Book-Reader’s Recap—Game of Thrones, Episode 509—The Dance of Dragons

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!

Okay, “The Dance of Dragons.” This was an intense one. Let’s take a deep breathe and get into it.

We begin in Stannis’ camp, where Ramsay Bolton and the 20 men he requested during the previous episode have done…something amazing that results in a number of Stannis’ tents spontaneously combusting. Honestly, I have no idea how Ramsay managed this. Stannis is also flummoxed, and orders that whatever half-blind morons were supposed to be guarding his camp be pumped for information and then hanged. Tough but fair.

With much of their food stores burned, Davos advises Stannis that they are, to put it delicately, up shit creek sans paddle. Unless the snow lets up, they don’t have enough supplies to besiege Winterfell or march back to Castle Black. Stannis, however, remains stubborn. He orders the newly dead horses to be butchered for meat (back when the tents first went up, at least one horse caught fire, so it’s probably already cooked—thanks, Ramsay!) and looks meaningfully over at Selyse and Melisandre, contemplating filicide.

Later, Stannis summons Davos into his tent and gives him new marching orders: ride to Castle Black and beg Jon Snow for reinforcements. I mean, he doesn’t put it that way, because he’s Stannis, but that’s basically what he’s ordering Davos to do. He’s also sending Davos away so no one’s around to make pesky objections when he decides to burn his daughter to death. Davos knows this, hence his request that he be allowed to take Shireen back with him. “My family stays with me,” Stannis says, as everyone watching at home wrings their hands nervously.

After tromping his way across the snowbound encampment, Davos checks in with Shireen, who’s being extra adorable this week, because the show is just that mean. Davos gives her a little wooden stag he carved himself, and she loves it. Again, the show is just that mean. Davos promises to carve her more animals, thanks her for teaching him to read, and gives her a kiss on the forehead before promising to return to her after a few days’ time, and someone needs to report this show for engaging in cruel and unusual punishment, because this is borderline-sadistic. I’ve long suspected the show had an ulterior motive for making Shireen into a more endearing character, but being buttered up like this is maddening.

On a more serious note, this scene is well-written enough to leave Davos’ true intentions ambiguous. Does he know Stannis is going to sacrifice Shireen and taking an opportunity to say a covert goodbye, or does he not believe Stannis would really go that far, and using this conversation to reassure himself? Find out…next season, probably, because I doubt there’ll be time for him to travel to Castle Black and back by the end of the next episode.

Way up north, Jon leads the wildlings who survived the Massacre at Hardhome to the Wall. He’s approaching it from the north, which means that he landed all the ships he borrowed from Stannis on the north side of the Wall and then marched all the way to Castle Black so he could stand outside in the snow while interim Lord Commander Alliser Thorne glowers down at him, wondering if he wants to open the gates to the wildlings he hates so much. Why didn’t Jon just land on the south side of the Wall? It’s possible I’m overthinking this.

Anyway, Thorne begrudgingly opens the gates, and in the wildlings march, Wun Wun and all. The Night’s Watchmen who remained at Castle Black glower at their new neighbors, no doubt composing hurtful nicknames for them. They’ll probably avoid making fun of Wun Wun, though, if their slack-jawed gapes at the giant are any indication. And yes, Olly is also glowering, but you probably didn’t have to ask that. I’m really ready for all those sidelong glances to pay off.

From north of the North to as far south as south goes: it’s time to visit Dorne, possibly for the last time this season. Possibly for the last time in ANY season. Jaime is summoned to a meeting with Prince Doran, who cuts through a season’s worth of amateur spy shenanigans by just asking Jaime why he didn’t talk to him directly if he was concerned for Myrcella’s safety. Jaime explains about the Viper-gram Cersei opened back in “The House of Black and White,” and it’s heavily implied that Ellaria sent it. Shocker.

