Metro Column: Arya and Sansa bookend the bleak “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken”
This week in our ongoing column for Metro, Winter Is Coming tackles “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” an episode that has already set the internet on fire with rage. The episode was curiously structured—it was bookended by dense, atmospheric sequences set in Braavos and Winterfell, while the middle featured a borderline goofy scene about cock merchants and a campy fight with Build-A-Badass action figures the Sand Snakes. Those bookend sequences hit the hardest, and the show made sure to draw parallels between the two.
When Arya was shown into the bowls of the House of Black and White, it was like she was walking into a fairy tale, and not the Disney kind—the brutal kind where people are crippled, brutalized, and cooked alive. The walls of faces, which extended higher than the eye could see, were grotesque, but also awe-inspiring, a feeling the episode encouraged by holding its shots and letting the macabre majesty sink in.
The wall of faces was mirrored in the grim visages of the wedding guests watching Sansa get married in Winterfell’s godswood, another sequence marked by long pauses and muted blue light. There were more direct callbacks as well. Notice, for example, how Myranda wrung the dye out of Sansa’s hair much in the same way that Arya squeezed the dirt out of the corpse’s hair in the House of Black and White. That’s an ominous comparison if I ever saw one.
Both sequences were ethereal and dream-like, as if time was slowing down so Sansa and Arya could experience the enormity of these moments. Arya’s dream is still going on, but Sansa’s quickly turned into a nightmare. After her wedding, she was taken to Ramsay’s bedchamber and raped. More than ever, she is playing the role of the princess in the tower, held captive by a monster.
That’s a role a lot of fans are very unhappy to find her in, especially as her sister advances in her quest to empower herself. It’ll be interesting to watch how the show deals with the aftermath in the coming weeks. After all, even if Sansa makes her way out of her nightmare, there can be no forgetting it.
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