed in Westeros for at least 300 years and have previously been used to kill dragons. That`s how Aegon the Conquerors sister died.

I guess I'm not a person.

@turambar: How many remaining possible realistic scenarios can you think of where Daenerys doesn't become queen?

In Season 6, they spent the first three or four episodes introducing new characters. plot lines, and past experiences before anything really interesting happened, so I'm glad that this season has started out with non stop action. I've watched some of the highlight videos on youtube and there were a lot more interesting little plots but that's how stories develop. There is more to the big stories now so less need for the little ones. But, in the beginning you had world reknown actors like Sean Bain, Charles Dance, Michelle Fairley, Stephen Dillane, Ian McElhinney, Ian Beattie, etc all who have incredible stage experience so it stands to reason that the acting would go down a bit.

Regardless, I'm excited to see if Snow can strike an arrangement with Daenerys for the the dragon glass which will turn into an alliance for the Targeryens against Cersai and Euron. But I see the dragons teaming with the army of the north to battle the white walker army and then join to fuck up Cersai and Euron. Although, I think at some point Euron will die at the hand of Theon.

When did "interested in" and "uncertain of" have the same definition in the English language?

People seem to assume that all the storylines are happening at the exact same time, when it could be weeks/months difference between them. For example, what Sam is doing could be in January, Jon leaving to meet Dany could be in March, he gets there weeks later while Sansa's storyline is right where we left off last episode. In the last season finale the Tyrells got blown up, Olenna had time to mourn and talk to the Sands as well as Varys then meet them in Dorne all in about 5 minutes, obviously weeks have gone by for her, but not for the Jon/Sansa storylines since it's only been days for them. Unless there's an event like the comet or an eclipse and multiple characters are seeing it at once, I wouldn't assume it's the same day/time for characters in different storylines. I would say that for the entire series, not just recent seasons.

I didn't get the feeling he invented a ballista, just that he and others have made a stronger/better one for Dragon killing.

The thing is storylines are meeting up, so that explanation does not really work anymore. Like Dany must have spent months assembling and bringing her army to Westeros. Since Jon learned about her last episode their storyline must be matched up time wise at this point, but that also meant Jon spent months just sitting in Winterfell with an army burning supplies and not doing anything since they haven`t actually decided anything or planned anything since last season. Maybe all the stuff with Varys assembling the army was in the past compared to the battle in the North? But does that create problems other places in the timeline? If I would guess since the show is not big on sweating the details (often for understandable reasons) I doubt there is a cohesive timeline that makes everything make sense and even if there is it would be so confusing and hard to follow that for the viewers the showrunners might as well just be doing whatever they want.

The storylines not taking place at the same time can work, but it should be seamless and the viewer should not notice it. An example of both doing this well and badly is in the Wheel of time books where sometimes storylines would be a bit "out of synch", but the difference in time was not major and it didn`t cross over with other storylines much, so the reader didn`t notice it. In a later book though the time difference was major and there was more crossover, so that it made it seem like a character was in two places at the same time which was pretty confusing for the reader and something the author admitted he had done a bad job of later.

The ballista thing was nothing major, but it just felt a bit silly of Qyburn to make it seem like a big reveal. When ballistas exist and have been used for this exact purpose before.

@charlie_victor_bravo said:

lol! That encapsulates the look on my face very well.

A missed opportunity indeed. I was so much on the edge of my seat, haha, man. That would have been pretty silly right? But then you know what I realized? Near-guaranteed prediction: one of the dragons will be killed and turned into a "White Wyvern" *then* it will be killed by that new fangled ballista.

That... completely blows my mind. Either the scene was more subtle than I expected (this is a *super ballista*!) or, damn. Just damn.

Yeah I'm just funnin really, I agree. Such a small thing but yeah, definitely made me laugh. Qyburn making such a big deal out of it and everything.

@geraltitude: the ballista didn't even pierce the dragon skull very deeply, it was ridiculous haha

@mikemcn: As someone who read the books beforehand and only binged the show recently in anticipation for season 7, the writers really dropped a lot of the intrigue and cut characters to stream-line the story for tv audiences. Don't get me wrong, some of the pacing changes totally help, Tyrion getting to Mereen is a slog in the books (although I did like Penny.) The biggest problem at this point though is that the characters are so compartmentalized into "good" and "evil" that undercuts a lot of what made the books (and the early seasons of the show) great.

