…Valyria. Or Old Valyria, if you wanna talk book-talk.
This was, by far, the most narrow victory in our Season 5 polls yet. Valyria barely edged out Hardhome, with its drained color palette and bleak expanses of snow, to claim the win.
I think this was a good choice. “Hardhome” was a standout episode for many reasons, and the production team did a great job of giving the wildling outpost a sense of place, but it didn’t drip with atmosphere the way Valyria did. The crumbling ruins, the unruly greenery, the mist over the water…you could tell director Jeremy Podeswa wanted to make this scene stand out.
I also enjoyed how critics kept reaching for things to compare Valyria to, another sign that it had made an impression, and that the references varied wildly, from Atlantis to The Last of Us to that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where the team sails downriver. Personally, I was reminded of Apocalypse Now, complete with the brooding dread of the unknowable, but the multiplicity of comparisons just demonstrates how evocative the sequence was.
The show smartly reinforced the eeriness of Valyria with pregnant silences and hushed dialogue between Jorah and Tyrion, who were brought together by their shared humility in the face of this fallen civilization. Let’s review what they said, courtesy of commenter NOMANHOOMAN:
"Valyria, totaly unexpected and true to the doom. Also we got stone man action with Drogon and Tyrion&Jorah. Plus this poem:“They held each other close and turned their backs upon the end.The hills that split asunder and the black that ate the skies;The flames that shot so high and hot that even dragons burned;Would never be the final sights that fell upon their eyes.A fly upon a wall, the waves the sea wind whipped and churned —The city of a thousand years, and all that men had learned;The Doom consumed it all alike, and neither of them turned”"
Everything about the sequence in Valyria, from the visuals to the dialogue to the amount of time we spend there, works to turn it into a thematic touchstone for the show. Game of Thrones spends a lot of time depicting characters who are jockeying for power, eager to one-up each other so they can improve their positions in life. However, their maneuvers are bounded, and arguably precipitated, by the society in which they live. Valyria is a reminder that, no matter how developed the society and advanced the civilization, everything goes to dust in the end.