Knee-jerk reaction to Game of Thrones, Episode 602, “Home”

Okay, I just watched “Home.” Here are my highly subjective, personal thoughts and feelings after viewing tonight’s episode. I’m avoiding social media comments and reviews until I finish, so my initial gut reactions aren’t influenced by other responses. First of all, I loved it. It was freaking brilliant. Every scene had a diamond folded into it. The show’s narrative launched off the base set up by “The Red Woman,”—it drove the plot forward and gave us some great character moments. And it gave us back Jon Snow. Overall I give the episode a fantastic Game of Thrones grade of A+.

The impressions I list below are my all my own musings and over time, I may rethink how I feel about things. I believe that I can support some of these points on an intellectual/logical level, while others are just emotional/internal feelings which may be less defensible in the cold light of day…but they’re as immediate and honest as I can make them. Some sequences end up on both lists for different reasons. Since I think this episode is great, I have way more than five Valyrian Steel (Best) Moments to pick from. On the negative side, I feel like I’m nitpicking to dredge up Flea Bottom Brown (Worst) Moments.

VALYRIAN STEEL (BEST) MOMENTS

It was difficult to pare such a great episode down to only five outstanding sequences, but here we go:

VALYRIAN STEEL FIVE: Bran brings the magic back. Seeing Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven voyaging through the past together was long-awaited and rewarding. Their shared vision allowed us to see into the past and watch young Eddard, Benjen and Lyanna Stark at Winterfell. Hodor (Wyllis) could once talk? And Lyanna, poor Lyanna—I hope we get to see more of her when she was alive. It looks like the Team Bran team is going to provide us with a vision of the Tower of Joy pretty soon, too.

VALYRIAN STEEL FOUR: Here comes the cavalry. Game of Thrones isn’t big on pulling good characters out of the frying pan, so it was fun to have something of an old-fashioned last-second rescue of Ser Davos and company at Castle Black. Just as Alliser Thorne and the nasty crows manage to—thump, thump, thump—bash some good The Shining-sized holes in Ser Davos’ door, we hear WHAM, WHAM, WHAM at the gate, which easily shatters under the blows of Wun Wun, who leads Dolorous Edd, Tormund, and the wildlings in to save the day.  I thought the Night’s Watch, armed and ready, would fight—the ever foul-mouthed Alliser at least—but I guess the guys who back the assassins of the Lord Commander are all cowards at heart.

VALYRIAN STEEL THREE: Tyrion releases the Dragons. A scene that mixed humor and danger very nicely. Tyrion’s lines (“I’m here to help. Don’t eat the help.”) completely cracked me up, and his sweet little story about wanting a dragon as a young boy was a great beast-soother. Tyrion got all the great lines in the Meereen story line this week. I’m sure your turn will come, Varys.

VALYRIAN STEEL TWO: Cersei embraces her last surviving child. This beautiful scene between Cersei and Tommen covered a lot of territory, with the boy wanting to be brave and Cersei shedding the emotional numbness of having just lost Myrcella and turning her focus to her youngest child. As a part of this story line, I thought the scene between Jaime/Tommen over Myrcella’s corpse in the Sept had an eerie echo of the earlier dynamic between Tywin and Joffrey; of course, the budding Jaime/Tommen relationship has much more positive energy to it than the Tywin/Joffrey one.

VALYRIAN STEEL ONE: of course, Jon Snow is alive (or something close to it). Melisandre raises Jon Snow from the dead. Jon sits up and breathes. Yes, we saw it coming. Yes, it didn’t seem like it was very difficult for Melisandre to do (see Flea Bottom Brown Moment One): Ser Davos strolls in and asks Melisandre to try: she grimaces but ultimately goes through with it, and voila with the slightly delayed win. Maybe the Red God only hands out resurrection powers to select priests who are fallen or are in crisis? At least the curtain has finally fallen on the endless ‘Jon Snow is coming back’ speculation, one of the mostly furiously guarded and worst-kept secrets in TV history, but man, when it finally happened, and Jon sucked in that first gasp of air, I got goosebumps. That’s some damned fine dramatic writing.

