Metro Column: “The Dance of Dragons” nearly trips over its own momentum
“The Dance of Dragons” certainly set off some dramatic fireworks. It’s almost hard to believe that this season was criticized for being slow earlier in the year. Major events are coming at a furious clip now, with more promised in the finale.
For our weekly column in Metro, we wrote about the two major events that defined this episode: the sacrifice of Shireen and Daenerys flying away on Drogon. Both moments landed, the first because of how horrifying it was and the second because of how entertaining it was, but did the two work well together? One wonders if the editors should have flipped the sequence of events, because although I enjoyed the scene in Daznak’s Pit, it was tough to switch gears after watching Shireen die.
It’s a problem the show must face anytime there’s an especially jam-packed episode: how does it organize things so that one big moment doesn’t get in the way of another? This season, Game of Thrones has been careful about spotlighting one huge moment per episode—for example, think about Sansa’s wedding, Cersei’s arrest, and the Massacre at Hardhome. All of those scenes came at the end of their respective episodes, after the show had established a rhythm it could punctuate with a final, dramatic flourish. In “The Dance of Dragons,” there were two such flourishes, and I don’t think the transition from one to the other was entirely smooth.
Still, it was nothing the episode couldn’t survive, and I appreciated the clever audio cue the sounds mixers used toward the end of the scene at Shireen’s pyre, as the crackling of the fire blended into the roar of the crowd at Daznak’s Pit. Still, the finale promises to have an even higher concentration of big moments—book-readers know to expect major happenings at the Wall and in King’s Landing, and I think we’re all expecting Arya to mount an attack on Meryn Trant, to say nothing of what might happen with Sansa at Winterfell. How will David Benioff and Dan Weiss structure these moments? I’m not sure, but hopefully it’ll be in a way that leaves our hands in the air and our jaws on the ground.
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