Book-Reader’s Recap—Game of Thrones, Episode 604—”Book of the Stranger”

Spoiler Note: This post is intended for those who have read the books in the Song of Ice and Fire series. As such, the post itself and the comments will contain spoilers. If you haven’t read the books yet, you can discuss this episode in our non-book reader (Unsullied) recap. Thanks!

Things get rolling in “Book of the Stranger,” a well-paced episode of Game of Thrones. Let’s dive in.

We start, of course, at Castle Black, which is where we’ve started every episode of Season 6 so far. Until tonight, we’ve ended every episode there, too. Daenerys broke the streak!

The producers seem to be giving us an awful lot of what we want lately, don’t they? After Jon Snow and Dolorous Edd chat about what Jon will do now that he’s quit the Night’s Watch (head south and “get warm”), Sansa, Brienne, and Podrick ride through the gates of Castle Black. Sansa dismounts, Jon walks out on the landing, they see each other, they stare, the music swells, and they embrace. I know Sansa and Jon never shared a scene together before this, but god help me, that was cathartic. That hug!

Oh, and Tormund was totally fascinated by Brienne. That will probably go nowhere, but if it goes somewhere, I am on board.

Jon and Sansa share some soup, and again, the tone is weirdly happy, even as they commiserate about what idiots they were to ever leave Winterfell in the first place. Sansa apologizes to Jon for being “an ass” about his bastardy, and even gives him a bratty little sister eyebrow raise when she commands him to “forgive me.” They both laugh and remember old times. As much as people complain about Game of Thrones indulging in misery porn, giving us scenes where the characters are genuinely enjoying each other’s company is almost weirder. I don’t want it to become the status quo, but I could stand a little more of this sprinkled throughout the season, to leaven the crushing darkness sure to come.

The cheeriness abates a little when Sansa suggests that she and Jon retake Winterfell from the Boltons. “Winterfell is our home. It’s ours, and Arya’s, and Bran’s, and Rickon’s, wherever they are. It belongs to our family. We have to fight for it.” So she did pick up a few emotional manipulation tricks down in King’s Landing.

Jon, however, is “tired of fighting.” He’s got a point. He’s been through the ringer since arriving at Castle Black back in Season 1. “I fought…and I lost,” he says. I like how that line echoes Alliser Thorne’s last words from the end of “Oathbreaker.” It seems the curse Thorne laid on Jon is weighing on his mind.

And the wish-fulfillment keeps coming. “I want you to help me,” Sansa says, “but I’ll do it myself if I have to.” All the fans who want Sansa to become stronger and more decisive are seeing it happen.

Outside, Davos approaches Melisandre on the landing, presumably because he’s bored…or cold. The Red Woman, it seems, has chosen a new leader. “I will do as Jon Snow commands,” she tells him. She thinks Jon is the prince that was promised, but considering how incredibly wrong she was about that the last time, there may be a few lingering doubts kicking around up there. I think that’s how Carice van Houten is playing it.

Davos has his misgivings, too, and follows Melisandre down the stairs. He demands to know “what happened to the princess,” but Melisandre is spared the need to answer by the timely arrival of Brienne, who towers over both of them. She stares daggers at Melisandre, and makes it very clear that if she were betting on who had the power to summon a shadow monster capable of assassinating King Renly, she’d put all her money on Red, if you know what I’m saying. Again, Van Houten is playing everything more vulnerable than she used to. I don’t think we’ll get the freakishly self-assured Melisandre back anytime soon, if ever.

Later, the Castle Black crew—old hands and new arrivals both—sit down to a dinner of awful food and significant looks. Tormund gives the most significant look of all, as he tears into a hunk of meat while staring at Brienne, as if to say, “This could be you.” It all reminds me of that incredibly tense Bolton family dinner scene from last season, but with a much lighter tone.

A guy comes in and stops the fun when he gives Jon a message from Ramsay. It’s the Pink Letter from A Dance with Dragons, although it’s coming at a different time and with different wording. Basically, Ramsay tells Jon to return Sansa (no mention of “my Reek”) or he’ll mess him and his up. I missed the bit about cutting out Jon’s bastard heart and eating it, but I liked how Ramsay punctuated each of his claims with the phrase “Come and see.” Repetition is important.

