Book-Reader’s Recap—Game of Thrones, Episode 703—”The Queen’s Justice”

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!

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen. Photo: HBO.

Welcome to our recap of “The Queen’s Justice” a damn fine episode of Game of Thrones if there ever was one. We start with the credits, which are great. Isn’t it fun to see Pyke again? Doesn’t the Hightower in Oldtown look tremendous? And who doesn’t love the astrolabe in the Citadel library?

I’m sorry. I’m excited, because this was a jam-packed, energetic episode of Game of Thrones, and almost certainly the best one Mark Mylod has directed. A lot of it has to do with the power of contraction — as the storyline speeds up and characters come together, it can’t help but generate excitement. We get a taste of that right at the top of the hour, when Davos Seaworth and Jon Snow disembark on the beaches of Dragonstone. They are greeted by two of Daenerys Targaryen’s top lieutenants: Tyrion Lannister and Missandei of Naath.

Jon and Tyrion exchange warm hellos. “The bastard of Winterfell.” “The dwarf of Casterly Rock.” What I like here is that, much like when Daenerys and Tyrion met for the first time back in season 5, the show isn’t going out of its way to sensationalize this reunion. Jon and Tyrion are two of the show’s main characters, insofar as it has main characters, and I feel like a lesser show would milk this moment with close-ups and one-liners. Here we get a couple of smiles between old buddies, and it’s down to the business of introductions. Good on Game of Thrones for keeping the fan service to a minimum.

Of those introductions, the most notable is the one between Tyrion and Davos, who were on opposite sides of the Battle of Blackwater Bay. I would have thought Davos would harbor ill will towards Tyrion on account of his son dying in that battle, but he’s either gotten over it or the show forgot that Matthos existed.

On Missandei’s request, Jon and Davos hand over their weapons to Dany’s Dothraki guard, and for some reason, the shot of the one Dothraki dude glowering at Jon cracks me up:

He’s so stone-faced serious! And also eyeliner. Then, in a two-shot, he makes Kit Harington look as short as he actually is!

So Dothraki Soldier #356 is my new favorite character. This guy’s going places.

Anyway, Tyrion and the Dothraki escort Jon and Davos up the steps of Dragonstone in a tremendous tracking shot — filming on the islet of Gaztelugatxe was money well spent. On the way, Tyrion brings up Sansa — now that’s a reunion I’d be curious to see. “She’s much smarter than she lets on.” Jon: “She’s starting to let on.” Is Jon worried about Sansa potentially undermining him in his absence?

There’s no time to think about that, because Drogon suddenly swoops over the heads of the assembled party in what I have to admit was a kinda-shoddy-looking special effect, at least for this show. Still, it was funny seeing Davos and Jon hit the deck while Tyrion and Missandei stayed upright. And surely that was Dany’s intent: to impress the guests. Jon looks appropriately bamboozled.

Above on a high hill, Melisandre and Varys watch the procession ascend the stairs. I always like it when the show pairs two disparate characters together for a conversation, and I liked this scene.

The thrust of it is that Melisandre is making herself scarce during the meeting between Ice and Fire because she “did not part on good terms” with Jon or Davos. Unlike last week, where Melisandre seemed almost back to her old, creepily confident self, Carice van Houten lets a little more vulnerability shine through here, when Mel is alone…or basically alone. She tells Varys that she plans to go to Volantis. He replies back with what amounts to a threat, saying that she should stay there, because he’s “not sure you’ll be safe here.” And then come the prophecies.

“I will return, dear Spider, one last time,” she says. “I have to die in this strange country, just like you.” Even after seeing a different side of her during season 6, there’s still a ton we don’t know about Melisandre, so declarations like this are good for a chill down the spine. How do you wrap up a character arc like her’s? Apparently, the producers have an idea.

Also, as he gazes out to sea, Varys sees a lone Greyjoy ship, bearing bad news.

So the reunion between Tyrion and Jon was nice. But the meeting everyone wants to see is the one between Jon and Dany. This is the quadruple lutz of Game of Thrones scenes. If it’s a success, it’ll propel the episode into legendary status. If it’s a failure, it’ll expose “The Queen’s Justice” to everlasting ridicule. And the world waited with baited breath…

Happily, the scene is a lot of fun. Jon and Davos stand before Dany, who looks like an Elizabethan painting sitting there on her stone throne. There’s a funny bit where Missandei rattles off all of Dany’s titles, and Davos, trying to keep up, can just manage to call Jon Snow the King in the North. Meme-makers everywhere rejoiced at that one, I’m sure.