Doran continues to make this whole Dornish plotline feel awfully pointless when he simply agrees to send Myrcella back to King’s Landing on the condition that she remain engaged to Trystane, and that Trystane take Oberyn’s place on the Small Council. Okay, so Trystane’s heading back to King’s Landing, meaning that the show got a little something out of this whole Dornish detour, although it’s questionable whether he’ll make much of an impact in the seasons to come. And man, did it have to do some major meandering to get here.

And what of Bronn, you ask? He’s still in prison, listening as Tyene and Nymeria play what I’m going to call the smacking game. You hold your hand out and try to yank it away before the other person can smack it. The game kills at parties—bonus points if you play dirty like Tyene and just smack the other player full in the face.

It would appear that smacking one’s enemies in the face is a time-honored tradition in Dorne. Areo Hotah acquaints Bronn with it after escorting the prisoner upstairs to attend the Jaime-Doran sitdown. Apparently, one good elbow to the mouth is the price of Bronn’s freedom, which…eh, it could have been a lot worse. Bronn lives to crack wise another day.

Things continue to wrap up in Dorne as Ellaria Sand swallows her pride before God(s), the Sand Snakes, and everyone and tearfully swears allegiance to Doran. Immediately afterward, she has a strange talk with Jaime in which she admits that she knows Myrcella didn’t have anything to do with Oberyn’s death, and that she doesn’t blame Jaime if he’s in love with Cersei—different strokes, man.

Indira Varma really sells these scenes—the pain she felt over giving up on her vengeance for Oberyn was obvious when she knelt before Doran, and she was convincingly earnest in her scene with Jaime—but the tidiness of it all just makes me again question why the show bothered. It seems like Ellaria went through a real arc here, from red-hot anger to despair to acceptance, but we didn’t see enough of it to become invested, and we were too preoccupied with other characters to care. Maybe on another show, in another life, this could have worked, but on Game of Thrones, Dorne was just so much pretty scenery.

Across the Narrow Sea, Arya Lana threads her way through the crowds in Braavos, selling oysters, clams, and cockles to anyone with a song in their heart and a coin in their purse—there’s a discount if they happen to be on the Faceless Men’s hit list. She approaches the insurance salesman she was assigned to assassinate last week, but before she can sell him poison food (he practically begs to buy some oysters—this assignment could not be any easier), she spies Meryn Trant disembarking alongside Mace Tyrell. The music swells, the camera pushes in or Arya’s face, and we’re reminded that she is very much not over how Trant killed her beloved dancing master back in Season 1.

Arya stalks Trant through the streets, suffers through Mace Tyrell extolling an Iron Banker on the evils of usury, and finally follows the knight to a brothel. She saunters in—whores enjoy seafood too, after all—and makes her way to the back, where Trant is refusing whore after whore because they’re “too old.” So for all his other virtues, Trant is apparently also a pedophile. I don’t think we’re going to mind too much when Arya skewers him in the finale.

After completing her very creepy bout of reconnaissance, Arya returns to the Brick of Black and White, where she lies to Jaqen H’ghar about why she didn’t get around to killing the insurance salesman today. It’s meant to be unclear as to whether he believes her, but this is the guy who instantly knew when she lied about which street she walks down on her morning route—of course he didn’t believe her. Expect that to come home to roost next week.

We’re back in the North for what has to be one of the most disturbing sequences in the series. I hope you all brought a paper bag to hyperventilate into.

Shireen is playing with Davos’ wooden stag when Stannis comes in for a chat. Shireen discusses what she’s reading about: the Dance of Dragons, a Targaryen schism that tore the realm apart. As she talks about how pointless and bloody the conflict was, the naive part of me wants to believe that Stannis will get the hint and back off from his plan, but that’s not Stannis and that’s not this show. I know what it’s building toward, so it’s heartbreaking to hear Shireen say that she wants to help her father, and to hear her parrot what Stannis told her earlier this season: “You are the Princess Shireen of House Baratheon, and you are my daughter.”

