Book-Reader’s Recap—Game of Thrones, Episode 508—Hardhome

Spoiler Note: This post is intended for those who have read the books in the 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!

So, that fight. Whew, that fight. We’ll get to that fight.

Actually, even if one left out the meticulously choreographed battle sequence at the end of this episode, “Hardhome” would still be an effective hour of television. We start with a scene we’ve been waiting for since the beginning of the season, and in some ways since the beginning of the show: a conversation between Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, two of the series’ major players.

Daenerys has summoned the Imp, along with Jorah Mormont, to her throne room, and the two characters ask some of the hard questions fans themselves have been asking for a while. Tyrion argues that Daenerys should spare his life because he’s killed some of her enemies, and she wonders why a penchant for murdering his own family members makes him trustworthy. She implies that, having dragons and an army, she doesn’t need his help, and he points out that he knows a lot more about the political landscape of Westeros than she ever could. It’s a tense scene made better by solid acting from both parties—I loved the way Emilia Clark’s lip trembled when Tyrion mentions her getting sold to “some warlord.”

After Tyrion jumps through some more conversational hoops, he and Daenerys discuss what to do with Jorah Mormont, who just stands there looking forlorn, which is his specialty. Tyrion speaks out both for and against his friend/kidnapper, lauding his devotion to the Dragon Queen in one breath and denouncing his betrayal with the next. This is a hard-headed, almost Tywin-esque Tyrion we’re seeing here, weighing both sides of the situation before making a recommendation. Having to think on his feet before someone like Daenerys seems to have snapped him back into shape. After listening, Daenerys decides to exile her big doe-eyed bear once more. “Dany’s contemplative theme” plays Jorah offscreen. He is very sad.

He soon finds a way to channel that feeling, though, as he marches back up to Yezzan zo Qaggaz and demands to be allowed to fight in the great pit in front of the Queen. I’m not quite sure what Jorah’s game is here. Is he honestly hoping that Dany will be so impressed by his fighting prowess that she’ll take him back into her service, or maybe he’s embittered and wants to spread greyscale around her city? Either way, I see him becoming dragon food come this time next week.

Later, Dany and Tyrion talk informally over some wine, and if Tyrion had any reservations about serving her before, they’re probably gone now. They commiserate over their terrible dads, remind us that Varys is still out there (possibly waiting within the walls of the Red Keep with a crossbow), and finally get around to discussing how to get Dany onto the Iron Throne. Tyrion suggests she just stay in Meereen, and that wailing you just heard was the voices of a million fans suddenly crying out in terror, before being suddenly silenced by what Dany said next. She insists that she’s not just going to stop the endlessly revolving wheel of ruling Westerosi families; she’s going to “break the wheel.” Is she going to install a constitutional democracy? How forward-thinking.

King’s Landing. Dark cell. Cersei in rags. A tall, mean woman I’m just going to assume is Septa Unella tempts Cersei with water, but denies her a drink unless the Queen Mother confesses whatever it is she’s accused of. Cersei falls back on old habits and threatens the woman’s life, but Unella just whaps her with a spoon and leaves. Cersei shrieks in helpless rage—this episode was freaky even before the White Walkers showed up.

Speaking of freaky, Arya and Jaqen (or no one and no one, as they’re known around the office) sit in the Brick of Black and White and go over Arya’s new identity—she’s posing as a seafood peddler named “Lanna” (I have no idea why the producers didn’t name her “Cat of the Canals,” but whatever), an identity that comes complete with the first dress Arya has worn since Season 1. Jaqen sends her to Ragman Harbor, where she makes a sale to an dockside insurance salesman who, for some reason, refuses to insure a ship owned by a visibly upset captain.

Apparently, someone wants the insurance salesman dead—just as it is in the real world—and has hired the Faceless Men to do the job. Jaqen assigns Arya the hit, which of course puts a big ol’ smile on her face, because she has issues. The waif doesn’t think Arya’s ready. Go scrub some corpses, the waif.

Back in King’s Landing, Qyburn visits Cersei and tells her of the charges against her: fornication, treason, incest, the murder of King Robert, day-drinking, shade-throwing, kicking cats, and smirking too hard. I may have made a few of those up. Anyway, Qyburn updates Cersei on the situation back at the Red Keep: her Uncle Kevan Lannister and Maester Pycelle are ruling the kingdoms, and Tommen has locked himself in his room. Lena Heady does a great job of making me sympathize with Cersei here, as she’s clearly torn up over her son’s safety. Still, she refuses to do what it would take to see him: confess her crimes. She’s later shown trying to slurp water straight off the floor of her cell, though, so she may be getting desperate enough to change her mind.