People used to have agendas, moral codes they adhered to. Like how everyone maligns the Kingslayer; breaking his oath is not honorable in Eddard Starks eyes, yet Jamie saved hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Now, Cersei is basically Hitler and the White Walkers are kind of underdeveloped as an enemy.

@geraltitude: If the ballista plan works, it will have completely trivialized the whole build up of the dragons and undermine so much of the backstory. It would be horrible writing, not just because of it being anticlimactic. The whole scene itself was bad as is, so much build up to shoot an arrow into a skull...

I'm convinced she's the biggest red herring in the entire series and the whole point of her was to just get the dragons to Westeros so Bran can warg into them and fight the White Walkers. After all, he will not walk again, but he will fly...

I'm not sure what you mean about Jon just waiting around for months due to Dany's army. She just got to Dragonstone and Westeros. Mel getting to Dragonstone, talking to everyone, and Tyrion sending the letter then Jon getting it must've happened within days or a week. I don't see any reason to assume that the Battle of the Bastards and Dany sailing home must've happened at the same time just because they happened an episode a part. Varys also goes from Essos to Dorne then back to Essos within a few episodes last season, obviously weeks had to go by in order to travel that much. The only answers would be he traveled offscreen or he can magically teleport. The way some people online were freaking out about that like it was a plothole was silly. I don't need to see Varys traveling on a ship and the same goes for Jon to Dragonstone. Having Jon on a ship for a couple episodes would be boring and a waste of time. When Jon gets to Dragonstone next episode it has been days for him. If Sam just finished the procedure on Jorah then it has been hours for them. I don't think they need to hold the audience's hand, people should be able to figure that out. Jon has probably only been charge for a week or two, not months. I doubt they would let the fate of the Umbers and Karstarks hang around that long or Jon preparing for winter and white walkers.

A ballista that size/power hasn't maybe been used in centuries, since dragons have been long gone for a while.

What I meant was that if it was only a few days between seasons for the North storyline it meant that the North storyline must have taken place in the future. All the southern storyline kinda come together and merge with the Dany storyline at the end of last season, so those have to be matched up time wise. That means that the North storyline must have jumped ahead of every other storyline at some point for things to make sense and if that happens it would probably mess with the chronology somewhere else.

I might be wrong and there might be some exttremly well crafted and meticulous timeline somewhere that spans the entie series, but I doubt it. The showrunners have improvised and changed things in the story along the way and they often (in these last few season anyway) are willing to make leaps in logic like Dragontone being empty for simpler/more expedient storyltelling.

I get it though. The point of my orginal post on this was more meant to say that you should`nt try to think too much about stuff like travel times on the show anymore because that way madness lies. And I get why the showrunners do these kinda things. Making things fit together perfectly in this kinda story is insanly hard. It`s partly why GRRM has taken such a long time writing the books.

It's show day!

Remember, all spoilers up to and including the latest airing episode (that means the one tonight!) are going to be untagged, so avoid this thread if you can't catch the premier! I'm very excited to see the Dorne fallout; do the Dornish abandon Dany to get Ellaria back from Cersei? Would they even care given how illegitimate her reign is? Does Cersei just toss her to Zombie Mountain because she failed strategy 101, firing up the Dornish even more?

Predictions! I am guessing Cersei will kill Ellaria and her last daughter and the death of the Sand snakes will mean the end of Dorne in the show. Everything about Dorne has been terrible and the show runners seem to know this considering how they have treated that storyline. With the death of the Sand snakes we also don`t have any Dornish characters left on the show and introducing new characters at this stage seems like a bad idea. My guess would be that we maybe see Dornish soldiers in Dany`s army or that they are just permanently gone from the story.

As to them joining Cersei I don`t see how they could justify that. They obviously don`t care about legitimacy since they let a Princes bastard concubine murder their ruler and take the throne, but Dorne are also traditionally Targ supporters and hate the Lannisters, so I don`t see them switching sides. Even if Ellaria survives I don`t see why they would be so loyal to her that they would switch sides.