Guards march Shireen out to a pyre, Melisandre appears, and Shireen catches on to what’s happening. The guards grab her and tie her to a stake. It’s horrible. Shireen pleads with her parents, and Selyse actually gives in and tries to rush the platform, but she’s too late. Melisandre lights the pyre, and Shireen’s screams fill the air as her parents and all their guard watch her burn to death.

The crackling of the fire merges with the roar of the crowd at Daznak’s Pit as the show ushers us to Meereen and into the final chunk of the episode. It’s a little disorienting having to watch a somewhat pulpy gladiatorial contest after seeing Shireen die. I wish we would have had a long quiet moment of Stannis alone in his tent first, because I needed a minute to process that.

The show is pulling out all the stops to give us a big, flashy fighting pit sequence, though. Dany, Tyrion, Daario, Missandei, and Hizdahr (who arrives suspiciously late) watch the first match, a fight between a big muscled brute and a smaller, quicker combatant, from a raised platform above the pit. It ends in a splashy beheading, which renews Dany’s distaste with this whole human cockfighting thing. She and Hizdahr dig into the meaning of “marriage of convenience” when she threatens to sack Meereen “if need be” and he makes a decent point about her tendency to impose her values on others. Oh, these two.

Their chat is cut short when the second match begins, and Jorah Mormont presents himself as a combatant. This guy just will not quit. Dany looks pained, but she allows the match to go forward, so if he thought she would shut down the proceedings for him, he was wrong. It’s a melee, and Jorah takes plenty of lumps, particularly from a guy who looks like he’s using the water dancing techniques favored by Syrio Forel, before coming out the victor. It’s an exciting, well-choreographed sequence with plenty of ebb and flow, so kudos to Iain Glen and the stunt team for entertaining me.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Jorah chucks a fallen combatant’s spear right at Dany’s platform, and for a second I thought he was trying to take down the Dragon Queen in a fit of rage, but it ends up he was aiming for a Son of the Harpy behind her. These guys are suddenly everywhere, and tear through Dany’s guards and the Meereenese populace alike in their rush to get to the Queen. This can’t be helping their popularity with the citizenry. One of them even stabs Hizdahr, apparently leaving him for dead.

In the tumult, Jorah climbs up onto the platform and offers Dany his hand, the better to help her into the pit and toward an exit with. She takes it. Wait, doesn’t Jorah have greyscale? Does Dany have greyscale now?

No time to think about that! The exits all seem to be blocked, and the Sons of the Harpy aren’t letting up. They surround Dany and her entourage in the center of the pit, and although her Unsullied guardsmen are picking them off as they approach, Dany seems to accept that she may die here. There’s a touching moment where she and Missandei hold hands and prepare to face oblivion together. Wait, didn’t Dany just contract greyscale from Jorah? Does Missandei have greyscale now?

No time to think about that! Because just as all seems lost, Drogon comes tearing out of the sky and lights the Sons of the Harpy up but proper. He eats guys, he sets guys on fire, he takes spears in his side but keeps on ticking. No, the special effects aren’t perfect in every way, but they’re quite good, and it’s still exhilarating to watch.

In the thick of the fight, Dany calmly walks toward Drogon and yanks a spear out of his side. There’s a moment where he looks ready to chomp her head off, but she doesn’t flinch. Instead, she climbs on his back, speaks a command, and flies out of the pit while Tyrion looks on, properly gobsmacked. Not a bad way to end an episode.

Odds and Ends

Dorne, post-mortem. We still have one episode to go, but unless something very unexpected happens, I think we know enough to start evaluating the success of the Dornish plotline. And from where I’m sitting, it looks like it was all for…well, not naught, but very little. The Sand Snakes were introduced, participated in a really feeble fight scene, and are apparently going to exit stage left, since it appears that Trystane will be traveling to King’s Landing in their place. They gained a little more personality after they were locked in a cell, but if they’re not going to tie back into the main plot, then what was the point? Furthermore, Jaime and Bronn are leaving without a scratch, so aside from providing them the opportunity to play at being medieval James Bonds, this trip did very little for them.