The scene mainly consists of a whole lot of posturing between Jon and Dany. Pleasantries have hardly been exchanged before Davos calls Dany out on calling Jon “lord” rather than “your grace.” Then it’s full-bore pissing match mode, as Dany declares herself the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and asks Jon to bend the knee. He brings up the Mad King. She apologizes for his behavior. He says they need each other. She says she’s got dragons and Dothraki and a dwarf and what have you got, hairline? Again, it’s nice that the show isn’t making this meeting a series of lingering looks laden with destiny, although you get the idea that this Moonlighting-like squabbling could eventually lead to some Moonlighting-like romance. But for now, it’s pretty much like any other scene of Game of Thrones, with two big personalities bouncing off each other, trying to get what they want.

What Jon wants, of course, is for Dany to help him fight the army of the dead, an idea she receives with a hilarious amount of incredulity. Really, Emilia Clarke knocks it out of the park when she says, with as much flatness in her voice as she can muster, “The dead,” and then gives Tyrion enough side-eye to rock the foundations of the Earth. And I love it, because of course this is going to sound ridiculous to someone who’s never been to Westeros, to say nothing of north of the Wall. The absurdity of Jon’s sales pitch is a real problem for him, and I’m glad to see the show confronting it head-on.

Dany’s response to it is to rise from her chair and deliver an impassioned speech about what a badass she is and how she doesn’t put stock in “myth and legends.” It’s a tad overwritten, but so are most of Dany’s speeches — Clarke always delivers them with enough conviction to make them work, and this is no exception.

Basically, she seems affronted that Jon would travel all this way just to not swear fealty to her and feed her horseshit, but just as things look like they could get ugly, Davos intervenes with some of his patented good sense, talking up Jon’s coalition-building accomplishments and rattling off the line we heard from the trailers. “If we don’t put aside our enmities and band together we will die, and then it doesn’t matter whose skeleton sits on the Iron Throne.”

It’s good advice, but it can’t stop the unstoppable force from pushing against the immovable object. It’s hard to know what would have happened if Varys hadn’t skipped into the room to whisper in Dany’s ear. It’s news of Theon and Yara’s defeat, and considering how heated things were getting, this kind of distraction is the best thing that could have happened to this meeting. Dany dispatches Jon and Davos to whatever quarters have been prepared for them to absorb the news in full.

Later, Tyrion finds Jon on some cliffs, practicing his greatest talent: brooding. In turn, Tyrion practices his greatest talent: talking sense into idiots. He starts by getting Jon to realize that, yeah, maybe going up to strangers and telling them that there’s a zombie apocalypse on the way is going to sound a mite bit bonkers without context, although he’s careful to say that he, Tyrion Lannister, totally believes Jon. Idiots don’t have the imagination to make up those kinds of lies, after all.

After that, he gets Jon to remember why he came to Dragonstone in the first place: to ask Daenerys to mine for Dragonstone. Speaking with Daenerys, aka Idiot #2, Tyrion convinces her to let the Northerner dig around. Worst case scenario: Jon leaves the island with a boat full of useless rocks and a high opinion of the magnanimous queen who gave them to him.

I don’t actually think Jon and Daenerys are idiots, mind you. I think they’re willful, hardheaded types who sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees, which is exactly why a detail-oriented person like Tyrion is a godsend for both of them. The show is doing a great job of giving Tyrion an important role this year even though his days as an anchor for his own plotline are over. Without him, fire and ice might have still come together, but all we’d be left with is a lukewarm puddle.

Instead, Jon finds Dany doing some brooding of her own on the steps of Dragonstone, watching her dragons fly. Becalmed after their duel doses of Vitamin Tyrion, the pair share some small talk about their dead brothers (small talk in Westeros is different from small talk here) and Daenerys offers to let Jon mine for dragonglass — she even throws in some manual labor, which means a bunch of Dothraki are going to be stumbling around in the dark for a while. She’s still not quite sold on the whole army-of-the-dead thing, but hey, Sam and Diane didn’t get together in the first episode.

We get just one quick scene with Theon this week, as one of the few Ironborn crews loyal to him and his sister fishes him out of the water. The captain quickly divines that Theon abandoned Yara to Euron’s devices, and then leaves him on the deck to shiver and feel bad about himself.

But whatever he’s going through, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening to Yara — Euron Greyjoy is marching her, Ellaria Sand, and Tyene Sand through the streets of King’s Landing as the smallfolk look on.

This scene makes good use of the various characters’ points of view. Yara, strong and silent, marches dourly along, her face a map of open sores, and refuses to be cowed into submission. Euron, meanwhile, is like a kid in a candy store, drinking in the adoration of the crowd and blowing kisses to random girls. It’s like the Beatles are in town, and they brought hostages to eat. “I have to be honest,” Euron says to Yara. “This is making me hard.” Because he’s not subtle.

The crowd has different moods, too. Many cheer Euron the conquering hero, while others sneer and thrown rotten vegetables at the Ellaria and Tyene. The crowd lends the scene a jolt of electricity, and it’s always good to remind viewers that keeping the smallfolk happy is a vital part of the game the great lords play.

All that and Euron’s horse is badass.

Inside the Red Keep throne room, Euron deposits a manacled Ellaria and Tyene in front of the Iron Throne, posturing all the while. He’s a natural fame whore, this one. Ellaria almost makes me like her when she hocks a loogie at Cersei’s feet, and Cersei makes me like her even more when she smiles through it. Turning to Euron, she promises that he will have “what [his] heart desires” — that is, her hand in marriage — “when the war is won,” a delay that catches him aback.

Cersei rises from the Iron Throne to make a proclamation to the crowd, naming Euron Greyjoy as the head of her navy and Jaime as the leader of the army. Will that be enough to secure Euron’s loyalty going forward? It’s starting to look like Euron will stand in for Aurane Waters, a character from the books whom Cersei names Master of Ships. He’s faithless, and later makes off with Cersei’s navy to become a pirate. That fits pretty perfectly with the feckless Euron we’re getting on the show, so I’m placing my bets now.

At the moment, Euron is satiated, and picks up where he left off the last time he was in King’s Landing by needling Jaime about all the sex he’s totally gonna have with Cersei once they’re wed. And then he stands in front of the Iron Throne and gives Cersei a great big bow. This guy is a drama queen. Play on.

Later, Cersei visits Ellaria and Tyene in a dungeon beneath the Red Keep to taunt and kill them. Ellaria and Tyene are both gagged, and while the Mountain is on hand, he’s mute, so what this scene breaks down to is a big, brassy, epic monologue for Lena Headey, and I’m all here for it.

Playing with her food before she eats it, Cersei recounts Oberyn’s foolish final moments of showboating before the Mountain killed him. Her jaw hardening in genuine anger, she asks Ellaria why she killed Myrcella. And finally, drunk on cold fury, she kisses Tyene full of the mouth, her lips coated in the same poison Ellaria wore when she killed Mrycella. It’s close to a tour de force for Headey, who chomps scenery without leaving a single bite mark. It’s also the best scene Ellaria and Tyene Sand have ever been a part of. The characters have been underwhelming at best, but if this is the last we see of them, they made good shows of being sacrificed on the alter of Cersei Lannister’s mounting madness. The key may have been the gags.

The scene continues, after a fashion, in Jaime’s bedchamber, where Cersei — irrepressibly horny after killing a girl and dooming a woman to spend the rest of her life watching her daughter’s corpse decompose — bursts in and starts going to town on Jaime’s face. Then she’s between his legs, and we get a shot of Jaime’s — or a double’s — butt. It’s a believably passionate scene rendered deeply disturbing by what inspired it. Cersei is discovering new lows all over the place.

But somehow more disturbing is the morning-after scene, where a blissed-out Jaime stares at Cersei like she’s the prom date he just married. Oh, Jaime, no. For the love of god, run!

But seriously, the sight of them looking like a happy couple waking up together is giving me night terrors…during the day. It’s horrifying. Happily, it doesn’t last long, as Cersei rises to answer the door. It’s a handmaiden wearing the exact same haircut and neckline as Cersei, so either the Red Keep staff is taken with Cersei’s fashion choices or she makes them dress like that.

The handmaiden — whom Cersei lets get a load of Jaime post-coital, by the way — is there to tell her that Iron Banker Tycho Nestoris is arrived from Braavos. He’s calling in the Crown’s debt, a demand for which Cersei is ready. She makes convincing arguments about why she’s a better bet than Daenerys, a woman who puts more emphasis on smashing the slave trade and doing the right thing than paying back loans, and asks that he give her a fortnight to make good on her promises. And yes, of course she says that a Lannister also pays her debts.

Meanwhile, at Winterfell, Sansa is thriving in Jon’s absence, managing the castle’s food stores and reminding armorers to cover breastplates in leather because it’s going to be cold as f*** in a minute, hammerhead. Littlefinger, who’s accepting the possibility of a White Walker attack more readily than I thought he would, gives her advice…I think. Here’s what he actually says, in its full insanity:

"Fight every battle. Everywhere. Always. In your mind. Everyone is your enemy. Everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before."

So…yeah. Drop some acid and get on that, Sansa.

Littlefinger’s lesson in quantum scheming may be impenetrable, but as Katie pointed out in the Unsullied recap, it does serve as good setup for Bran’s arrival home at Winterfell, since he’s a person who actually can do and see everything at once. Littlefinger would be so jealous if he could wrap his head around it.

The reunion scene plays out very similarly to the one between Jon and Sansa last year, with Sansa and Bran sharing a look across the Winterfell courtyard before Sansa throws herself onto Bran and envelops him in a hug. It’s sweet, but Bran clearly isn’t as over the moon about it as Sansa is. The pair of them end up in the Winterfell godswood, where Bran tries — with great difficulty — to explain the finer points of being the Three-Eyed Raven to his sister. I think there’s a parallel here to the difficulty Jon has trying to explain the army of the dead to Daenerys — this just isn’t the kind of thing you can understand without being there.

Still, he manages to get through by talking about Sansa’s wedding night to Ramsay, which understandably upsets Sansa. Between Theon’s breakdown last week and Sansa’s hasty retreat from her brother’s side tonight, that asshole is really making his presence felt post-mortem. I’d love for Sansa and Theon to meet up again — I don’t think either of them are done healing.

As for Bran, it’s hard to get a read on the youngest surviving male Stark. Becoming the Three-Eyed Raven has clearly changed his perspective in a way I don’t think is readily apparent to us — and maybe to him — yet. But his behavior tonight does pound home the theme that you can’t go home again, not really. The Starks are getting the band back together, but they’ve all changed so much. The most we can hope for, I think, is bittersweet reunions. They may not be as satisfying as some fans are hoping, but I think they’ll be more beautiful.

At the Citadel, Jorah’s greyscale is gone. It’s gone! Which…okay, congratulations to Samwell Tarly on your prodigious healing abilities (and kudos to Jorah for not narcing on him), but this seems like a bit of an anticlimactic end to Jorah’s battle against the disease. Why draw that plotline out for two seasons if it wasn’t going to end in his poignant death, or affect the story in some bigger way? I liked the scene, and seeing Jorah make physical contact with someone for the first time in years was sweet, but this feels…small.

But I know not the whims or writers and fake pathogens. Naturally, Jorah is making a beeline back to Daenerys, while Sam is going to get chewed out by Archmaester Ebrose. Ebrose gives him the old, “You’re a rebel, but you get results, dammit” talk, and then assigns him to do mountains of paperwork as punishment for disobeying him. Again, Sam is basically Harry Potter this year, only in that story, the professors would stop at praising Harry for breaking the rules.

Also, paper mites don’t exist, if you were wondering. Rest easy, bookworms.

For our penultimate sequence of the evening, we have an interesting approach to a battle scene: after Tyrion and Missandei talk Daenerys out of looking for Euron’s fleet on dragonback, Tyrion lays out what the Unsullied will fight at Casterly Rock. There will be 10,000 men. Unsullied soldiers will die storming the walls. Grey Worm and a select few will sneak in through a secret sex tunnel Tyrion built when he was in charge of the castle’s drains and cisterns and open the gates from within. And as Tyrion describes these things, we see it happen. It’s all very Guy Ritchie/heist movie, and it would be tiresome if Game of Thrones had ever done it before. But it hasn’t, so it’s welcome. This time.

Also, there’s a twist: after Grey Worm and his soldiers take the castle (complete with Grey Worm spearing a dude to a Wall), they notice that there aren’t enough enemy combatants. Where, Grey Worm wonders, are the Lannisters?

Then, as he looks over the railings out to the sea, he espies Greyjoy ships (I assume these are ships that Euron left near the Iron Islands) setting the ones he and his men took to get here on fire. It’s a trap, and they’ve fallen into it.

As Jaime points out later, the Lannisters didn’t need Casterly Rock. With the gold mines of the Westerlands depleted (something Tyrion didn’t know — recall that Tywin told Cersei that information when Tyrion was in jail for Joffrey’s murder), it wasn’t worth much anymore, so Jaime and Cersei elected to clean out the larders and let it be taken. And now that Grey Worm’s ride is destroyed, he and his Unsullied are essentially trapped there. Tough luck.

