Review Roundup: Season 5, Episode 7 “The Gift”

If you thought the last scene from “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” was divisive, well, you should see the reaction to “The Gift.” Everyone’s feeling a little lost, especially after the aforementioned scene, and it showed in this week’s reviews as critics tried to figure out just what the heck Game of Thrones is building to.

On Sam, Gilly, and “Egg, I dreamed I was old…”:

On the one hand, Samwell Tarly is a fan favorite character for both Unsullied and book-readers alike, and seeing him get an awesome moment (with what Nina Shen Rastogi called “classically badass” lines) was gratifying. On the other hand… well, here’s Alicia Lutes:

Samwell and Gilly getting together should’ve been a moment where these two poor souls choose one another over their outside obligations. The whole series thus far has been slowly — and delightfully — unfolding their powerful, intimate, and tender connection. In perhaps any other scenario, this scene would have worked, but instead it was contextualized by attempted rape, and therefore rendered tone deaf and uncomfortable.

This sentiment was echoed by Julie Hammerle, who felt the Sam/Gilly scene felt “icky and unearned. And Libby Hill makes the case for why the show has been consistently problematic when it comes to sexual violence:

The problem that “Game of Thrones” encounters more often than not when it attempts to tackle these smaller, more human moments of the aftermath of trauma, is that it’s just not built for it. There’s no way to sufficiently capture the grief of Sansa after being raped because there are fifteen other characters that need servicing in each episode. […] So when people say that “Game of Thrones” should stop featuring rape as a plot, it’s not so much that it should stop featuring rape just because rape is bad. It’s that they should stop featuring rape because it is physically impossible for the show to portray it in the sufficiently grave light that it deserves.

I liked Previously.TV’s succinct subtitle in recapping this moment, too: “Stop Using Rape Or Almost-Rape As A Dramatic Crutch.” It’s probably falling on deaf ears, but I appreciate the effort all the same.

On a more positive note, Aemon Targaryen was a real hit this week. “Maester Aemon has the show’s most shocking death yet: He dies of old age,” writes James Hibberd. Book-readers naturally took note of the “Egg” reference, and Nina Shen Rastogi called Aemon’s funeral pyre “the most starkly beautiful image in an episode full of strong black-and-white compositions.” We shall never see his like again.

On Dorne, where breasts and bodice-rippers live in… uh, harmony?

When I can quote Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series with regards to something that unironically happened in Game of Thrones, you just know something’s going wrong. Well, guess what, Joey: BREASTS have arrived!

Myles McNutt had probably the most interesting take on what was a pretty blatant and pointless nude scene; he struggled to reconcile a reading of the scene as a critique of gender roles with its exploitative use of the male gaze. He concluded with some minor book-reader knowledge regarding the character whom Ellaria and the Sand Snakes are (apparently) replacing: Arianne.

We had the opportunity to read through Ariane’s motivations for her actions, and understand her larger goals—what was the point of Tyene’s display? Why was her sexuality crucial to her show of power over Bronn if he was already on his deathbed without her antidote? Without such details, it’s hard for this scene to transcend the gaze it consciously engages in, making it a failed critique if it was intended as one.

Dorne as a whole failed to grab anyone’s attention this week (though Laura Hudson has a vague notion the show might be able to turn Myrcella into “more than a pawn”), but at least two people felt that the Sand Snakes scene worked a little better, with Matt Fowler saying it was “the first time the Snakes sort of felt like characters and not plot devices” while James Hibberd wrote that “seeing the trio act like sisters instead of militant warriors just felt more convincing.”

As for the forbidden romance angle, here’s Tim Surette:

We have to buy Myrcella and Trystane’s love as legit after seeing them together for about one-and-a-half scenes, but it’s hard to do so given the fact we all know that hormonally charged teens are idiots who would fall in love with a picture in a magazine if given 43 seconds alone with it. Are we really going to have to sit through Jaime giving Myrcella the spiel about all the loves she’ll have after this guy and that men aren’t even ready to settle down until they’re 35? Probs.

It occurred to me the other night that the Myrcella/Trystane romance storyline could actually work if the show had the time to let it breathe. A Thrones-ian take on Romeo & Juliet might actually work. But as Libby Hill mentioned, and as others echoed, there is no longer any room on this show for storylines to develop comfortably and at a good pace. So instead, we get Rebellious Teenage Daughter-slash-Niece Myrcella. And Sally Draper she ain’t. (I think. I’ve only seen the first season of Mad Men.)

