Read the next piece in this series here.
6.3 “Oathbreaker”
Written by David
Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Directed by Daniel
Sackheim
There are multiple oathbreakers in this episode, some more
understandable than others. Jon breaks ties with the Night’s Watch. His murderers
are punished. Sam twists the meaning of his promise to Gilly to stay with her.
Bran finds out that Ned wasn’t nearly as honorable as he thought he was. The
Umbers break any remaining oaths to protect the Starks.
So, Jon’s alive, but he remembers being murdered, and the
evidence of that murder is still on his body, so he’s understandably freaked
out. Melisandre wants to know what there is after death, but Jon says there’s
nothing. She says she was wrong about Stannis but that R’hllor bringing Jon
back means he’s Super Special. Davos kicks her out because Jon’s still getting
his bearings, for goodness’ sake. He tells Jon that they may never know why Jon
got murdered for doing the right thing, but he needs to get up and “go fail
again.” (Huh?)
Jon goes outside and gets stared at. Tormund tells him that
the other wildlings think he’s a god, but Tormund knows he’s not, because a god
would have a bigger penis. Edd just remarks that at least his eyes are still
brown so they don’t have to burn him as a wight.
Later, Jon executes the murderers—by hanging. I wonder if
Benioff and Weiss decided that beheading each of them would take too much
screen time, or if the fact that Jon, who passed the sentence, isn’t swinging a
sword (remember that in the books, he almost hangs Janos but then remembers Ned’s
advice and beheads him instead) says something about how broken he is. (Personally
I doubt they put that much thought into it.) So Jon’s last act as Lord
Commander of the Night’s Watch is getting his revenge on his murderers, then
tossing the cloak at Edd and leaving Castle Black.
Technically, since Jon was dead, his oath to the Night’s
Watch no longer holds. But keep in mind that this whole story has been told out
of order, probably to make Jon look way better than he is in the books. (So
much for “gray” heroes.) In the books, Jon is killed because he’s about to break his vows to the Night’s Watch, possibly
taking several other brothers with him, and as Lord Commander, that can’t be
allowed. Sure, the wildling thing and the way he’s been handling restaffing the
castles were unpopular and built up some animosity, but the final straw is him
deciding to march south and fight the Boltons. He’s already demonstrated a
resistance to listening to the council of the other leaders of the Night’s Watch—the
heads of the various factions—so it’s easily understandable why they thought they
had no other choice but to kill him. The show boils everything down to
intolerance and racism and has the conspirators murder Jon before he goes to fight the Ramsay, thus giving him a technical out
on the oathbreaking thing. This is yet another way in which Benioff and Weiss
fail to understand why Martin put the plot together the way he did and instead
revert to the “clichéd” fantasy tropes that Martin was purposefully trying to
avoid.
Meanwhile, Sam and Gilly are on a ship bound for Oldtown, and
they’re completely skipping the whole Braavos storyline, which would have given
them another oathbreaker if they had remotely followed the book story (not to mention
that this oathbreaker’s actions indirectly led to Aemon’s death). Instead, Sam’s
decided he’s going to “stop by” his family’s holdings and drop Gilly off there
before continuing to Oldtown.
I have questions.
Here’s a detail of the map of Westeros (borrowed from this resource) that shows Oldtown and
Horn Hill. On this particular map, major ports (Casterly Rock, King’s Landing,
White Harbor) are marked with the same big stars that we see on Oldtown. These
are places where lots of ships stop. In order to “stop by” Horn Hill to drop
Gilly off, Sam would have to get the captain to sail up the Mander to
Highgarden (note that it’s not a major
port) and hike south. Also notice how far off the main road Horn Hill is; that’s
not an insignificant trip. And the chances that the captain would be willing to
do that are very low. Heck, the chances that Sam could have gotten on a ship
going straight from the Wall to Oldtown are very low, which is why in the books
they have to take a cart from Castle Black to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, take a
small ship from there to Braavos, and then try to book passage on a ship going
from Braavos around the southern tip of Dorne to Oldtown. I think Benioff and Weiss
seriously underestimate just how big Westeros
is, hence the super weird travel times and casual stops at places that would
actually add weeks to the trip. Or,
like so many other things, they just ignore it when it doesn’t fit the story
they’re trying to tell.
Anyway, Sam tells Gilly he’s going to leave her with his
family, because that’s a great idea. She says he promised to stay with her, and
he claims that he promised that in order to keep her safe, and now keeping her
safe means becoming a maester. I don’t understand what part of keeping her and
baby Sam safe means leaving them with a man who abused Sam to the point that he
hates himself, a man who hates Wildlings (despite never having met one). Even
claiming baby Sam as his own isn’t going to help this at all. Not to mention
that Sam didn’t promise to keep her safe,
he promised to never leave her. No
amount of weaseling is going to change the fact that he’s technically breaking
his promise. Also notice how Gilly just accepts that rather than pushing back
like she constantly did at the Wall. Apparently her personality—much like Sansa’s—can
be changed to fit the current needs of a male character’s story.
