Review Roundup: Season 5, Episode 4 “Sons of the Harpy”

Some people died, some people were imprisoned, and Jaime discovered a nifty new use for his prosthetic hand. It was not a boring episode of Game of Thrones this week, that’s for sure, and the critics had much and more to say on a few select topics. Let’s dig in.

On the Faith Militant and the Sons of the Harpy:

Season 5’s subtle parallel between the Sons of the Harpy and the High Sparrow’s followers became not-so-subtle this week as the episode opens and closes with violence in the streets of King’s Landing and Meereen spurred by both groups. As such, this was the most common point of comparison. In addition to Libby Hill’s weekly recap, Salon ran a piece by Steven Attewell on the history of religious extremism as it relates to the show. It makes a great companion read to Libby’s review, who also drew in FX’s The Americans as an outside reference point.

But while the roots of the Sons of the Harpy movement are easy to discover, the transition from Cersei and the High Sparrow talking about the Faith Militant to the brutal montage of that group’s hostile takeover of King’s Landing’s streets was harder to suss out. Nina Shen Rastogi notes that it is a reactionary movement related to the treatment of religious people and places across Westeros in the wake of the war, but also believes it to be the first instance of such issues being brought up on the show. (In the books, if I’m not mistaken, we see flashes of this during Brienne’s journey, as part of her story is about seeing Westeros failing to recover after the War of the Five Kings.)

Others are simply concerned that Cersei might have made a fatal error in loosing religious extremists on the city, since she also qualifies as a “mortal sinner” in their eyes. David Malitz alone at least appreciates that Cersei is trying to think ahead:

You have to admire Cersei Lannister’s ability to formulate a plan and see it through. With her influence in the capital waning, she surveyed the playing field, found her easiest paths to power and sprung into action.

We’ll see how that works out for her in the future. Price Peterson had possibly the best quote related to these depictions of extremist violence, especially the anti-gay sentiments of the Faith Militant:

Game of Thrones is technically a fantasy series and is therefore escapist fare at heart, but as we all know, George R.R. Martin steeps its plotlines with actual historical events, each more awful than the next. This show’s infamous “Red Wedding” was based on Scotland’s very real Black Dinner massacre of 1440. Or this week’s sequence involving the church-sanctioned persecution of homosexuals was based on an obscure real-life incident known as THIS STILL HAPPENS.

This episode was, by many accounts, a reminder of how well pop culture can act as a mirror that reflects the society that developed it.

On Rhaegar Targaryen and a certain theory:

Rhaegar Targaryen was on everyone’s mind this week, as he was brought up in the context of no less than three scenes: at the Wall, where Stannis and Selyse briefly discuss Ned and Jon Stark; at Winterfell, where Littlefinger delivers some exposition about the famed tournament at Harrenhal; and in Meereen, where Ser Barristan tells Daenerys of the prince’s habit of walking the streets of King’s Landing and singing songs. There were plenty of unique perspectives on each of these scenes—Alan Sepinwall, for example, notes the different perspectives Barristan and Littlefinger have of Rhaegar—but anyone who brought these scenes up noted how it might tie into Jon’s parentage, which is one of the biggest questions hovering over the series.

On Dorne, where Salazar Slytherin’s favorite animals prosper (usually):

Nothing really got out of hand here, with loose comments related to Jaime’s sick new boxing glove, Bronn’s insightful eyebrow raises, and Jaime looking forlorn at the sight of Tarth, possibly remembering his other favorite traveling companion. (Also, the fight scene was awesome.) While the Sand Snakes only get one scene, Obara’s “SPEARS BEFORE TEARS” speech (which should totally be embroidered on a pillow, as Laura Hudson says) and subsequent spearing of a ship captain buried in the sand and surrounded by scorpions left an impression on everyone. I’m honestly surprised no one has tried to mash up this scene with ABC’s Revenge yet, but maybe that’s coming down the line, when viewers have had more time with Oberyn’s deadly daughters.

On Stannis Baratheon, #1 Dad, and parenting in general:

He made everyone feel things. This scene kind of got lost in the shuffle given its proximity to Melisandre’s latest attempt to enact the plot of The Graduate (“Are you trying to seduce me, Red Priestess?”), but it warranted at least one or two sentences per review. I’ll quote James Poniwozik here as he succinctly sums up why it made people feel things:

See Shireen, Stannis’ only child, disdained by her mother, who apologizes to him for “[giving] you nothing but weakness and deformity.”

Which is why it was a surprisingly affecting scene to see Stannis telling his daughter how he fought to save and keep her after she fell ill with greyscale. It may be the first time that we hear Stannis talking about a decision that he came to, not because of honor or rigid adherence to law, but simple, febrile love. “I told them all to go to hell,” he says. “You are the princess Shireen of House Baratheon. And you are my daughter.”

This was without question the best scene of the night for me, and I’m glad everyone else felt that it worked. Kudos to Stephen Dillane and Kerry Ingram, too.

In related news, Myles McNutt and Alyssa Rosenberg note a running theme of parents and parenting this week. Myles:

If last week’s episode focused on the Stark children, this week we saw various parents—Ellaria, Stannis, Barristan as a surrogate father figure to Rhaegar and Dany alike—confronting their relationships with their children as reflections on themselves. It lies at the core of Jaime’s trip to Dorne as well, as Bronn raises his eyebrows at Jaime’s claim he’s risking his life as a one-armed, highly recognizable man to save his “niece.”

Interestingly, Myles doesn’t mention Cersei, a character who can sometimes be narrowly defined by her motherhood (to the observer’s detriment). Alyssa, meanwhile, is here echoing a few other critics in their read of Cersei as self-destructive:

Cersei has set her son up to be humiliated. It’s a dreadful thing for a parent to do to a child, and even worse because Cersei’s doing it out of revenge and spite: the only lesson she wants to teach him is that he should be more loyal to her than to his wife. That’s not love; it’s a kind of abuse.

What with the presence of the Sand Snakes, the hints at R+L=J, and Stannis’s speech to Shireen, this season could very well be the season of “Parenting by Westeros”—to say nothing of the “Mother of Dragons” absent her children.

On George R.R. Martin’s literal white knight, Ser Barristan Selmy (DON’T READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO BARRISTAN):

Early confusion about whether Barristan died in that brutal skirmish with the Sons of the Harpy was soon cleared up by Ian McElhinney himself, who gave an exit interview for his character. So, uh, he’s dead. This did not sit well with most book readers because Ser Barristan is still alive in the books. That reaction mostly confused me, since there is overwhelming evidence that Barristan is going to die early on in The Winds of Winter anyway. But I guess since it hasn’t actually happened yet, it’s technically a spoiler for the books. I GUESS. (I’m still sad about it, just not surprised.)

In any case, Alyssa Rosenberg found the fight “poorly choreographed” which may have something to do with the Twitter reaction to the Unsullied, allegedly the most competent and well-trained army of soldiers in the world, dying quickly and recklessly to the untrained reactionary fighters of the Sons of the Harpy. In contrast, Todd VanDerWerff wrote about the visceral joys of watching Game of Thrones, noting both the Jaime/Bronn fight scene in Dorne and this final fight scene in Meereen as the two primary examples of how the show consistently produces such great action scenes.

I do think that the weakening of the Unsullied may be similar to how the Turok-Han, the “original” vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s seventh and final season, were nerfed in the final battle in order to show the relative effect of all the Slayers suddenly gaining access to that primal Slayer power. The main issue is that it creates an inconsistency that many viewers simply won’t be able to reconcile in their own minds. The Unsullied are supposed to be highly disciplined fighters! What gives, man?

But hey, I think Grey Worm survived! No one’s really worried about him! That’s something, I guess.

Other Quotes of Note:

“But Oberyn Martell’s bastard daughters are fearsome warriors beloved by the nation from which they come, and under the seemingly masterful tutelage of Ellaria Sand (Tyene’s mother), theirs is a course set sail on the good ship Avenge.” —Alicia Lutes, Nerdist, disappointing me by not calling the ship REVENGE and then seguing into a Game of Thrones/Revenge mashup. (I’m alone in this, I know, but I believe in it!)

“Barristan Selmy and Daenerys share a lovely scene in which he tells her that her brother Rhaegar used to go out into the streets and sing for money. It’s cute and touching and… oh god, Selmy’s gonna die soon, isn’t he?” —Kimberly Roots, TVLine, accessing that sixth sense of dread you have when you’re watching a TV show and you know someone is about to die

“Waste of a good kidnapping!” —Tyrion, summarizing his one scene in the episode for all of the critics and thus making it easier to not dedicate a lot of ink to the scene altogether.

• Published on 05/06/2015 at 8:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT