Knee-jerk reaction to “Blood of my Blood:” five best and worst moments
Here are my highly subjective, personal thoughts and feelings, delivered lightning-quick, after viewing tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, entitled “Blood of my Blood.” Pretty smooth installment with some great big and little moments. It covered a lot of territory and advanced a lot of plotlines pretty darned well, but it also couldn’t keep some heavy exposition rolling effortlessly everywhere either.
I offer five Valyrian Steel (Best) Moments and five Flea Bottom Brown (Worst) moments. I’ll hang around in the comments section for a while so please feel free to chime in and discuss.
VALYRIAN STEEL (BEST) MOMENTS
VALYRIAN STEEL FIVE: Bronn is coming back! Jaime mentioned Bronn! And I saw him in next week’s trailer! (You may not care, but this is my list, after all.)
VALYRIAN STEEL FOUR: Samwell grows a pair. I loved the Tarly family reunion, all sweet, bittersweet, and sour. Sam, Gilly and Little Sam are so cute, and the awkward dinner scene played superbly, especially because I can understand the helplessness Sam feels in front of his antagonistic father. Sam looked truly gutless when he left the room with Gilly and their child, and it was a relief to see him man up and come back. You know he’s going to need that Valyrian steel again, somewhere north, I’d imagine.
I gotta say, Sam must be the only person in Westeros looking forward to the ‘autumn colors’ that appear when winter is truly coming.
VALYRIAN STEEL THREE: Arya finally does something. She finally turned against the Faceless God, knocking poison out of Lady Crane’s hand and digging Needle out of the crumbling wall where she hid it so long ago. As long as Needle hadn’t been thrown into the deep, we were pretty sure Arya Stark wasn’t going anywhere that required no name, and POW, now she can whisper her personal list of names in the darkness again (as long as she can avoid the vengeful Waif, apparently).
VALYRIAN STEEL TWO: Bran’s brain on overload. I think we saw a lot in Bran’s machine-gun-edited greensight visions, including the Mad King. Somebody is going to have quite a good time pausing the DVR to scrutinize every one of those shots. It looks like everything is on the verge of opening up to Bran: past, present and future, and that’s exciting. And he and Meera looked a bit snuggly there for a second.
VALYRIAN STEEL ONE: Benjen Stark is back (sort of half-frozen), and he’s kicking frozen ass. My favorite storyline of the episode, from Meera giving everything she’s got to drag Bran out of danger to their rescue by the mysterious fire and flail-weilding rider. It wasn’t a big surprise that the hero turned out to be Benjen Stark, lost north of the wall in an earlier season, but his story of survival betwixt White Walkers and Children of the Forest was one of the most captivating monologues of the episode.