Book-Readers Recap—Game of Thrones, Episode 501—The Wars to Come

Game of Thrones is back! This season promises big things: significant departures from the books, major characters meeting each other for the first time, and the beginning of the end for a lot of these stories, if executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss can be believed. Read about how the premiere episode, “The Wars to Come,” kicks off this exciting year below.

Spoiler Note: This post is intended for those who have read the A Song of Ice and Fire series. As such the post itself and the comments will contain spoilers. If you haven’t read the books yet, you can discuss this episode in our non-book reader (Unsullied) recap. Thanks!

We open in the past, where a young Cersei and her friend tromp through a moodily lit forest. The friend wants to turn back, but Cersei won’t hear of it. They duck into a small, thatched hut in the middle of the woods and encounter Maggy the Frog, who looks quite a bit younger than I pictured her when reading the books. Maggy tells the kids to beat it, but Cersei refuses, proclaims Maggy “boring,” and demands that she tell them their futures. So Cersei was always this demanding, then.

Maggy has Cersei prick herself with a knife and sucks some blood out of the cut on her thumb. She smirks knowingly and gives Cersei a slightly altered version of the fortune detailed in A Feast for Crows: “You’ll be queen, for a time. Then comes another, younger, more beautiful, to cast you down and take all you hold dear…The king will have 20 children and you will have three…Gold will be their crowns, gold their shrouds.” I can’t help but notice that she left out the part about Cersei being strangled to death by the valonqar, but otherwise this scene is pretty faithful to the source material.

Meanwhile, in the present, grown-up Cersei attends Tywin’s funeral. Lords and ladies from all over Westeros have traveled to be there for the event, but Cersei makes them all wait so she can have a moment alone with the body. She also shares a chilly look with Margaery as she ascends the stairs to the Great Sept of Baelor, which is about par for the course with these two. Once inside, she seethes with Jaime over their father’s death. Cersei asks Jaime, point-blank, if he set Tyrion free, and he doesn’t deny it. She is most displeased, so it would seem that the brief reunion these two shared in The Children is over.

Next, the director gets fancy and has us look through Tyrion’s eyes as he peers out an air-hole in the box he’s been hiding in during his voyage across the Narrow Sea. After getting unloaded and dragged across Pentos, Varys cracks it open, and Tyrion falls out in a messy, scraggly, drunken heap. The two trade witticisms about the difficulties of heeding nature’s call while stuffed inside a crate before Varys starts trying to convince Tyrion that his help is needed so that Westeros can be “saved from itself.” Tyrion is not optimistic (“The future is s***, just like the past”) and vomits.

Dinklage is just wonderful here as he stretches out the soreness in his body, compulsively downs wine, and generally spews self-loathing all over Illyrio Mopatis’ nice floor. It’s tough to watch Tyrion scrape rock bottom like this, but it’s bringing out the best in Dinklage.

In Meereen, Daenerys Targaryen’s Unsullied soldiers topple a great golden Harpy from atop one of Meereen’s many pyramids, and if they’re trying to remind me of that time Saddam Hussein’s statue got pulled down, they succeeded. Afterwards, one of the Unsullied soldiers heads to Meereen’s red-light district and pays a prostitute to cuddle with him and sing to him, which is a wrinkle from A Dance with Dragons I honestly did not expect the show to preserve. It’s a sweet moment that indicates the Unsullied have kept more of their humanity intact than we’ve been led to believe, or at least it was a sweet moment until a mysterious man in a golden mask cut the soldier’s throat without warning.

The mystery man was apparently one of the Sons of the Harpy, a grassroots resistance movement that objects to Daenerys’ rule. Daenerys, who is determined to make the locals respect her anti-slavery stance, demands that the murdered Unsullied soldier be given a proper burial and that the Sons of the Harpy be found. As Grey Worm suits up to carry out her demands, Missandei asks him why an Unsullied, who presumably has no need to frequent brothels, would visit one. He doesn’t know, but all the lingering glances between him an Missandei indicates that he’s thinking about it.

