Baffled By Episode 5

Published May 13, 2019 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hi Gene and Big D,

Love you guys and I adore the bejesus out of your podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughtful GOT insight with the world. Big D: Loved your military analysis!!

I just listened to your episode five Instacast–I’m quite baffled by the episode myself and I couldn’t resist sharing my two cents with you. Sorry, it’s a bit of a mess and all over the place! It reads a bit like a stream of consciousness…I have to work so I typed hastily!

Firstly, don’t even get me started on Varys. I just didn’t believe any of it. He was too savvy to go down the way he did. He knew better than to wait for Jon Snow and approach him out in the open like that. Varys had come to know Jon and he knew that having been raised by Ned Stark, Jon abides by a tenet in which honor, honesty, and loyalty stand front and center. Approaching Jon was stupid and Varys is not stupid; he is smart and deliberate–he knew that Jon didn’t want the throne and was loyal to Dany. I believe that Varys would have handled the situation in a more inconspicuous and thoughtfully calculated manner. He deserved better. I hope he at least managed to send some ravens so his death wasn’t for naught.

I know GOT is praised for its battles and I commend the hard work that went into the visual spectacle, but there were just too many holes in the plot. I think they could have tried another means of seizing the city first. I know they had the unsuccessful parlay, but Dany and Jon had Arya in their corner, a highly skilled assassin. Does anyone know Littlefinger is dead? They could have sent Arya into King’s Landing with Littlefinger’s (or someone else’s) face to get rid of Cersei sans bloodshed. Wouldn’t Arya have told Jon she was planning to kill Cersei herself instead of standing by while the entire Northern army enters a second bout of combat? I know Arya said she doesn’t need allies, but she also has House Stark’s best interest at heart and she was there last week when Sansa insisted that the armies should rest. I also know that writers probably didn’t want to give Arya two big kills, but the topic wasn’t even addressed. I also know if Arya had taken her out, they wouldn’t have had that battle and the battle was necessary, but I still see the omission as a hole in the storyline.

What bothers me most about Dany’s “madness”–and I don’t know if this was the acting, directing or writing–but there’s no “aha” moment that justifies her decision to torch the city. Like you guys, I am in support of her strategy and I think she should have done it years ago, but nothing makes her snap. She glares at the Red Keep, puts on her angry face and proceeds to burn the city after her foes surrendered. I get that it’s impossible to reason with Cersei and that perhaps she was doing what Cersei would have done in her position, but why didn’t she just go straight for the Red Keep? Cersei lost all of her support and no one was charging at Dany–the Lannister army dropped their swords, she wiped out the Golden Company, the scorpions had all been destroyed, and the bells rang. I know she was fueled in part by grief from the tremendous losses she had suffered, but I just had a hard time believing that she decided to burn the city and all the innocents for any reason other than it being scripted. I loved the shock value of it, but It just felt like something was lacking. I don’t think it flowed seamlessly and perhaps this was due to the pacing of the eighth season.

I also had a hard time believing the Northern army would rape innocent women. I don’t think Ned Stark would have ever tolerated that nor would Jon as we saw.

Also, Tyrion–we all know that he should have known better than to trust Cersei. Should he have known better than to trust that Dany would stop once the bells started ringing?

And Euron? The one Iron Fleet survivor who happened to wash up on the same beach as Jaime? Please. Completely implausible. What made Game of Thrones so epic was how it always eschewed those eye-rolling “only in the movies” scenes, and now they gave us one of them? And if they were going to unite Euron and Jaime, they could have at least let us see Euron’s reaction to Jaime being the real father of Cersei’s baby. (Maybe he already knew that and didn’t care?) But anyway, that scene was completely unnecessary. Was it staged only to wound Jaime? I fast-forwarded through it (and all the Varys business) the second time around.

Also, Drogon is probably going to have to die and if so, how will they kill him? And who will kill him? I just hope it’s not via a scorpion that was salvaged from the rubble miraculously intact.

Not sure how I feel about Cleganebowl. I love Sandor and was obviously glad to see the Mountain go, but I thought it was just a bit too much. Coco Chanel famously said, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off”. I feel like that philosophy applies to this episode. There was so much happening and I thought it was a bit overwhelming to squeeze Cleganebowl into everything else.

On the positive side, I loved seeing the Mountain off Qyburn who created him and I loved the Red Keep collapsing on and, in a sense, entombing Cersei, after she had said the Red Keep has never fallen and it won’t fall today. Cersei always gets what she wants and technically, she didn’t have to relinquish the throne. As she said in season one, “when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die”. She was losing and she died. Yes, she was trying to escape but in the end, she went down with her castle and with Jaime. I thought it was fitting. I also loved the sequence with Arya running through the destruction and chaos of the streets. Thought it was pretty powerful as was the shot of her riding out on the white horse at the end.

Anyhoo, that’s all from me at the moment. Thanks so much for reading all of this. You guys are the best and I look forward to your Deep Dive!

All my best,
— Jaclyn

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