You have to think that Melisandre is going to get her mojo back in a big way after accomplishing this kind of feat, especially if she now believes that Jon truly is Azor Ahai and that all of her prior failures were simply leading her to this moment. And now, we get Jon back, plus all the awesome ‘who’ and ‘what’ is he now questions, and we’ll get to see his Hero’s Journey continue, powered by a freshly opened can of back-from-the-dead whoop-ass.

FLEA BOTTOM BROWN (WORST) MOMENTS

(Please remember that I enjoyed all of the following scenes but I did sense some questionable elements, and they mostly have to do with the predictability factor, which isn’t all so bad if it’s well executed, which it was.)

FLEA BOTTOM BROWN FIVE: It feels like Arya didn’t suffer enough.

I know that’s a difficult statement to make when it comes to the lives of Game of Thrones characters, but how long was Arya actually reduced to blind beggary in the alleys of Braavos? It didn’t feel very long to me. It didn’t seem like poor Arya (whom I love) was penalized harshly enough for the awful transgression she performed in the eyes of the Many-Faced God. Maybe she was out there for months, eating bugs and huddling with lepers for warmth in the night and getting bashed around by the Waif daily, but if she was I didn’t sense it. It felt like she was destitute for a week, tops. Maybe I’m way off. And I’m sure there are plenty more unpleasant hurdles she’ll have to overcome once she return to the House of Black and White.

FLEA BOTTOM BROWN FOUR: Walking into the lion’s den alone. Jaime versus the High Sparrow is a great scene, with Jaime simmering on the boil, his hand on his sword handle. But we’ve seen so many royals stroll confidently into the Sept of Baelor and not come out again (tossed into prison cells), including Cersei, that it seems a bit too reckless, considering the situation. The much-sinned, incest-stained Jaime just trundles in there, alone, to chat with Tommen and do some saber-rattling at the High Sparrow? Surely Jaime and Cersei are smart enough to know that the High Sparrow’s fanatic, club-wielding minions would be hidden en masse nearby. Even with his sword and armor, Jaime is going to be in dire straits if this scene comes to blows, unless, of course, he organized some back-up, which would have been the smart thing to do.

FLEA BOTTOM BROWN THREE: Somebody always dies on the rope bridge. As soon as Balon Greyjoy stumbled out on that Temple of Doom rope bridge in the middle of the storm, I knew that was going to be the end of him. And sure enough, a dark hooded figure (Euron Greyjoy) was there, in the rain, waiting to chuck him into the void.

FLEA BOTTOM BROWN TWO: sometimes you just have to see it coming. Roose Bolton was too dumb to see how the arrival of his newborn son might drive his psychopathic bastard Ramsay to do something desperate? Plus, Roose had been poking that skin-peeling maniac with a sharp stick for quite a while now. To me, Roose had always seemed self-aware enough to avoid ending up within dagger-striking distance of Ramsay. Ramsay’s character may be impossible to develop beyond his one-dimensional bloodthirstiness, and the scene where he sets the dogs on Walda and his half-brother was positively Dracula-like in tone. Ramsay continues to offer no surprises (or even mild deviations) from this one-color character.

FLEA BOTTOM BROWN ONE: Melisandre raises Jon Snow from the dead. After months and months of speculation and theory-crafting, it all ended up being so simple. Ser Davos asks and, with a little prodding, the forlorn Melisandre acquiesces; she washes Jon’s body, burns a bit of his hair, asks the favor and, like the ‘lucky drunk’ Thoros of Myr, succeeds without knowing why. This sequence is number one on my Valyrian Steel moments list because it is filled with pure awesomeness. But wow, I mean, after nearly a year of Matrix-level complex conjecture, it was the Red Witch saying the words. That was it. Part of me loves that it ended up being so simple. Part of me might have liked a funeral pyre and Targaryen dragon blood and Melisandre gone magic-berserk, along with fireworks.

BONUS VALYRIAN STEEL MOMENT: it was crazy awesome when the FrankenMountain squashed that guy’s head against the wall. I have no idea how the FrankenMountain knew about the man’s dirty gossip against Cersei, but it was bloody glorious.

So, there they are. My knee-jerk thoughts and reactions. I do hope that you enjoyed ‘Home’ as much as I did. It was killer, killer good.