At The Wall, Jon Snow is training Olly, the kid who felled Ygritte with an arrow last year, to fight with a sword and shield, while Sam and Gilly worry about what Alliser Thorne will do to Gilly and her baby if he’s elected Lord Commander. Then Melisandre appears out of nowhere, Batman-like, behind Jon Snow and summons him to the top of the Wall, where Stannis asks him to convince Mance Rayder to bend the knee. Stannis figures that if Mance swears loyalty to him, he can use the wildlings to help retake the North from the Boltons. If Mance refuses, Melisandre will burn him. Jon Snow makes his signature Jon Snow face, pitched somewhere between worried, bored, and itchy.

If this scene is any indication, it looks like some of the political maneuvering will switch locales this year, moving from King’s Landing to the Wall and Meereen, just as it did in the books. I’m happy to see this happen. I always thought the Wall material got a lot more interesting once Stannis and company arrived to shake up the dynamics.

Next, we jet off to the Vale, where Sansa, Littlefinger, and Lord Yohn Royce watch little Robin Arryn fail at swordplay. There’s a lot of high-pitched wails and accidental tripping, not the kind of thing you want out of the Defender of the Vale. Littlefinger and Sansa are apparently leaving, but we aren’t told where to. Since Sansa is pretty much done with her chapters from A Feast for Crows, I’m as in the dark about their destination as anyone.

Brienne sits by a brook, cleaning her sword in a most downtrodden fashion. She’s still upset over Arya’s refusal to accept her protection, and gets very prickly when Podrick suggests they go after Sansa instead. “The good lords are dead and the rest are monsters,” she says, lamenting the fact that she’s unable to serve a lord she believes in. Would that she could meet Tyrion for a drink right about now. They both need to do some wallowing. Hilariously, Sansa and Littlefinger are passing by in a covered carriage not 50 feet from where Brienne and Pod are sitting, talking about their mystery destination. They’re going somewhere “so far from here even Cersei Lannister can’t get her hands on you.” Which tells me nothing. I hate not knowing. Wah.

Speaking of Cersei, she’s spying on Tommen and Margaery as they talk at her father’s wake, all while ignoring Loras’ canned comments about what “a force to be reckoned with” Tywin was. A multitasker, this one. She wades through the wake with a glass of wine in her hand, ignoring pretty much everyone until Lancel Lannister, making his first appearance in a while, walks up to offer his sympathies. Keven Lannister, making his first appearance in damn near forever, apologizes for Lancel’s barefoot and be-robed appearance and tells Cersei that his son’s been caught up in a fanatical religious movement. “They call themselves Sparrows,” Kevan says, in much the same way a modern-day father might talk about his son if he joined up with the Hare Krishnas or became a vegan.

Cersei wanders off, grabs more wine (there’s a really literal drinking game to be made out of this), and talks one-on-one with Lancel, who asks her to forgive him for tempting her “into [their] unnatural relations,” and for spiking Robert’s wine way back in Season 1. Lancel is clearly sincere about his religious conversion, but Cersei looks like she wants to dump her wine on his head. She drinks it instead.

It appears that the producers are trying to balance out the female vs. male nudity ratio this year. Olyvar, the male prostitute who hung out with Oberyn last year, and Loras are getting busy somewhere in the Red Keep when Margaery walks in and casually demands that Loras join her for dinner with King Tommen. After Olyvar leaves, Margaery and Loras discuss his impending marriage to Cersei. If it doesn’t happen, Cersei will stay behind with Margaery, but she implies she might have a plan to ensure that doesn’t happen.

In Pentos, Tyrion appears to have sobered up a bit. He talks with Varys about his future, and Varys drops the line that’s been featured heavily in the trailers, about Westeros needing “a ruler loved by millions with a powerful army and the right family name.” “Good luck finding him,” Tyrion says.” “Who said anything about him,” Varys shoots back, and thousands of viewers are like, “Khaleesi!” even though we’ve asked them to stop.