Meanwhile, Jaime led the bulk of the Lannister forces to Highgarden, which wasn’t expecting an attack so soon. Although we see the Lannister armies assembled (including appearances from Randyll Tarly, who clearly chose Jaime’s side, and Bronn, who makes a brief cameo), the show skips over a battle sequence, which is forgivable given what we got last week and will likely get next week. Instead, we jump right to the big finish: Jaime and Lady Olenna, alone in a room, talking.

This is Lady Olenna’s death scene, and it’s a doozy. I’m sad — nearly heartbroken — to see this wonderful character go, but this is a corker of a scene.

The first thing that stands out is how casual it is. Jaime and Olenna are on opposite sides of a war, but they never had the personal enmity that, say, Olenna and Cersei had. They show each other respect and speak openly, and Olenna gets in some of her legendary barbs. (Jaime: “There are always lessons in failures.” Olenna: “Yes, you must be very wise by now.”) But running under the scene is the knowledge that Olenna is going to die, and knowing Cersei, there’s a good possibility that she will die horribly.

As Jaime reveals, that was Cersei’s original plan — whipping her through the streets and beheading her in front of the Red Keep was a possibility — but Jaime, being more merciful than her sister, talked her down to a painless poison, which Olenna drinks eagerly before laying out her trump card.

"I’d hate to die like your son. Clawing at my neck. Foam and bile bile spilling from my mouth, eyes bloodred, skin purple. Must have been horrible for you, as a Kingsguard, as a father. It was horrible enough for me. A shocking scene. Not at all what I intended. You see, I had never seen the poison work before. Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me."

Diana Rigg does great work here, lowering her voice to a raspy whisper as she reveals that everything that happened as a result of Joffrey’s death — Cersei blaming Tyrion, Tywins death, Tyrion joining up with Daenerys and escorting her back to Westeros — was for naught, and that it was Olenna who dealt the first big destabilizing blow to the Lannister family, a blow that is still reverberating and could still bring the whole house down.

When season 7 started, a lot of fans assumed that Cersei wouldn’t last long. The show has done an effective job of turning that assumption on its head — at the end of this episode, she’s riding high, and Daenerys seems like she’s in trouble. But there’s a rot at the enter of the Lannister family, and Olenna knows it. She’s right about Cersei being a disease, and somewhere deep down, Jaime knows it, too. In her dying moments, Olenna snatches whatever pleasure Jaime may have taken in this victory away from him, and replaces it with dread. Cersei is ahead right now, but the scales are tipping, there are dragons in the air, and Olenna, like so many other characters on this show, may well have her revenge from beyond the grave.

Next: How do you kill a dragon? Dragonslaying in Game of Thrones and Myth

Odds and Ends

• What was the point of the brief conversation Missandei and Davos have about the island of Naath? I’m genuinely asking. I have no clue what that added to the episode.
• Little book-reader rant: When Jon and Dany are sparring, Jon says that the Mad King burned both his grandfather and uncle alive. Book-readers know that’s false — Aerys Targaryen did indeed burn Rickard Stark alive, but killed Brandon Stark via some kind of weird strangulation device. The odd thing about this change is that I know the Game of Thrones producers know this — they even filmed a deleted flashback scene starring Sean Bean as Brandon.

• And they included all the historical details about Torrhen Stark bending the knee to Aegon the Conqueror, so why cut the detail about Brandon? Again, I have no clue. It’s hard to guess their thought process behind which book details to cut and which to keep. And that’s without getting into the whole so-dragonglass-apparently-kills-wights-now thing.
• So Jon stopped Davos from telling Dany about his death and resurrection. Would knowing what happened to him make it more, less, or as difficult for Daenerys to take him seriously? They called attention to it later, so I’m sure we’ll find out eventually.
• Cersei poured Tycho Nestoris wine and he didn’t take it. She poured the High Sparrow wine and he didn’t take it. SOMEONE DRINK WITH CERSEI. She needs a distraction from plotting everyone’s death.
• I wanna give a shoutout to Maester Wolkan, who transitioned from working for the Boltons to working for the Starks without skipping a beat. I just imagine he cries tears of joy every morning when he wakes up and remembers he doesn’t have to treat Ramsay Bolton’s disgusting sexual injuries anymore.
• We may not have gotten another big, “proper” battle sequence in this episode, but we did visit both Casterly Rock and Highgarden for the first time. Not too shabby.

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