Most of the hour was devoted to the journey north of the Wall, and started off on good footing with plenty of great character-driven conversations between the dead-hunting party. Jon and Jorah talked about the latter's father, and the family sword Longclaw. The Hound and Tormund bonded over insults (both dishing them out and teaching them). Gendry got to confront the men who handed him over for torture. So on through the group, and there were many interesting pairings to explore.
But at the same time, note that many of these conversations piled up right up against each other. In earlier, ten-episode seasons, these scenes undoubtedly would have been separated from one another with cuts to things happening elsewhere in Westeros. That would have given us more space to really take in all the connections and reflect on what they meant. Instead, it felt like the writers were fully aware of all the interesting pairings they had to explore among their band of adventurers... they just also knew they only had 10 or so minutes to cram it all in.
In an earlier season, the battle with the "dead bear" would have been enough for one week; we would have gotten to the big showdown the week after. Even that action scene with the bear came off a bit rushed, too frenetic to quite track exactly what was happening to who. (Did we have a couple of red shirts in the mix here? Somehow I'd thought that everyone leaving on this excursion last week was "someone important.")
Still, any story compression north of the Wall was nothing compared to what was happening at Winterfell. At gazelle pace, Sansa sent Brienne away, and her relationship with Arya came completely unglued. Now mind you, I can ultimately believe these characters would get to that place eventually. Sansa is dealing with a form of PTSD in which any time she pushes for something too hard, horrors are visited upon her. She's also using Cersei a lot as a guide for leadership, and hasn't yet fully learned that there's more to leadership than just claiming you're in charge. Sansa walks on eggshells around her northern allies, and yet thinks herself absolutely safe in Winterfell. It tracks when you think it through... but we're missing a lot of the connective tissue.
In the same way, when you stop to think about it, Arya hasn't really seen Sansa in years. The family bonds between them have had a long time to atrophy, and they weren't really that strong to begin with in their case. Arya of course feels more loyalty to her dead father than to her living sister. I can believe that the crafty Littlefinger could drive a wedge between them. But it has all happened so quickly. And where is Bran in all of this? I really feel like I needed another episode or two of watching things unravel between the Stark sisters to come naturally to this juncture -- Arya essentially threatening to kill Sansa.
Tyrion's conversation with Daenerys felt like the one part of the plot that was given the appropriate amount of space to breathe. Everything we've been getting this season has been part of a nicely slow burn that's telling us Dany may just wind up being a villain by the end of this tale, as monstrous as the Mad King before her. And really, this is not a new development, if you look back at her entire story. Her brother Viserys was an ass, to be sure, but Dany's indifference to watching his execution by boiling gold is chilling. Her decision to oppose slavery is the correct one, but her methods of crucifying hundreds, burning people alive, and eagerly encouraging a cult of personality around her undermine her image as a pure heroine. Tyrion and Daenerys seem to be on a collision course in the final season, and it's been satisfying watching that inevitable crash in "slow motion" over the course of these last few episodes.
But, of course, what everyone will be talking about this morning (well, besides the eclipse -- but we're talking Game of Thrones here) is the dead dragon. And UNdead dragon. Dany's sense of invulnerability took a huge hit when she charged up in an attempted rescue only to lose one of her "children." (I believe it was Viserion, though I don't believe that was stated explicitly in the episode.) Night King's gonna Night King, so -1 dragon for Dany means +1 dragon for the army of the dead.
That showdown itself had an appropriately slow buildup. Too slow, even? I mean, how long did it take Gendry to run to the Wall, and then send a raven to Dragonstone, and then for Dany to fly back north of Eastwatch? Surely a week at least, even at speeds faster than Game of Thrones has operated before this season. That's a long time to be stuck on an ice floe staring at zombies. When the battle came, though, it was intense -- even though the most significant non-winged characters lost in it were Thoros and the back-for-30-seconds Benjen Stark.
Like I said at the beginning, there were plenty of satisfying developments that left me feeling thrilled at the end of the hour. But it came with another acceleration of pacing, despite the hour-plus running time, that made that thrill start to fade more quickly than usual. I'd give this week's episode a B+.
Only one episode to go -- the season finale, and the longest installment of the entire series to date. It seems as though everyone is bound for King's Landing. And it would hardly be the stuff of a season finale if we spent the episode with people talking around a table and coming to a friendly agreement.
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