Khaleesi Daenerys is currently entertaining an audience with Hizdahr zo Loraq, who wants her to reopen the fighting pits in Yunkai and Meereen, where slaves have traditionally battled to the death. Under Hizdahr’s proposal, free men would do the fighting, but Daenerys does not approve of “human cockfighting,” no matter how much the locals enjoy it. Later, while in bed with Daario Naharis (more male nudity—HBO is really trying here), Daenerys hears about how Daario rose in society after he became popular as a combatant in the fighting pits. He advises her to reopen them and to display her strength by showing off her dragons. but she’s afraid that she can’t control them anymore. “A dragon queen with no dragons is not a queen.”

And then the special effects team gets to show off their new budget, as Daenerys visits the pit where she locked up Rhaegal and Viserion at the end of last year. It’s dark, and moody, and then one of her babies belches out a stream of flame and we get to see the dragons in all their glory. They look wonderful, and dangerous, and well-equipped to tackle that very special scene from A Dance with Dragons later on in the season.

The final stretch of the episode deals with Jon Snow’s attempt to convince Mance to bend the knee to Stannis. The wildling king isn’t having it, and basically says that if Jon doesn’t understand why he refuses to enlist his people in a foreigner’s war, then there’s no point explaining it further. Ciarán Hinds, who’s been very underused during his stay on the show, does great work in this scene. Mance knows he’ll die and die horribly if he doesn’t do what Stannis wants, but being a wildling means making up your own mind, and he’s made up his mind to never serve another king. At the same time, Jon has some good points about the big picture: if Mance doesn’t command his people to swear loyalty to Stannis, they may not be let through to the other side of the Wall, which means they’re all goners once the White Walkers come. It’s a terrific scene all around.

Finally, we have Mance’s death scene. Stannis gives him a final opportunity to kneel, but Mance politely refuses before wishing Stannis good fortune in “the wars to come.” He’s tied to a stake on top of a pile of wood which Melisandre lights on fire. Mance burns and screams while the Night’s Watch, plus Stannis’ crew, looks on. Jon Snow cuts his misery short with an arrow through the heart.

Odds and Ends

Opening credits place name roll call. Moat Cailin is gone. So is Braavos, presumably because Arya doesn’t appear in this episode. The Eyrie is back, although probably won’t stick around for long, and we see Pentos for the first time in a good long while. Most importantly, though, is that Winterfell is no longer depicted as a burned-out husk. It’s good as new, and even has a little flayed man symbol where the Stark direwolf used to be. Boo, hiss, and so forth.

Season of Cersei. The fact that the producers chose to open the show with a flashback to Cersei’s past (the first flashback that’s ever appeared on Game of Thrones) suggests that the show will zero in on her this season. A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons have wonderful material for Cersei, and Lena Headey certainly seems up to the challenge. I, for one, cannot wait to see her crush it.

Funnies everywhere. This episode was lighter on humor than Season 4’s premiere (let us all take a moment to remember the Hound’s abiding fondness for chickens), but Tyrion and Varys each got a few good barbs in. In addition to Tyrion’s line quoted in the recap, I enjoyed when they traded nicknames with each other after Tyrion sobered up.

Mired in Meereen. Daenerys’ problems in Meereen are controversial among fans who think her story moved too slowly. I always enjoyed the conflicts and questions these sections brought up, but the show will have to take care that her story stays hopping. The wonderful-looking dragons should help with that.

Selective fidelity. As much as this season has already departed from the books (without Lady Stoneheart around, for example, Brienne and Pod are in completely uncharted territory), it’s remained faithful in other ways. Case in point: I never expected the producers to bring back Kevan Lannister, even though he plays a fairly big role in Feast and Dance. I can’t help but wonder what else they may be adapting down the line.

R.I.P. Mance Rayder. Ciarán Hinds always did a wonderful, textured job playing this character, even if he didn’t appear enough for my liking. I doubt the show will be doing the whole Mance-Rattleshirt switch from Dance, so this is probably the end.

And that’s it! This was a rock-solid premiere that set up what I hope will be an eventful, layered, involving season. Let us what you guys thought below.

• Published on 04/12/2015 at 10:09 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT