Sullied on Unsullied: What role will greyscale play this season?

Each week, the intrepid panelists at WiC Live break down the latest episode of Game of Thrones. When discussing “Kill the Boy,” they answered a question from a fan about the nature of greyscale, the in-world disease that turns a person’s skin into a craggy mess. The condition also drives its victims mad, which does not bode well for Jorah Mormont, who contracted it at the end of the episode.

Attentive viewers, and probably even those who were only half-listening while the show played in the background, probably saw something like this coming. Greyscale has been on the minds of many characters this season—Shireen and Gilly, of all people, discussed it in “The House of Black and White,” Tyrion mentioned stone men in “High Sparrow,” and Stannis revealed that the spread of the disease can be stopped in “Sons of the Harpy.” The show has been foreshadowing something big involving greyscale for a while. Now that Jorah’s got it, the question is, what happens from here?

Well, one thing we know is that Jorah is unlikely to survive. Although young Shireen Baratheon beat greyscale in childhood, it’s a killer in adults, kind of like a mega-charged version of the chickenpox. Jorah is on his way to Meereen, and since greyscale can be spread through touch, he risks infecting everyone he meets on the way. Meereen is a densely populated city—you see where this might be going.

If Jorah does start an epidemic, it would roughly parallel a plotline from A Dance with Dragons involving the “bloody flux,” a dysentery-like disease that sweeps through the besieging armies that have traveled to Meereen to oppose Daenerys’ rule, as well as the masses of freedmen who have come seeking her protection. From a storytelling perspective, an epidemic would be more than big enough to pay off all the greyscale talk from the first half of this season, and it would give Jorah an important new role to play. That seems in keeping with the producers’ fondness for combining and repurposing plots from the books.

Apparently lost in the shuffle: Jon Connington, a character who has not (and probably will not) appear on the show. In Dance, it’s Connington, nor Jorah, who saves Tyrion after he goes overboard following the fight with the stone men. The difference is that, after Connington contracts greyscale, he brings it to Westeros, not Meereen. Fans have theorized that Connington’s arrival in Westeros will result in an outbreak of greyscale, but his absence here could indicate that nothing of the sort will happen, or at least that nothing of the sort will happen on the show.

Wherever this plotline goes, I feel like it’s already time to start eulogizing Jorah Mormont, who I doubt will live through this. Really, the greyscale is just the latest in a string of misfortunes that have befallen poor Jorah since he was exiled from his homeland for selling slaves, years before the series began. Since then, he fell in love with Daenerys Targaryen only to be banished from her presence, which made him an exile in both the west and the east. Now, he’s contracted a deadly disease and may be doomed to spread it among the subjects of the queen he loves. That’s a lot of tough breaks—Jorah is the Charlie Brown of Game of Thrones.

I can envision Jorah looking at this situation and growing desperate, perhaps releasing Dany’s dragons in a misguided attempt to please her, or else as a way to hurt the woman who rejected him. I see Jorah going out in a blaze of some sort—whether it’ll be a blaze of glory or ignominy remains to be seen.

• Published on 05/12/2015 at 3:30 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:04 PM CDT