Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

Meereen: Daenerys returns to her quarters in the huge pyramid, presumably exhausted after another day of listening to petitioners. Daario is there! She asks how he got in with the doors guarded; he says the windows are not guarded. They exchange flirtatious banter and she orders him to remove his clothes…

Later, Daario leaves, just as Jorah arrives. Daario says Daenerys is “in a good mood”, and Jorah gives him a lingering glare. Daenerys tells Jorah she has ordered Daario to take his men to Yunkai and recapture the city, and execute the Masters of the city. Jorah argues that the punishment is too harsh, and will only show the freed slaves that violence is an acceptable means to an end. Daenerys is initially firm, but relents, ordering Jorah to tell Daario that the Masters should be given the choice of submitting to her rule or facing execution. She also tells him to tell Daario that he convinced her to change her mind.

It’s pretty clear that Jorah has fancied Daenerys from afar for a long time, and now Daario has stepped straight into her bed in front of him. Jorah seems level-headed enough to deal with this at the moment, but who knows how this will play out in the future. I think given a chance to find an excuse to get rid of Daario, Jorah would leap at it.

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

It’s been a long time since the last episode. I’ve had a lot less free time since we got our puppy, Scully, and TV was one of the things to fall by the wayside. But things are returning to normality now and we had time to watch a new episode.

Meereen: A goatherd is herding goats, when a huge dragon appears and scorches his flock, carrying a burning goat off for tea. Later Daenerys is holding court for supplicants inside a grand pyramid. Ruling like a Queen, as she stated last time we saw her.

The goatherd approaches humbly, choosing his words carefully. He says he really, really likes dragons, but now that one has eaten his goats he has nothing and his family will starve. Daenerys generously says she will repay three times the value of the goats. The goatherd backs out in a flurry of genuflection and thank yous.

Next is a noble, one of the sons of the former city rulers. He begs to be able to take down the corpse of his father from the crucifixion stakes, where it is rotting in the sun, and give it a decent burial. Daenerys is defiant, saying that the rulers crucified children and let them rot in the sun, so they deserve no better. But the guy is the right mixture of flattering, humble, and appealing to her mercy, and says his father was actually against killing the children. Daenerys relents and lets him go bury his father. Daenerys, tired of seeing supplicants, asks how many more, and is told over 200. She sighs and calls for the next one.

Not much to be gleaned from this scene, except that this new noble might be catching Daenerys’s eye. Also perhaps Daenerys might get bored of ruling like a queen and decide sooner or later that she should go do some more conquering.

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

King’s Landing: Tommen is crowned king in a ceremony in the Great Sept. Margaery looks on from one side and when she catches Tommen’s eye, she gives him a secretive, mischievous sort of smile, which he responds to. Her plan is clearly working and Tommen is developing a crush on her. But Cersei also sees her, and walks over for a friendly chat. I thought at first that Cersei would be confrontational, but no, she is all sweetness and light. She notes that Margaery is still wearing mourning clothes for Joffrey. Margaery puts on her “devoted to Joffrey” act, but Cersei says straight out that Joffrey would have destroyed her.

Then follows a very frank discussion. Cersei says that Joffrey would have been a terrible king, but Tommen may be the first decent king Westeros has had for a long time, but he will need someone strong to help him, and that she presumes Margaery would still like to be queen. Margaery replies appropriately humbly, while indicating that that would be an honour. Cersei is favourably inclined, and says she will see about starting the arrangements for Tommen to marry Margaery. Margaery, perhaps a little too relaxed, drops a joke about an abundance of weddings – referring to the fact that Cersei is still betrothed to her brother Loras, and says she doesn’t know whether to call Cersei mother or sister. I thought this might trigger a harsh response, but Cersei takes it all in her stride. Well, Cersei is one cool customer all right. I imagine she has some plan in the back of her mind, which requires sucking up to Margaery for the time being.

Cersei meets Tywin and suggests the marriage. Tywin asks how soon. Cersei says after an appropriate period for her to mourn her son and Margaery her husband. Tywin says, A fortnight, then?” and Cersei happily agrees. He says her marriage to Loras should not be delayed much longer either, and suggests holding it a fortnight later. Tywin says they need a strong alliance with the Tyrells to support their current financial problems. He reveals that the Lannister gold mines have been worked out, and the family is in massive debt to the Iron Bank of Braavos, which is news to Cersei. This is significant news, as it foreshadows problems when the Lannisters need to raise an army – their victory in any coming war now seems much less assured.