At Winterfell, Sansa and Theon catch up. “If I could do what Ramsay did to you right here, right now, I would,” she says. It’s going poorly. In addition to being pissed that he told Ramsay about her escape plans, Sansa unloads on Theon about how, as far as she knows, he killed Bran and Rickon. He didn’t actually kill Bran and Rickon, of course, a bit of information he lets slip after she gets all up in his face about it. Theon scurries away before Sansa can pull anything else out of him, but I dig the way Sansa is being proactive and forcing Theon to slowly peel back his Reek persona, something he did for himself in the books. Also, is Sophie Turner actually taller than Alfie Allen, or did the director just make it look that way?

Elsewhere in the castle, the Boltons go over their strategy for fighting Stannis. Roose wants to wait him out, figuring that Stannis’ army will freeze to death while trying to besiege Winterfell. This is smart. Ramsay wants to leave Winterfell and strike first. This is dumb. If Ramsay keeps making stupid decisions like this, Sansa won’t even get the chance to twist off the barrel auger she grabbed last week in one of the the bastard’s sensitive areas.

Further north, Gilly is dressing the wounds Sam received during his thrashing in “The Gift” when there’s a knock on the door. It’s Olly, and Sam brightens up so suddenly that I have to laugh. I was also cracking up a few weeks ago when Sam seemed overly excited about handing Jon letters to sign, so it seems that I find something inherently funny about John Bradley’s big goofy grin.

After Gilly leaves, Olly and Sam have the same argument the Night’s Watchmen have been having for episodes: they hate the wildlings, but it’s probably a good idea to join forces with them rather than risk adding them to the army of the dead. Olly makes the point that the wildlings might betray the Night’s Watch once on the south side of the Wall, which is a new wrinkle, but overall we’re seen this fight before.

Okay, we’ve arrived at Hardhome, a major action set piece if there ever was one. When I first heard that the show was sending Jon to Hardhome, I was skeptical. It seemed too similar to when it sent him back to Craster’s Keep in Season 4—a departure from the books the producers cooked up so they could stall for time while lining up other events. The production team, however, really went the extra mile to make this battle feel special. I think it was more satisfying than last year’s Battle at Castle Black, and it didn’t monopolize the hour.

Anyway, Jon and his fellow Night’s Watchmen pull into Hardhome, a ramshackle bunch of huts abutting an icy coastline. The wildlings, who are dressed uniformly in what looks like splotchy white camouflage, are sullen—you’d be too if you were staying at Hardhome. Everything is gray there. Jon and Tormund try to negotiate with Rattleshirt, but things deteriorate once the Lord of Bones suggests that Tormund performs fellatio on Jon Snow, which inspires Tormund to viciously beat Rattleshirt with his own spooky walking stick. It’s actually pretty similar to the move Tyrion pulled last week when he beat that slaver’s assistant with a chain. They’re not so different, these far-flung people.

Cowed into conversation by Tormund’s brutality, or possibly just bored, the wildling elders gather to hear Jon Snow make his case. Some—particularly a female leader the HBO images identify as “Karsi”—seem willing to join him on his return trip to Castle Black, but others—particularly a Thenn chieftain—are hostile, and only become moreso once Jon reveals that he “put an arrow through [Mance Rayder’s] heart.” Oh Jon, there were so many better ways to say that.

Tormund pulls Jon’s foot out of his mouth by explaining the circumstances under which Mance died—he also calls Stannis “that cunt,” which is worth noting—and the wildlings make their decisions. At the end of the day, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, some wildlings gotta choose to join Jon, and Thenns gotta be dicks about everything. “I fucking hate Thenns,” Karsi says. Hey, they have running gags north of the Wall.

So it’s been around 40 minutes and a good chunk of the wildlings have decided to head south. It looks like things are wrapping up, right? Wrong, because just as the wildlings are starting to pile into rowboats and head out to board the ships Jon borrowed from Stannis, things start to get weird. Like, horror movie weird, with dogs barking at nothing and huge drifts of snow wafting mysteriously down from the nearby mountains. The Thenn chieftain orders that a massive gate be shut. The wildlings trapped on the other side scream to be let in, and then they don’t.

And then the gates are charged by an army of rotting wights, and it’s Night of the Living Dead meets Braveheart on Game of Thrones. Without recapping every single moment, I’ll say that it’s one of the best battle scenes to ever appear on the show, with a ton of combatants on screen at once—alive, dead, and undead—tense music, and great use of space—the editor expertly cuts between wide shots of the fighting, panicked exchanges between the living, close-ups of the wights, and shots of the ships in the bay to keep us appraised of the stakes at all times. It’s not the Battle of the Blackwater, which cut between action and inaction to establish a rhythm all its own, but as far as sequences that get the blood pumping go, this is the best the show has ever had.

Things get yet more intense when Jon spies a quartet of White Walkers looking down on the battle from the mountainside. He suddenly gets the bright idea to go find the bag full of dragonglass daggers he brought for just such an occasion, a bag he left it in the hut where he and the wildlings had their summit meeting. He makes a beeline for the place, and is nearly there when a giant I’m just going to assume is Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun bursts through a wall, kicking the craziness up another notch.