Now that Ramsay has called Jon out, he’s more willing to act. They deduce from Ramsay’s signature that Roose is dead (Sansa seems to know instinctively, so it must have seemed as inevitable to her as it did to us). Ramsay also claims that he has Rickon, and while there’s no real way they could know he isn’t lying, Sansa seizes upon this claim, and uses it to convince Jon to mount an attack. Will Jon and Sansa be able to raise enough soldiers to take out Ramsay? We’ll surely find out by the end of the season.

Meanwhile, in the Vale, Robin Arryn is…doing better with his combat training. I mean, none of his arrows save one hit the target, but judging by the look Lord Yohn Royne gives him afterward, you get the idea that it took a looooot of work to get to even this point. Baby steps.

But we only have so much time for Robin Arryn’s adventures in incompetence, because Littlefinger’s back! He steps out of a carriage and immediately starts to flatter Robin, who hugs him enthusiastically. Okay…I never got the idea that he’d gained Robin’s trust, but maybe he’s been giving him gifts of the kind he gives him here (a falcon) for a while. That would get the little snot on his side.

Not on Littlefinger’s side: Yohn Royce. Apparently, Littlefinger didn’t tell Royce that he was transporting Sansa to Winterfell, but rather that he was taking her to the Fingers. By now, word about her marriage to Ramsay has gotten out, and Royce is nettled about being lied to. Littlefinger serves him a cock-and-bull story about getting accosted by Bolton men on the road, and when Royce points out that it’s cock-and-bull, Littlefinger asks Robin to mediate their dispute. As Littlefinger just gave Robin a new toy, the boy sides with his step-father (whom he calls “Uncle”). You should have gotten him a pony or something, Royce.

Royce pulls his bacon out of the fire at the last second, though, and pledges his “absolute loyalty” to Robin and, by extension, Littlefinger. Royce doesn’t seem like he has a ton of imagination, so I’m not sure if he’s going to plan anything sneaky, but you never know.

Next, Littlefinger informs Robin that he has “good news”: Sansa has escaped Winterfell and is headed to Castle Black. I don’t know how that’s good news, considering it represents the ruination of his original plan, but Littlefinger is nothing if not a guy who knows how to go with the flow. Anyway, Robin wants to help Sansa, which gives Littlefinger the excuse he needs to take the knights of the Vale to the North. “The time has come to join the fray,” he says. What, is he recording promos or something?

Next we head to Meereen, and I brace myself for a repeat of last week’s awkwardness. Luckily, these scenes were punchy and fun.

Tyrion, Missandei, Grey Worm, and Varys (who is pretty much just set decoration this week) await envoys from Yunkai, Astapor, and Meereen. Grey Worm and Missandei, as former slaves, are pissed that Tyrion would entertain the slavers, but Tyrion says he is taking a “diplomatic approach.” Let’s see how it goes.

The slavers, unsurprisingly, are dicks. They want Daenerys gone (it’s unclear how much they know about her whereabouts) so they can bring slavery back and treat people like Missandei and Grey Worm like dirt again. Tyrion, ever the diplomat, offers a compromise: the slavers can keep slavery intact for seven years, during which time they will find new ways to make money. In return, they’ll stop supporting the Sons of the Harpy. No one is happy with this deal, which probably means it’s a good one.

And then Tyrion summons a bunch of scantily clad whores in to writhe on the slavers’ laps. Missandei is livid.

There’s more to come, but I confess myself impressed with how quickly the writers have turned things around in Meereen. As the series went on, one of my concerns was that there seemed to be fewer shades of grey, but these are a lot of layers to Tyrion’s decision-making here. Missandei and Grey Worm are justified in feeling betrayed that Tyrion would preserve slavery in any form (I loved how completely Missandei owned Tyrion when he claimed to know what it was like to be a slave), but there’s also something to be said for Tyrion’s conciliatory approach. As David Benioff points out in the After the Episode featurette, Tyrion’s moves here sort of resemble Abraham Lincoln’s during the lead-up to the American Civil War. If there are no more Song of Ice and Fire books to draw from, actual history will do.