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

Meereen: Apparently the slaves of Meereen don’t immediately rebel and overwhelm their masters, because the episode opens in the night, so several hours must have passed since Daenerys catapulted the broken slave collars of Astapor and Yunkai into Meereen. The opening scene is Grey Worm and Daenerys’s translator Missandei inside a tent. She is teaching him to read and speak the Westeros language. During this, their hands almost touch, but she draws away shyly. Clearly this is setting up either romance or rejection between these two.

Daenerys interrupts and says “It’s time”. Grey Worm exits to lead an infiltration of Meereen via a sewer, with several troops dressed as slaves, complete with collars, lifting the sewer gates and spreading throughout the city. They come across a meeting of slaves, where one of the Meereen slaves is urging the others to rise up in revolt, but most of the other slaves are unconvinced, saying they can’t fight, or that they’ve already seen too many failed uprisings, and they’d rather live a slave than die. Grey Worm says he has come to help them revolt. The naysayers complain they have no weapons or fighting skill. Grey Worm’s followers dump sacks of swords and knives and other weapons on the ground.

This does the trick. Next thing we see hordes of armed slaves attacking masters in the streets of the city. The scene then cuts to the next day, when the slaves are freed and chanting “Mhysa” (“mother”) as Daenerys walks through them to a position on the walls where she can speak. She asks how many children the masters nailed to mile posts along the way to Meereen. The answer is 163. Knowing what she is thinking, Ser Barristan advises Daenerys that sometimes injustice is best answered with mercy. Daenerys says that she will answer injustice with justice, and orders 163 of the former masters nailed to posts to die in agony.

Well. She’s conquered Astapor, Yunkai, and now Meereen without encountering any real obstacle, and now has a vast army of loyal followers. What’s the next step? Following the Rule of Three, it seems she should now be ready to launch her assault on Westeros. We haven’t seen the dragons for a while – I’m guessing this is so that next time we see them they will have grown impressively large. Can anything stop her?

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

King’s Landing: Joffrey is dead! I almost half expected to see this episode open with Joffrey recovering in bed, and Maester Pycelle explaining how the poison wasn’t entirely fatal, but I suppose that’s a thing best left to The Princess Bride.

So, in my previous conclusion I conjectured on what would happen to the kingship, now that there’s no obvious successor better than Princess Myrcella, Joffrey’s sister. Well, it turns out Joffrey has a brother! Who knew?! I certainly didn’t. His name is Tommen and I definitely don’t recall him ever being introduced or mentioned before, although it’s definitely possible that I overlooked it at the time (there are a lot of details in this show that seem utterly unimportant at the time).

Anyway, we’ll get to Tommen in a bit. Immediately after Joffrey lies dead at his own wedding feast, we see Sansa being led away to safety by the Fool. Lucky for her, because Cersei is on the warpath and not only wants Tyrion arrested for Joffrey’s murder, but Sansa taken as well. Tywin orders the city gates sealed and Sansa captured and brought to them. But she’s already away, and the Fool leads her to a boat and rows out to sea. In the fog, they meet a ship, and the Fool tells Sansa to climb up the ladder first. A hand grabs her arm to help her aboard… it’s Petyr Baelish! Fairly predictable in hindsight, but I hadn’t really pondered who might be behind her rescue until he was revealed.

The Fool asks for his reward of 10,000 coins, and Baelish responds by having him shot with arrows and killed. Sansa protests, but Petyr explains that the Fool was only as loyal as the next person to offer him money or booze, and the best way to keep her safe was to silence him. She ponders this for a second and sees the logic, but is still appalled. Okay, well, Sansa is no doubt safer here than in King’s Landing, but I don’t entirely trust Baelish. He was in love with Cat, who rejected him. I wonder if his motivations with Sansa are entirely well-intentioned, or if lurking in the back of his mind is the possibility that she’ll be a young surrogate for her mother. And where is he going to take her?