@odinsmana: If she had captured Doran or Tristane (assuming they were still alive at this point), it would make sense to hold them captive or ransom them off in order to secure Dorne's neutrality and get them out of the fight, given that they were the ruler and heir to Dorne, respectively. As there's no legitimacy to Ellaria (which is a problem in itself as I still have no idea why Dorne isn't in civil war mode, as there has to be Martell loyalists somewhere, right?), it'd make less sense fo the show to go that direction with it, and they probably will relegate them to background cannon fodder during the big battles to come.

(On a side note, they really did bungle the whole Dorne subplot in a spectacular fashion, both in terms of relevance and competence. I guess they never figured out what to do with them given the fact that they are skipping the (fake?) Aegon subplot, but they still had enough of the pieces to do something better with it. Have Doran execute Ellaria for killing Myrcella, put Tristane in a position to be killed by Cersei's goons as retaliation, and have that push Doran to meet Olenna after the Sept explostion. Same plot, less stupid.)

I think you are right that the removal of the fAegon storyline is part of the reason that storyline ended up the way it did (the removal of that storyline also led to (less severe) problems with the Varys storyline), but from what I have heard there was also some weirdness behind the scenes that can maybe explain why they didn`t go with your (good) Doran suggestion. Apparently Doran`s actor had been hired to appear in four(?) episodes the season he died and was really suprised to read the script and find out that he died in the first episode he appeared in that season. The showrunners have also said that they really liked the Ellaria actress, so if I put on my tinfoil hat for a second it seems like they might have killed of Doran to give Ellaria a bigger role (or a role at all). Another guess I have is that they might just have seen how much people disliked that storyline the previous season and decided to wrap it up as quickly as possible. Either way it`s a bummer. Dorne is far from my favorite storyline in the books, but it has some good intrigue and Doran is a really great character and the actor they got to portray him did a great job. Wished we could have seen more of him.

@alkusanagi: The plot is certainly a device to get to Dragon's Vs Zombies but the audience demands Catharsis so Daenerys will (almost certainly) "win" prior to Jesusing in some way.

Pre-episode prediction. Jaime does something to the 2 remaining Sand Snakes and not Cersei.
At this point the death of her children seem be an annoyance to her more than anything. But Jaime was there when the daughter he was literally just about to have a connection with died in front of him.
In the long run it doesn't really matter who kills them, if they die then the repercussions or lack thereof will be the pretty much the same regardless. I'm just throwing it out there it may be him who does it. Besides which, accepting and then killing the Sand Snakes might be seen as accepting Euron's marriage proposal, which Cersei didn't seem keen to do.

Depending on his this happens though it might damage Jaime's 'hey, I'm a good enough guy now!' status.

I never predict anything right though so pfffffft to me.

@odinsmana said:

Yeah, it's a shame. I like Doran's character; he's the long con to Oberyn's overt and obvious desire for retribution, and the interplay between his desire for revenge vs the necessity of waiting for the right time to strike probably could have erased the ill will that was generated from the lackluster start to that plot, but they took the safe route and just minimized the role that whole kingdom had to play. In a way, they are quite lucky they fucked Dorne up and not The Wall or any of the other major moving pieces, as they wouldn't have been so easily sidelined.

Pretty great episode, mostly because of the last 15 minutes. Daenerys does well in duos but not when surrounded by better actors, so the council session sort of made her look Sansa-ish; a dreadful thought. More good stuff from Littlefinger, paranoia is the best. Euron getting quite charming I must say, good show there. "What a Twat!" perfectly describes Theon. Stuff happened! Even more impending incest as well, can't wait. Bran is still the most boring piece of shit ever. Cersei back to Ramsay mode after a brief interlude as somewhat normal. Sam the only nice guy on the planet, old dude just gave him a treasure trove of documents I'm sure. Dinklage should just have 6-7 Emmys at this point, he even had a Costanza-esque "How could I fail at failing" type of line.

I like how Littlefinger comes on screen talking about how "You need to fight all battles, all at once, at all times, in your head." Then Bran shows up and essentially is like "I see all things, at all times, all at once, in my head."

So next week a dragon dies, right?