A Curmudgeonly Look at Game of Thrones

This review contains SPOILERS for the TV series Game of Thrones as well as for A Song of Ice and Fire.  Read at your own peril.

What’s going on with these new episodes of Game of Thrones?  Everyone is so understanding, so goddamn nice.  What happened to all the treachery, the back-stabbing, the hatred and secrets and vindictiveness?

Look at Jaime, for example.  Enough people bear grudges against him that they should be standing in line to attack him: he killed Daenerys’s father, he pushed Bran off a tower, he imprisoned Sansa and Arya’s father, he constantly made fun of Brienne.  And yet every one of them ends up accepting him.  Some of these scenes are truly affecting, especially the one where he makes Brienne a knight, but they can’t all be so forgiving.

The Hound shrugs off the fact that Arya left him to die.  Samwell Tarly is unhappy that Daenerys killed his father and brother, but nothing seems to come of it.  (Unless the fact that he told Jon the secret of Jon’s birth is his revenge, but if so it seems awfully passive-aggressive.)  Sansa even hugs Theon, after everything he’s done.  When Tyrion suggests they sing a song, I almost expected someone to start up with "Kumbaya."

I don’t know why this bothers me so much.  It’s certainly a pleasant change of pace to see everyone working together, and to watch people who have been separated for years finally meet up again.  It just seems too rational for Westeros; it’s as if, to take an example from the real world, everyone suddenly decided that Climate Change is a real threat and banded together to do something about it.  I kept expecting something more in keeping with what’s gone before, like, I don’t know, Arya getting orders from the House of Black and White to kill Jon, because someone knows about Jon’s claim to the Iron Throne.  But nope — they meet and talk about weaponry.  Yeah, it works, but I don’t know if it’s as interesting.

But as I said, I don’t totally hate all of this good feeling, and I did enjoy a lot of Sunday’s episode.  And there’s still Cersei left.  Thank god for at least one vindictive person.