While Wun Wun wrecks the wight’s shit, Jon and the Thenn chieftain slip inside the hut, which is now on fire, and are confronted by a bearded White Walker so bad even the flames retreat as he approaches. The Thenn dies real fast, but not before his weapon is shattered upon impact with the White Walker’s blade. Jon turns to face the White Walker, and all the ambient sound from the battle cuts out so their face-off feels extra epic. After getting slapped around a bit, Jon grabs Longclaw and meets the White Walker’s blade in mid-swing. Longclaw stays intact. Hooray for Valyrian steel!

From there, it doesn’t take long for Jon to land a blow, and the White Walker shatters into ice crystals. And now there are two men who’ve killed a White Walker—oh, how he and Sam will talk. The Night’s King (for that is how he is named on IMBd), or the Whitest Walker, looks down on Jon in contemplation. “He killed Brent,” the Night’s King might be thinking. “I dislike him.”

Meanwhile, Karsi is mutilated by a pack of truly terrifying-looking wight children—she had been kicking ass throughout the battle and had shown herself to be just and kind, so she had to go. Dolorous Edd, still ticking since Season 2, urges Jon to get the hell out of there, and as they talk an army of wights tumble, lemming-like, over a ridge and crash onto the ground, only to wake up and immediately resume charging. It’s another effectively scary image in a sequence full of them.

The living decide it’s about damn time to leave, and make for the rowboats (Wun Wun just wades into the sea). As they row away, the Night’s King saunters to the edge of a dock, casual as your please, and favors Jon with a smirk most menacing. He lifts his arms up, but he raises not the roof, but rather the recently deceased as new-made wights. It is bleak, and it is chilling, and it happened.

Also, I can’t help but notice that neither the White Walkers nor the wights tried to swim after Jon and company. Do they not like the water? Can the living use that?

Odds and Ends:

Barristan Selmy, not pictured. During his conversation with Dany, Tyrion says that she has “no one at [her] side who understands the land you want to rule.” While it could be argued how politically savvy Barristan Selmy was, he definitely filled this role in the books—he was an emissary from Dany’s homeland who could fill her in on its particulars. More than ever, it seems like the producers killed him off prematurely so they could make room for Tyrion, who’s clearly going to take up that spot on the show.

As much as that rankles, I can understand their reasoning. The scenes between Tyrion and Daenerys this week crackled with energy, and seeing the two of them together ahead of George R.R. Martin’s schedule showed a solid grasp of time management. Might there have been room for both characters? I think so, as long as one was willing to give up some screentime. Still, considering how good a start the Tyrion-Daenerys dynamic is off to, it’s probably time for me to stop feeling bitter about it.

Let’s nitpick the economics of the House of Black and White. Okay, so this is a very pedantic complaint, but it’s bugging me. According to Jaqen H’ghar, the wife and child of a dead sailor are the ones who want the insurance salesman dead. However, the reason they want him dead is because he didn’t pay out on the sailor’s policy, so how did they have the money to pay for the assassination in the first place? It takes money to maintain those moody interiors, y’know. Was there anything in the books about the Faceless Men working pro bono?

“The work continues.” With his parting words to Cersei, Qyburn confirms that Operation Frankengregor is still proceeding. Will we see the fruits of his labor by the end of the season? I hope so.

So do you think Olly might try and kill Jon Snow? For a long time now, the show has been dropping not-so-subtle hints that Olly has a problem with Jon’s plan to make peace with the wildlings. These seemed like obvious indicators that Olly was going to be a member of the Jon Snow murder brigade come the finale, but the hints have gotten so blatant that I wonder if we’re not being misdirected. Maybe Olly will end up defending Jon, which at this point is the only thing that would surprise me.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, kill a White Walker. So this episode revealed that there are at least two ways to kill a White Walker: dragonglass and Valyrian steel. Even if the second method doesn’t end up being an option in the books, although I think it very well might be, it makes some amount of sense. Valyrian steel is forged by dragonfire and tricked out with magic spells. Although the arts of making it have been lost, those seem like the kinds of things that could take down White Walkers.

“Hardhome” was another strong hour of Game of Thrones, which seems to be recovering after a divisive bunch of mid-season episodes. “Hardhome” deserves plenty of praise for the kinetic action sequence at the end, but it shined in other areas, too. The Daenerys-Tyrion scenes were written with the subtlety and depth they needed—it honestly feels like this could be the start of a beautiful friendship, and not just a cheap bit of fan service. The series also continued to dive into the characters of Cersei and Sansa, setting them up for big moments down the road.

Still, it does all come back to that battle scene, which seems destined to go down in history as one of the most ambitious ever put on TV. If the producers try to top it in future seasons, they’ll have a high hurdle to jump, but I certainly won’t try and stop them.

• Published on 06/01/2015 at 4:38 AM CDT
• Last updated on 06/01/2015 at 4:38 AM CDT