Awww yeah. He’s completely my favorite.
So in the books there’s so much more of a lead-in to all this, to Ser Barristan the Hot appearing and revealing himself to Dany, and I want to be mad that they changed things and rushed it but I’m sorry, if we get more Ser Barristan, I refuse to see that as a bad thing.
Quick takes: How badass was the Old Bear, appearing out of darkness and setting the wights on fire? DRAGONS! Drogon is so big and catlike now, and I was dying laughing at the “catch it, grill it, eat it in midair” trick. Margaery Tyrell is a scary, scary woman, like Cersei but you know how Cersei can never put her resentment down long enough to make inroads with anybody? Margaery knows how to get out of her own way. She scares the shit out of me.
Speaking of scary, I actually jumped when Qyburn showed himself. And every time Roose Bolton mentioned his bastard … SHUDDER. It’s like a law of nature in Westeros that there is ALWAYS something worse out there, that no matter how far down you think this goes, there’s always another level. Roose Bolton’s bastard is like … don’t watch the rest of the season with the lights off, is all I’m saying.
MANCE RAYDER, and Tormund Giantsbane! My favorite wildlings ever!
So pretty much everyone starts from betrayal. The growth pattern on this show goes something like this: You find something you love, like Davos, like Brienne, like Catelyn, like Ser Barristan, like Stannis. And then the world wrenches it away from you, and you spend the next however many months flailing around doing God only knows what, in an effort to make sense out of that loss. You twist what you thought you believed in, in order to get it back.
You throw open the doors of the Kingslayer’s prison, you try to stab Melisandre’s heart out, you seek out an old enemy’s old enemy, you sit in the dark and stare into the flames, swear an oath to Mance Rayder, all to try to get back what you had. You betray who you thought you were, who everyone else thought you were, and in the process you become something new. Something you don’t recognize.
At this point in our story everybody’s only halfway through the process. It’s still hard to say, who’s going to get better and who’s going to get worse.
A.