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

North of The Wall: We have some point-of-view camerawork of something wild and savage stalking through the snow. It spots a deer, grazing peacefully on some morsel of vegetation found under the snow. The camera lurks and slowly approaches, behind the cover of trees. It leaps, startling the deer, which tries to flee… but too late. It lies dead on the snow, its throat ripped out.

“Hodor!” Hodor wakes Bran from his dream-borrowing of his wolf’s mind. His wolf, Summer, has been hunting for food. Jojen looks scoldingly at Bran, and warns him not to ride in his wolf’s mind too much, lest he become obsessed with the freedom and ability to move on his own legs, and forget that he is a human. It’s all very reminiscent of Granny Weatherwax from Discworld. Bran doesn’t look convinced, and I feel that maybe the temptation is too much and he is in danger of losing his grip on humanity.

They travel on a bit, and come across a weirwood tree, with its distinctive white trunk and red leaves. Bran wants a close look and asks Hodor to sit him next to it. Bran reaches out to touch the tree near its oddly human face in the bark, and is struck by a series of visions. We see the three-eyed raven, what looks like Ned, his father, moving through the tunnels that I think were under Winterfell, some other stuff that happened too quickly to remember, a huge flock of ravens flying through a forest, and then a voice saying something is hidden under a tree in the North. Bran returns to reality with new purpose and says he knows where they need to go.

So again we have this weird vision associating Ned Stark with those underground tunnels. We’ve seen this before a couple of times. I have a feeling that we have not heard the last of Ned Stark somehow. It really feels like this is foreshadowing some ghostly vision. Perhaps Ned’s spirit will return to give Bran advice on how to become the Lord of Winterfell and restore their lands. That would be cool.

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

King’s Landing: The episode opens with a rare pre-credits sequence, showing a sword being melted down and its metal being used to cast… two swords. After the credits, Tywin presents a washed and clean-shaven Jaime with one of them. He admires its Valyrian steel, and asks where it came from, because such steel is apparently very rare. Tywin says he melted down some legendary sword of some sort, which was so stupidly big that he made two swords out of it. But we never see where the second sword goes. Despite the “Two Swords” of the episode title, I don’t think this is the second sword being mentioned. It’s a bit like “The Two Towers”, in that it’s not at all clear which of the five towers in the book are the two towers of the title. Anyway, I think the two swords of import are Jaime’s sword and… well, we’ll get to that.

Tywin tells Jaime to go back to Casterly Rock and take up residence as its lord. Jaime refuses, saying he swore an oath to protect the king, and must remain in King’s Landing. They bicker a bit over Jaime’s lack of sword hand, but Jaime casually says using his left hand will just make things a bit more even for his enemies. Tywin gives up and lets Jaime stay. I think this is the first time anyone has ever defied Tywin’s wishes successfully.

Jaime’s true motives are revealed when he visits his sister Cersei, and attempts to resume their incestuous relationship. Cersei rejects him, however, claiming to be “ill”, and saying she has been having treatments from a Maester. Jaime is surprised that she would let Maester Pycelle touch her, but she says it’s someone else (whose name I didn’t catch). Cersei tells Jaime off for leaving her for so long. He protests that he was captured and escaped as quickly as he could, and it’s not like he wanted to be away from her, but she doesn’t accept this excuse. Cersei seems to have grown bitter in Jaime’s absence. I wonder what her “illness” is… Could it be something significant for the future?

Meanwhile, Tyrion has been sent on an errand, to welcome dignitaries visiting for Joffrey’s wedding in a fortnight. A Prince Oberyn from somewhere in the south arrives, and immediately terrorises a couple of minor Lannister cousins in Littlefinger’s whorehouse. When Tyrion intervenes, Obery openly tells him that he hates Lannisters, and has come to avenge the rape and death of his sister by Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane. Okay… this is clearly foreshadowing for later developments, but I have to wonder why Joffrey or Tywin invited this guy to the wedding. Would you invite a guy to your wedding, if your hired killer had despatched his sister?? Seriously, what were they thinking?

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

Okay, since last time I’ve learnt that the slaughter of Robb, Cat, and the Stark army at Edmure’s wedding at The Twins is in fact the event called the “red wedding”. I was under the impression that “The Red Wedding” was an episode title, but it turns out that was a mistaken assumption from snippets of overheard conversation. All right then, without further ado… onto the Season 3 final episode.