Anyway, Tyrion, Missandei, and Grey Worm next meet with Meereen’s former slaves in Dany’s throne room. The show wrings some more comedy out of Tyrion’s bad Valyrian (“Large sorry you wait so fat time.”) before getting to the heart of it: the freedmen are pissed that Tyrion is meeting with the slavers. Tyrion makes like a politician and passes the buck to someone else, in this case Daenerys, assuring everybody that he’s just filling in until she gets back (I enjoyed how Dany’s litany of titles still managed to show up even though she wasn’t there). Grey Worm and Missandei, whom the freedmen trust more than the weird foreign dwarf, vouch for him, a little reluctantly.

Later, Tyrion clashes further with Missandei and Grey Worm, and drops a pretty good line: “Slavery is a horror that should be ended at once. War is a horror that should be ended at once. I can’t do both today.” Tyrion thinks they can trust the slavers so far as they can depend on their self-interest, but Grey Worm is pretty sure the masters will end up screwing them over in the end. And I remind you that, despite his efforts at negotiation, Lincoln was unable to stop the Civil War from happening, so…

But it doesn’t matter. It’s just nice to hear conversations where every view is given its due. This is the kind of thing the show needs to do if it wants to make Meereen interesting. Keep it up, show.

Outside Vaes Dothrak, we have a simpler story: Daario and Jorah are gonna sneak into the enemy stronghold and rescue the princess. We go from the Civil War to Star Wars.

Not that I’m complaining…too much. Jorah and Daario share some buddy-cop banter and make plans to abandon their weapons outside Vaes Dothrak, where such things are forbidden. They’ll pretend to be merchants if they’re caught. It’s not a great plan, but compared to what Jaime and Bronn thought up before sneaking into the Water Gardens, it’s the height of tactical brilliance.

Also, Daario finds out that Jorah has greyscale. What will he do with that information? Wait until Jorah pisses him off in the queen’s presence to find out.

The dynamic duo sneak into the city at night, where there is much reveling and public sex. They don’t get far before they stumble into two Dothraki soldiers who do not believe their line about being merchants. (But points for effort, Jorah!) Fighting ensues. Daario snaps his guy’s neck, but old man Jorah gets the stuffing kicked out of him (more points for the moment when he tries and fails to throw sand in the Dothraki’s face) before Daario knifes the dude in the back. Daario snuck in his naked lady blade, the scamp.

The citizens of Vaes Dothrak live it up at night, but the members of the Dosh Khaleen apparently must spend their evenings in a hut talking about their dead husbands. No wonder Dany wants out.

Still, the High Priestess is friendly enough, and allows Dany to head outside the hut to pee. She is instantly found by Jorah and Daario, and it’s pretty great how Dany barely bats an eye when they spring from the shadows. I imagine she’d been puzzling out her big end-of-episode plan for a while, and they provided the final piece she needed. We’ll find out what it is later.

For now, let’s head to King’s Landing, where the good scenes keep coming. Septa Unella visits Margaery, who is still rotting in her cell, and takes her to talk with the High Sparrow—I like how the light in the room is extra bright, to reflect how long Margaery has been in darkness.

Margaery and the High Sparrow spar in a well-written scene. He gives his backstory: he was once a cobbler who became good enough to amass a minor fortune. He indulged in the pleasures of the flesh, but after one particularly drunken night, he realized what a mess he was making of his life, and left to find his truth. That sounds a little trite, but Pryce sells the hell out of it—unlike Ramsay, who increasingly seems in danger of becoming a one note villain, the High Sparrow is getting filled out, and Pryce is clearly loving the opportunity.

Margaery’s reactions are hard to read, as they should be, but in the next scene, it’s revealed that she’s not buying the High Sparrow’s pious chatter, although I wonder if she senses how easily someone like Tommen might.

The High Sparrow allows Margaery a reunion with her brother. This is the first time we’ve seen Loras this season, and he’s in terrible shape. Margaery seems to have found some inner reserves of strength to see her through her imprisonment, but Loras is broken, which I can buy. He may be “very good at knocking men off horses with a stick,” but Margaery’s always had the brains in the family, and is better equipped to take an all-out assault on her mental endurance.