It’s been theorized that Dorne would be a vehicle for introducing Aegon Targaryen, Rhaegar’s son, but it seems that’s not happening. At the end of the day, it looks like the producers fell into the same trap that George R.R. Martin fell into—they catered to fans who liked Oberyn by giving the Dornish more to do, only to learn too late that that it was Oberyn, not the Dornish, that fans enjoyed. Is this the last we see of the land located as far south as south goes? My guess is yes, and I can’t say I’m sorry to see it disappear in the rear-view mirror. Assuming the rumors are true, let’s see if Benioff and Weiss have better luck with the Ironborn.

Roger Ashton-Griffiths appreciation corner. Broad comedy is a tricky business at the best of times, and trickier still when it’s used on a show as grim as Game of Thrones, but somehow Roger Ashton-Griffiths keeps getting away with it. I cracked up when Mace Tyrell exhaled a disappointed “Oh…” after the Iron Banker refused his bribe of wine, and again when he tried to win the man over by singing obnoxiously in the town square. Even Meryn Trant looked embarrassed. It’s easy to see how Mace Tyrell could become irritating if overused, but he’s a joy when deployed sparingly like this.

On Shireen, Melisandre, and The Winds of Winter. On both the show and the in the books, Melisandre is a morally ambiguous character. She’s ostensibly working to save humanity, but she gives birth to shadow creatures and burns people alive. Can fans possibly root for her, and for Stannis, after they’ve burned his only daughter to help win a war?

The scene where Shireen died reminded me of Sansa’s wedding from “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” Both sequences were beautifully shot, with the falling snow lending them an ethereal air. But they were both grotesque, the stately compositions clashing with the horrific subject matter. We’re used to Game of Thrones pushing our buttons, but these scenes have raised things to a new level. They’ve shocked us in ways we were unprepared for, in part because they weren’t taken directly from the published books.

If David Benioff can be believed, that won’t be the case after The Winds of Winter comes out. In the “Inside the Episode” feature at the end of this episode, the producer talks about the scene with Shireen, and says, “When George first told us about this, it was one of those moments where I remember looking at Dan and was just like…that’s so horrible…” “When George first told us about this…” Benioff and Weiss have said that Martin has told them all the main beats of the coming books, and it would seem that he told them about Shireen’s sacrifice. It’s unclear how the books will get to this point, but apparently Shireen is doomed to meet a similar fate on the page. The show is, officially, spoiling the books now.

Fun in Daznak’s Pit. As entertaining as the sequence in Daznak’s Pit was, I didn’t like that the producers shoved the Sons of the Harpy into the mix. In A Dance with Dragons, Drogon descends from on high and starts wrecking pit fighters indiscriminately, and probably would have started snacking on the populace if Dany hadn’t mounted him. I think that’s dramatic enough without having to threaten Dany’s life beforehand, but I understand that the producers set up the Sons of the Harpy and wanted to use them again before the season ended.

Also, in the books, Hizdahr makes a personal guarantee to Dany that, if she marries him, the Sons of the Harpy will cease their insurgency, a promise he manages to carry out. He never made that promise on the show, so it’s not technically cheating to have them return. There’s a popular fan theory that Hizdahr is, in fact, the Harpy himself, a theory that the episode both reinforced (Hizdahr showing up late to the fights) and negated (Hizdahr getting stabbed real bad). He looked quite dead, but I actually hope he survives so we can clear this up.

This was another intense episode of Game of Thrones. I’ll confess to watching raptly for much of the hour, especially during the segments in Meereen and outside Winterfell. I do feel like the show is only really hitting it out of the park this year when it goes for big dramatics, and wish the smaller scenes were constructed with a bit more care. Still, it’s hard to argue with the sight of Daenerys flying away on Drogon, something I’ve been waiting to see for a long while. Bring on the finale!

• Published on 06/08/2015 at 4:11 AM CDT
• Last updated on 06/08/2015 at 4:11 AM CDT