Read the next entry in the series soon.
8.4 “The Last of the Starks”
Written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Directed by David Nutter
Ho boy. Okay.
Do the writers want us to be #TeamNobody? Because this is how you get Team Nobody.
And I don’t mean that to be glib. Given the events of the last 5 or so minutes of the episode, I don’t think this is something to be glib about. I’m usually deeply sarcastic about this show (I don’t know if you’ve noticed), but this episode feels to me like it pushed one too many buttons one too many times and I just want to watch the whole thing burn.
Lots of little character moments happened, but two big ones stuck out at me, so let’s tackle those first.
The first is kind of a joint character thing: Jon vs. Daenerys. I’d have to go back through the archives to see when I started predicting that the showrunners would pit them against each other and that all of this “Dany burns everything/Dany can’t be controlled by her advisors” stuff was setup for “Jon is the one true king.” Since I don’t want to do that, though, I’ll leave it at called it. Not only is the writing on this show bad, it’s predictably bad.
This episode in particular hammers home the Dany=irrational, Jon=good narrative, but is ridiculously clumsy about it. For one thing, all the things Dany’s angry about, she has every right to be angry about. But women aren’t allowed to be angry, right? Women angry equals overly emotional, irrational, crazy, you know, all the stereotypes. (This is very similar to how they treated Cersei a few years ago before she went full Evil Queen; they wanted us to think she was paranoid while everyone around her actually was dropping dead.) So Dany’s male advisors decide that she can’t be trusted to rule well, so they’re planning to overthrow her before she even gets started and replace her with Jon, who does not want to be king. Did we forget what happened the last time we had a king who didn’t want to be king? We had Robert Baratheon, who bankrupted the crown, left a bastard in every port, failed to keep the alliance with the Lannisters together, and moped about Lyanna for decades.
(Quick side note: Robert’s Rebellion was a justified war. It wasn’t started because of Lyanna, and it wasn’t “built on a lie,” and the writers can go jump off a cliff for that whole in-universe backseat rebelling.)
So, in order to keep that problem from even coming up, Dany asks Jon for one thing. To not tell anyone about his heritage. Jon can’t manage that, not even to prove to his queen and the woman he loves (and, incidentally, his aunt) that he backs her claim to the throne. Jon’s parentage is what’s going to bring this whole thing down—without that knowledge, Tyrion and Varys probably wouldn’t even be considering having Dany assassinated to replace her with Jon.
Meanwhile, Jon’s been super busy denying being a Stark, like he’s forgotten that his mother still was one. He literally says out loud “I was never a Stark” before having Bran tell Sansa and Arya about his parentage. Since when does one’s father wipe out the heritage one gets from one’s mother? Having a Targaryen father and a (utterly ridiculous) Targaryen name does not make him 100%, no taksie-backsies, Targaryen. Not only that, but if Theon can be considered an honorary Stark—as Sansa leaving him her pin would seem to indicate—then surely Jon being raised by a Stark in a Stark household and literally having a Stark mother would make him a Stark. Blood isn’t everything, and Jon has no Targaryen influence at all.
And then he sends Ghost north, which I think is equal parts “he’s not a Stark anymore” and “we don’t have the budget for more direwolves.” (Maybe it’s “we’re about to get Nymeria back and we can only afford one direwolf” but I’m not holding my breath.)
In short, if we were going to end up with Jon on the throne, I’d much rather it be because Dany sacrificed herself and her dragons to save the world from Winter rather than whatever this all is. (I know what it is. It’s misogyny disguised as “strong female characters” and has been from the jump.)
Then there’s the other big incident in this episode.
Missandei.
So much went wrong here. From the obvious setup with her and Grey Worm being too cute and wholesome for this show to the chains to her last words to the beheading, it was all bad. But since I’m a white woman and not a critical race theorist, let me lead this bit off with some words from actual women of color:
Based on my mentions, it seems some people still aren’t getting where I’m coming from, so let me clearer:— Ayana Gray (@AyanaGray) May 6, 2019
The problem isn’t a female POC character dying in a book/film, the problem is when the ONLY female POC character dies in order to “inspire” a white character.
My issue isn't that Missandei's death happened. I never expected her & Grey Worm to make it to that beach. My issue is that her death is the one way she said she didn't want to die. She died in chains with no way to defend herself. Lyanna slays a giant. Missandei should have too.— ❄Mikki Kendall❄ (@Karnythia) May 6, 2019
You know what would fix or at least alleviate problems like this? Having more women of color on the show. When there’s only one, the way she’s treated becomes the way the show treats all women of color, full stop. And Missandei died in the way she most feared—in chains—in order to a) show that Cersei (despite Tyrion’s words) absolutely is a monster (which we knew); and b) motivate Dany to burn everything to the ground. A woman of color is killed off to inspire a white woman have her Feelings and that’s pretty much the definition of fridging.
Unfortunately, the first half of the episode was mostly pretty good before the proverbial shit hit the fan. The funeral was touching, Jon’s speech was actually pretty inspiring, and it gave the characters a chance to react to the battle and having survived it. Being not entirely immune to fan service (do they make a vaccine for that?), I squealed over Brienne and Jaime. (And then I got super annoyed that she was reduced to standing in the snow in a housecoat begging him not to leave and crying over him because seriously.)
Even Arya and Gendry’s thing actually makes thematic sense. Of course she would refuse him and instead ride off with Sandor to probably go murder Cersei. That’s the character they’ve built up since season one. That’s the kind of thing I expect from Arya, not whatever last week was about. (Shock value. It was about shock value.)
But even this opening party scene isn’t without its deeply problematic elements, and as usual, they have to do with Sansa.
Here’s the dialogue:
SANDOR: None of it would have happened if you’d left King’s Landing with me. No Littlefinger. No Ramsay. None of it.The implications here are deeply troubling. First, that all the trauma she went through was somehow good and necessary for her character development, which is, of course, horseshit. Second, that she wasn’t already starting to grow up and understand the world before “Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest”; you know, after Ned’s death and Joffrey’s abuse and being forcibly married to Tyrion and everything that happened in seasons 1-4.
SANSA: Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed that little bird all my life.
Third, it sounds very much like the writers are arguing that taking Sansa in the direction they did, far far away from her story in the books, somehow made her a better character. Granted that we don’t know the culmination of Sansa’s story in the books yet, but I highly doubt that she’s somehow worse than this ice queen David & Dan have given us.
Only two more episodes to go. Let’s see how big of a conflagration we get in next week’s episode and how Dany’s demonized for it.
Deaths:
Rhaegal
Missandei
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