The Twins: Sandor flees the carnage outside The Twins, where Walder Frey’s men are slaughtering Robb’s army. He holds Arya with him on his horse, but she glimpses much of what is happening. Some men ride out of the castle, carrying Robb’s body, with his wolf’s head stitched onto his neck in a grotesque parody.

Later, in the evening, Sandor and Arya come across a group of men camping in the forest. They overhear one man boasting that he was the one who sewed Robb’s wolf’s head onto his body. Before Sandor can stop her, Arya slips off the horse and races over. She approaches the man from behind and pretends to be seeking warmth from the fire. They tell her to get lost. She says she can pay for it, and offers a silver coin, which she drops with a feigned “oops”. As the man reaches for it, she jumps him and starts stabbing him repeatedly with a dagger. The others jump up to intervene, but Sandor appears and despatches them with his sword.

He asks Arya where she got the dagger; she says, “From you,” and hands it back. Sandor is surprised to find she has lifted his dagger without him noticing. He asks if this is the first man she’s killed, and she says yes. Sandor turns to leave. Arya picks up the coin, and whispers “Valar morghulis” over it – it’s the coin from Braavos that Jaqen gave her, last seen in the last episode of the previous season. Will this be a theme, that it comes up in the final episode of every season? And now that Arya has killed someone, will this begin her path of rampaging revenge that we’re so eager to see? Why is Sandor helping her? Is he really a big softy, and not the monster we were led to believe he was? He did save Sansa earlier, so maybe he’s not that bad after all.

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

Wow. What an episode. There was some pretty astonishing stuff in this one. And none of it happened in King’s Landing! In fact, King’s Landing didn’t appear in the episode at all. Let’s get to it!

Yunkai: Daario has a plan to conquer Yunkai. He says that he and his mercenary co-leaders (now dead by his hand) used to enter by a back gate for carousing purposes, and the guards at that gate know and trust him. He’ll sneak in, kill the guards, and then call Jorah and Grey Worm inside, so they can sneak through the city to open the front gate and let Daenerys’s army in. Jorah says he doesn’t trust Daario – it’s obvious why he doesn’t trust him: Daario is putting smooth operations on Daenerys and Daenerys likes his Fabio-like long hair and muscular body, so Jorah is jealous. Daenerys trusts Daario, and asks Grey Worm to cast a deciding vote. He says he trusts Daario too.

They put the plan into action. Daario enters the back gate, then whistles for Jorah and Grey Worm to follow. Daario has dispatched two guards and all is well… until another group of half a dozen or so guards arrive and they have to fight those. They rest and Jorah thinks okay, we managed that, but what if Daario really is setting us up for an ambush? And then even more guards arrive and surround the trio…

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Intro: I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time. I don’t know anything about it more recent than this episode.

It’s been a while since I watched an episode, with holidays and travel eating up time recently. But here we go…

Heading North: Arya wakes up in a camp and realises her captor, Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, is still asleep. She grabs a rock and sneaks over to bash his head in. Showing the supernatural senses of all good villains, he somehow knows exactly what she’s about to do and says, without opening his eyes, “I’ll give you one chance. Kill me and you’re free. Fail, and I’ll break both your hands.”

Now, I reckon Arya most likely could kill him with a single blow from that rock in her hands, but she wimps out. Geez, a rock that size hitting you in the face – there’s no way you’re going anywhere after that. I’m not sure if it’s through fear of the bloody mess she’ll make of Sandor’s face and brains, or if she lacks confidence in her own ability. Honestly, neither of these reasons seems much like the Arya we know and love. So I’m completely baffled as to why she didn’t smash his brains in.

Later, Clegane is riding and carrying Arya seated on his horse’s neck. She asks where they’re going, and he says to The Twins, where her brother (Robb) and mother (Cat) are. She’s confused on two points: (1) why are Robb and Cat at the Twins, and (2) why is Clegane taking her to them? He explains that Robb and Arya’s uncle is marrying one of the Frey girls, and that Robb will pay a handsome ransom for Arya’s return. Clegane says he’s not all bad, leaving Arya something to ponder.

I hope this is finally the end of Arya’s wilderness wandering, and she is indeed reuinted with Robb and Cat. Her story seems stalled while she’s been wandering around like this. I want her to go and get more training from her swordmaster and then go and kick some serious butt.

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