Brynden is showing Bran the fight at the Tower of Joy for
some reason, despite that making no sense, as I mentioned in the last post. The
best I can figure with all of this is they’re aiming to make Bran one of Jon’s
staunchest supporters for King in the North (if not king of Westeros as Dany’s
husband) by making sure that he knows that Jon is the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna
and thus has both Stark and Targaryen blood. Since the only other people who
knew that—Lyanna, Ned, and presumably Rhaegar—are all dead (Howland Reed likely
does, too, but he’s been mentioned all of once in the show before these “flashbacks”),
if they’re going to use this as leverage, somebody has to know it, and that
somebody might as well be Bran, even if his method of discovering it is ridiculous.
Ostensibly, the reason Bran’s watching the fight at the Tower
of Joy is to see how things “really” happened rather than the legend he’s been
told his whole life (this according to Weiss in the “Inside
the Episode” thing). And apparently how things “really” happened include
Ned not being the bastion of honor that everyone always believed he was. The
trouble here is that, once again, this is entirely Benioff and Weiss’
invention. The only thing we know about the Tower of Joy is what we get from
Ned’s fever dream in A Game of Thrones,
and his frequent quick flashbacks to Lyanna dying. Other than the outcome—eight
men die at the Tower of Joy, including three Kingsguard and five of Ned’s
companions; only Howland Reed and Ned survive and Ned buries the bodies—we know
nothing about how that battle went down. I find it confounding that while they
twisted Jon’s storyline into knots to make sure he looked better, they then
throw this utterly non-canon fight into the mix to make Ned look bad—or, at
least, not as good as we thought he was.
That’s leaving aside the utter
ridiculousness of the fight itself. I mean, just look at this nonsense.
I just . . . I can’t even. They had a chance to do an
actually really cool fight scene with a really cool sword—Dawn is supposed to
be a legendary sword, after all, seeming to glow with its own internal light
because, well, it’s Excalibur—but instead we get . . . this. (If you’re
interested in a historian who specializes in medieval martial arts breaking
down just how stupid this scene is, go here. It’s like 30 minutes
long and he rambles a bit at the beginning, but it’s worth watching.)
Daenerys is still in the clutches of the Dothraki, and they’re
still treating her like a slave (making her walk) despite knowing who she is. The
leader—Weiss refers to her as the “high priestess”—of the Dosh Khaleen asks why Dany didn’t come back when Drogo died, like
she’s supposed to, and Dany says she’s been kind of busy. The high priestess
says that she’s not even sure Dany’s going to be allowed to stay with the Dosh Khaleen because she didn’t come
back right away, and it’s going to be up to the Khalar Vehzven—the council of the khals. Which makes no sense, but whatever. Nothing that happens in
the Dothraki storyline at this point makes any sense.
Meanwhile, the people Dany’s left behind are trying to keep
a city from imploding. Or, rather, Varys is trying to keep the city from
imploding by negotiating with the prostitute who’s been working with the Sons
of the Harpy while Tyrion plays drinking games and tries to get Grey Worm and
Missandei to loosen up instead of doing their jobs. Grey Worm says games are
for children, while Missandei remembers the kind of “games” her former master used
to make them play. She also says she doesn’t drink and doesn’t intend to start
now. Tyrion, however, has no respect for anyone or their boundaries, and starts
pushing. Grey Worm and Missandei are rescued by Varys coming in with the
information he got from the prostitute, that the masters of Astapor, Yunkai,
and Volantis are the ones funding the Sons of the Harpy. Grey Worm wants to
reconquer the cities, and Missandei agrees that they only understand violence,
but Tyrion pish-poshes their experience and instead gets Varys to send a
message to the various masters.
Over in King’s Landing, Qyburn has taken over Varys’ little
birds, and the Small Council tries to put Cersei in her place by refusing to
discuss anything with her. Tommen tries to negotiate with the High Sparrow to
allow Cersei to visit Myrcella’s grave, but he won’t allow it and Tommen still
won’t unleash the Kingsguard on the Militant. It’s interesting that a man who
preaches humility so hard has no trouble claiming to speak for and serve the
gods with ultimate authority, even over the secular leaders of the land.
In Braavos, Arya is still blind and still training, but she’s
getting better, which seems to make the Waif angry, which makes absolutely no
sense (as I’ve mentioned before). Finally, Jaqen sits her down at the well and
again asks her name; she says no one. He offers her a drink from the well,
telling her that if she truly is no one, she has nothing to fear from death. She
drinks, and her eyesight returns.
Finally, in Winterfell, the Umbers meet with Ramsay. They
refuse to swear fealty to him, but as a sign of good faith and in exchange for
help fighting the Wildlings Jon let loose in the Gift, they bring him Osha and
Rickon. To prove that he’s really Rickon, they also brought Shaggydog’s head,
which makes it abundantly clear that Rickon’s not going to survive the season,
either. After all, when it comes to the Starks, they are their wolves, and the
wolves are their Stark-ness and their connection to the North. Of course, in
the show, the direwolves are a CGI money-sink and since they can’t really get rid
of the dragons, sidelining the wolves is one way to cut that budget.
RIP:
Alliser Thorne
Olly
Shaggydog
In flashback: Willam Dustin, Ethan Glover, Martyn Cassel,
Theo Wull, Mark Ryswell, Arthur Dayne, Oswell Whent, and Gerold Hightower
Next week: Stark family reunion. Tyrion tries diplomacy (it
is not very effective). Dany sets a fire.
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