On King’s Landing, where dirty deeds get done dirt cheap:

“Cersei’s finally going to pay for her crimes! Who would have thought we’d ever see this day?!”  Your vocabulary word for the week is “comeuppance” because it showed up at least once per review thanks to Cersei’s A Feast For Crows storyline finally reaching fever pitch. Though much of the talk was on how cathartic this moment was, Todd VanDerWerff showed some sympathy for the lion:

What makes Cersei one of the show’s best characters is that she’s a villain, yes, and a villain you want to see brought to justice. But she’s also completely and totally understandable. You get where she’s coming from, and her motivations make sense. Contrast that with, say, Ramsay, who’s just a monster, or with Littlefinger, whose plans increasingly seem beamed in from another dimension. Cersei was just the smartest and the cleverest and the cruelest, until she ran out of room to run and she wasn’t any more.

A few stray remarks this week (including from Todd) also note Lena Headey’s performance, which means now is a great time for me to tell you all about this little show called Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where you can see even more of Lena Headey’s magnificence on display.

Interestingly, Nina Shen Rastogi was one of the few full-on detractors of the episode (Julie Hammerle was another, calling out multiple parts of the episode as lazy writing, which I sort of agree with); she felt the obviousness of this conclusion to Cersei’s storyline made the moment feel unearned, in part because of how Cersei’s depiction this season has strayed from her more nuanced portrayal in the past. She writes:

In the past, Cersei has risen above simple villain status because her motivations seemed so grounded in understandable human emotions. Yes, she wanted power, but I also believed that she wanted love, acceptance, and to protect her children. […] Simple jealousy (or even a prophecy) don’t feel like enough of a foundation for this historically layered, complex character. I think in another season, I might have felt more about Cersei’s capture, one way or the other, but this left me a little cold.

I am someone who did not really enjoy Cersei as a character until A Feast For Crows, which is the first time we’re granted access to her inner thoughts, so it’s interesting to see some reactions to this plot development that differ from the more schadenfreude-y responses that dominated Twitter and recap posts this week. And Matthew Yglesias over at Vox has apparently been peeking at my reading journal:

For starters, I think Cersei (particularly the show’s version, whom the creators wisely made less nutty than the book) is oversold as a villain by a fandom that is excessively hung up on the Starks, whose lack of mindfulness about the public interest is fundamentally what’s brought humanity to the brink of possible destruction. But that’s a matter for another day.

Yglesias goes on to talk about the rhetorical shift in the Sparrow’s function and goals from religious to sociopolitical vis-a-vis the “many versus the few” view that he lays out to Olenna Tyrell:

His rhetoric in favor of the common man and against the elite is appealing. But he has no agenda for constitutional reform. Populism is a bludgeon with which to beat the Great Houses in order to arrogate more power to the Faith, not to redistribute it to the people. And he has no civic-minded policy agenda. He’s not doing anything to fight the White Walkers or to prepare for winter — he’s policing the sexual mores of the King’s Landing elite.

There’s certainly a much larger essay to be written about this topic, but for now, what we have is two queens captured and an open chess board with a lot of isolated pawns.

Other Quotes of Note:

“At the beginning of “Game of Thrones,” Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) was a character caught between two possible identities. Was he a citizen of Westeros, trying to win his respectability back by spying for the Iron Throne? Or was he enough of an idealist to throw himself wholeheartedly behind the dream of the queen he’d come to love?” —Alyssa Rosenberg with a very GRRM-esque take on the man the Internet has dubbed “Ser Friendzone.”

“Marital rape is still rape, but it comes without the same criminal status, and without the clear stigma within the world of the show (and in some parts of our world, sadly)” —Myles McNutt, pretty much summarizing the tone of everyone’s feelings about the Sansa/Ramsay/Reek stuff this week (but hey, Sansa has Chekhov’s Corkscrew now!)

“The main thing we learned about this whole thing was that Jaime’s secret entry into Dorne while wearing a disguise was really stupid? Even after that whole courtyard skirmish the Dornish guards were treating him super well and he could freely talk to Myrcella. Couldn’t he have just arrived in an envoy and pretended to whisk her away on vacation? I guess maybe he just really wanted to be a spy. Fair enough!” —Price Peterson, who wrote this and didn’t even mention Eagleton, Indiana’s prisons, therefore making me sad.

• Published on 05/27/2015 at 8:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:04 PM CDT