Still, the scene is sweet, as Margaery tries to bring her brother back from the brink of despair. Even after all this, she’s keeping a clear head (“They want me to help you. They want me to help tear you down…And if either of us give into what they want, then they win.”), but has no choice but to let him cry it out when it becomes clear that he’s in no fit state to strategize.

Back in the Red Keep, Pycelle is giving advice to Tommen on how to deal with the High Sparrow. Cersei, who really picks and chooses when to be subtle, is displeased. “Leave,” she says. But Pycelle plays it well and doesn’t leave until the king dismisses him, and takes his sweet time walking out the door. You gotta give it to Pycelle—he’s smart and wily enough to have survived a long time. When he goes, as we book-readers know he soon will, I’m going to be sad to lose him and Julian Glover both.

Once Tommen and Cersei are alone, she heads off any potential sympathy he might be developing for the High Sparrow with an impassioned defense of the medieval class system. (“Queens must command respect. Kings even more so. Not just for their own sake, but for everyone’s.) I think it’s Tommen’s destiny to be pulled apart at the center this season—but in this scene, he sides with his mom, and reveals something he learned about the High Sparrow back when he visited him in “Oathbreaker.”

Tommon’s big knowledge bomb is that the High Sparrow plans to have Margaery make her own walk of atonement ahead of Cersei’s trial. Cersei brings this intel to Kevan and Olenna as they wait for a Small Council meeting that isn’t going to happen. The revelation finally seems to bring this group together, and a plan is formed: since Tommen has forbidden Kevan from siccing the Lannister army on the High Sparrow for fear of endangering Margaery, the Tyrell army will act instead, stopping Margaery’s walk of atonement before it starts. If the plan goes wrong, it might piss off the townsfolk, but the group decides to move forward anyway. “The Rains of Castamere” plays on the soundtrack, and we all hunker down for a big set piece around Episode 6 or so.

On to the Iron Islands, which continues to be way more compelling than Dorne was at this stage last season—hooray for side-stories that hold my interest.

Theon arrives home and reunites with Yara, who just looks right sitting in her father’s chair in front of his kraken fireplace. Yara queen!

The meeting is not a happy one. Yara chews Theon out for not coming with her when she tried to rescue him back in Season 4, an attempt that got many of her men killed. Theon is abashed—it’s certainly an interesting contrast with how cocky he was the last time he was here. Yara keeps drilling down, and accuses Theon of showing up in an attempt to fight her for rulership of the Iron Islands. That seems like she’s jumping to conclusions, but it’s election season on the Iron Islands and she’s probably stressed.

Theon, however, insists that he doesn’t want to be king, and only wants to help her role. It’s another nice brother-sister scene in an episode full of them, (Sansa-Jon, Margaery-Loras, and Theon-Yara—coincidence, or a subtle reminder to cherish your siblings always?)

Next, we’re off to Winterfell, for Ramsay’s Terrible Deed of the Week. Until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to fans who say that Ramsay’s evil is growing out of proportion with our ability to take it seriously, but it is starting to get tiresome.

At least this particular scene seems rooted in reality. Osha, fresh off her kidnapping, is escorted into Ramsay’s room and tries to seduce her way out of certain death. I mean, it worked back when Theon was running Winterfell, so I can buy that she would try it again.

Unfortunately, Ramsay flayed Theon for all the information he was worth, so he knows Osha’s strategies. He stabs Osha in the neck seconds before she can do the same to him, and another great character bites the dust.

This was actually a well-written scene—Osha’s lies about not really being loyal to the Starks might have worked if Ramsay hadn’t had access to Theon, and there was some nice tension as Osha reached for the knife on the table. Still, there was really only one way this scene could go. Goodbye, Osha: you will be missed.

Finally, we head back to Vaes Dothrak, where Daenerys Targaryen does Something Awesome and Inspiring—this’ll be time #4, by my count.

She’s brought before the assembled khals, who are to decide what’s to be done with her. The Wise Masters of Yunkai come up—they’re offering a reward for her, so they must at least know she’s not in Meereen—and Dany inserts herself into the conversation.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Emilia Clarke is never better on this show than when she’s giving dramatic speeches in made-up languages. Her speech here is a good one: she calls the khals small men, and claims that she would make a better leader of the Dothraki than any of them. And even as they laugh and threaten to rape her to death, she keeps this creepy little smile on her face, and you know she has something up her sleeve.

