Game of Thrones, season seven, episode 7: "The Dragon and the Wolf" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the seventh and final episode of season seven of Game of Thrones, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” which was an unusual episode first because it was the season closer even though the first six seasons had had 10 episodes each, season seven only had seven and season eight only had six. The second unusual aspect of this episode was its length -- 80 minutes (most of the shows were just a shade under an hour, though there’d been a 75-minute episode earlier in season seven) -- and the sheer breadth and scope of it, which encompassed some pretty dramatic changes in the overall Gestalt of Game of Thrones and some radical transformations of the assumptions we’ve been making about the overall universe of “Westeros” (i.e., England, though with admixtures of continental Europe and even the Middle East) and how the various contenders for the Iron Throne, the overall rule of Westeros (and the throne is literally iron; its back looks like a whole bunch of swords stuck together, and that’s a pretty obvious metaphor for the amount of mayhem the various contestants are willing to wreak on them for the right to sit on it). The imdb.com synopsis, which is surprisingly short given how much happens in this episode (apparently no reader contributed a more extensive one, as has sometimes happened) reads:

The Dragon and the Wolf: “In King's Landing a grand meeting takes place. Theon makes amends and rescue plans. Sansa punishes those who wronged her family. Jaime confronts Cersei. The complete truth of Jon's lineage is revealed. The army of the dead reaches the Wall.”

The “grand meeting” is between Jon Snow (Kit Harington, to my mind the sexiest male in the dramatis personae -- had this been a 1930’s Warner Bros. swashbuckler his would have been Errol Flynn’s role), who’s approached the incestuous couple Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who’s also a pretty hot piece of man-meat) and Cersei (Lena Headey) Lannister, who currently more or less sit on the Iron Throne. Cersei is the widow of Robert Baratheon and the mother of Joffrey and Thommen -- the last three kings, in that order -- though we’ve long since known that Jaime was Joffrey’s and Thommen’s biological father, and they’re planning not only to have a third kid (Cersei is pregnant again) but openly proclaim it as theirs. The sibling-loving Lannisters are at the meeting, as are Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage in the performance of his -- or just about any other little-person actor’s -- lifetime), who’s become Daenerys’s principal advisor (her “hand,” as he’s called in the Game of Thrones universe) and who shows up to confront the brother and sister who hate his guts because he’s a little person and he’s killed their father (which he did) and their older son (which he didn’t) -- for some reason they even blame the death of their younger son Thommen on Tyrion even though he wasn’t even in King’s Landing, the seat of government to the extent Westeros has a unified authority, when Thommen committed suicide after his mom literally blew up the religious cult of the High Sparrow, which he had adopted.

The purpose of the meeting is to call a truce in the Westeros civil war between the Lannisters and Daenerys’s army, which includes the Dothraki warriors (who come off as sort of like Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes, basically having their hooked swords drawn and ready to mow down any passers-by they think are in their way) and the so-called “Unsullied,” soldiers who look vaguely Black and are called that because they were castrated by their former slaveowners before Daenerys set them free. The purpose of the meeting is so these forces can make common cause against the White Walkers, a.k.a. the Wights, a group of undead warriors who’ve formed a sort of vampire cult north of the Wall across the island to separate “Westeros” from -- oh hell, it’s pretty obviously supposed to be Scotland and I suspect Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin (his book A Game of Thrones was supposed to be the first entry in a cycle of books called A Song of Ice and Fire, but he hasn’t finished the last two books in the series and appears to be blocked on them, though he’s written and published novels on the backstory of Westeros and some of its leading families; this forced series producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss to concoct their own ending for the cycle) was inspired by Hadrian’s Wall, the real-life barrier across the main British isle he built to keep England (which this Roman emperor had been able to conquer) from Scotland (which he hadn’t).

To demonstrate what they’re up against, Daenerys’s crew has brought a living White Walker they’ve captured, which they let loose from its cage until it’s finally subdued with a weapon made out of dragonglass, which essentially is to the Whire Walkers what Kryptonite is to Superman -- and explains that the only other force that can kill them is fire. But the attempt at an alliance goes haywire when Jon insists that he can’t swear loyalty to Cersei, even if only temporarily, because he’s committed himself and “bent the knee” to Daenerys. The big secret of Jon’s parentage has been a running gag throughout Game of Thrones, but it was only in this season that the writers started hinting that Jon may not be what we’d been told he was throughout -- a product of Ned Stark, grand old man of the Stark family until he was lured into a trap and he and most of his family were killed, having sex outside his marriage -- but a legal heir to the throne because he’s descended from either Robert Baratheon or the Targeryan who sat on the Iron Throne even before him, Daenerys’s grandfather (or was he her father?) by Jaime Lannister, giving him the nickname “Kingslayer.” Jaime and Daenerys end up in bed together (which, if he’s a descendant of the former Targeryan king who was Daenerys’s father, would mean Game of Thrones has the same number of incestuous relationships -- two -- as Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung).

There are also peripheral characters involved in the action, including Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and her younger sister, trained assassin and master of disguise Arya (Maisie Williams), who had been feuding for years but at this juncture more or less make up; and Bronn (Jerome Flynn), t/n Brandon Stark, who years before became disabled after he climbed the tower of a castle wall (not the Lannisters’ own castle, Charles recalled after I’ve said it was in previous posts to this blog, but one in the Starks’ home base in the northern realm of Winterfell -- though that still begs the question of what the Starks’ hated rivals the Lannisters, were doing visiting and fucking in the Starks’ home domain) and has been dragged around the northern regions, at first in a sort of sled but more recently in a wheelchair (a surprisingly modern-looking one, too), and whom we see here in a cut-in of such apparent irrelevance to the rest of the action I couldn’t resist my Anna Russell impression and went, “Ya remember Bronn?”

But the big thing that happens at the end of this episode is that Daenerys’s third dragon, killed during her attempt to rescue Jon Snow and his raiding party from the White Walkers, but resurrected by the White Walkers and now ridden by their leader, the Night King (Vladimir “Furdo” Furdik) as a sort of zombie dragon (they not only zombify any humans they kill but can turn other animals into zombies -- we’ve seen them do that before with other wild creatures and now they have their own zombie dragon) which breathes something that isn’t quite fire and isn’t quite ice but is powerful enough to destroy the all-important Wall that for centuries has kept the menaces of the far North at bay. This is one of the most powerful and exciting sequences in the entire cycle even though it also makes nonsense of much of the way the series had previously played out (one wonders just when in the story arc the inventions of George R. R. Martin ended and Benioff and Weiss were forced to do their own fill-ins -- including the series’ controversial ending, which according to online feedback disappointed a lot of Game of Thrones buffs) -- but it certainly made for a powerful cliffhanger ending to the next to last season!