And indeed she does. Dany grabs hold of the braziers around the room and topples each of them over, causing the hut to go up in flames faster than a box full of oily rags. I mean, really, this is the most flammable hut in the world—I’m shocked there were braziers in it to begin with. Jorah and Daario have barred the doors, so the khals are trapped inside. Meanwhile, the Dothraki gather to watch the place burn.

In another lucky stroke, the doors of the hut burn out and fall inward, allowing Dany to walk out of the flames unscathed, as the collected masses watch in awe. In a callback to the last scene of the first season, they bow before her, because you don’t watch someone walk out an inferno without a scratch on them and not make them your god.

It’s an entertaining end to an entertaining episode, although doing such a literal callback to an earlier episode isn’t likely to calm fans who think Dany’s storyline repeats itself. Still, the context is different, and I like that they avoided the obvious development, which would have involved Drogon helping her out, in favor of Dany making her own way.

Odds and Ends

Jon is different. I swear we’ve seen Jon Snow smile more in the past two episodes than in the past two seasons. Last week, he smiled when reuniting with Tormund and Edd, and now he smiled after cracking a joke. (What’s he gonna do when he gets south? “Get warm.”) Weirdly, getting killed seems to have made him happier.

Yeesh with the callbacks. Littlefinger made reference to “the wars to come.” Littlefinger, Mance Rayder, and Arthur Dayne have now all used that phrase. When did it penetrate this far into the Westerosi consciousness?

Nitpick or mistake: you decide. When on the docks, Tyrion says: “As a clever man once told me, ‘We make peace with our enemies, not our friends.'” That’s a paraphrase of something Littlefinger said to Ned Stark back in Season 1. Are we to assume that he also said it Tyrion? Did he and I’m just not remembering? Did someone else say it? Considering that the quote played a big role in the goings-on in Meereen this week, some clarification would be appreciated.

So…what are Jorah and Daario doing here? I guess Jorah and Daario helped Dany by barring the door to the hut, but beyond that, the show had to do an awful lot of work to get them to Vaes Dothrak just for Dany to spring herself. Are they going to have a bigger purpose going forward? Is Jorah’s greyscale going to come into greater play?

Then again, their roadtrip didn’t take up as much time as I’d thought (read: feared), so no harm done.

Bon mots. I wonder how much time the writers spend coming up with clever things for characters like Olenna and Tyrion to say. I enjoyed this exchange:

"Cersei: “You once spoke of your respect for our father because he understood the necessity of working with one’s rivals.”Olenna: “”You have been stripped of your dignity and authority, publicly shamed, and confined to the Red Keep. What’s left to work with?”"

Oh, Olenna Tyrell. Never change.

Fire cannot kill a dragon. Okay, I’m sure there will be debates about whether Daenerys is supposed to be fireproof all of the time, or if she was only granted that ability during the birth of her dragons. On the show, it’s obvious: she’s fireproof all of the time. This scene clinches it. But the end of “Fire and Blood” wasn’t the only time she showed resistance to fire. In Season 1, she was able to take scalding hot baths without any pain, and she held scorched dragon eggs that had been cooking over the coals for long periods of time.

Also, I’m not sure she isn’t fireproof all of the time in the books. In A Dance of Dragons, Drogon burns her hair off when she encounters him in Daznak’s Pit. It’s unclear if she was engulfed in flames in that instance, but you’d figure that if the fire was bad enough to burn her hair off, it would have at least been bad enough to mess up her scalp, which doesn’t seem to be the case.

Finally, here’s what George R.R. Martin said on the subject back in 1998, two years after A Game of Thrones came out:

"[S]ome fans are reading too much into the scene in GAME OF THRONES where the dragons are born — which is to say, it was never the case that all Targaryens are immune to all fire at all times."

Some Targaryens, like Viserys, obviously aren’t immune to fire at all, but this quote doesn’t foreclose the possibility that some Targaryens, like Daenerys, could be immune to fire all the time.

Further clarifications would be appreciated. I feel like this question has been rattling around the fan community for years.