Small Council: What did we think of “The Last of the Starks”?

The latest episode of Game of Thrones has proven very controversial. What did we think of “The Last of the Starks”? The Small Council is in session!

DAN: What I liked best about “The Last of the Starks” are the questions it raises. A lot of characters make difficult choices, and it’s far from clear they are the right ones.

For example, Jon tells Sansa and Arya about his true heritage despite pleading from Daenerys to keep it secret. Jon is his fake father’s son: honest to a fault, but even Ned Stark managed to keep that particular secret for a long time. Then again, it’s different when you’re the subject of the secret, and anyway Robert Baratheon is no longer a problem. But there are a bunch of new problems.

Anyway, shortly after Jon tells, Sansa leaks the information to Tyrion, who then tells Varys, who is now contemplating abandoning Daenerys at a time she most needs good advice. Dany’s warnings about the secret hurting people are already coming true. But is truth, in the end, always preferable to lies? What would Ned say about it, I wonder?

We can also ask if Sansa was right to leak the information. It’s certainly doing what she meant it to do, dividing Dany’s forces against one another, which gives her a better chance at maintaining a hold on an independent North. But now Sansa is part of whatever destruction results from the difficult choices Varys and Tyrion now have to make. (I loved their scenes together, by the way — those two were batting ideas about power and entitlement and leadership back and forth like a couple of tennis-playing philosophers.)

This episode seemed to be about characters unable to let go of their pasts, and as Bran reminds us, the past is not an enviable place to live. Arya and the Hound would do better to abandon their vengeance, but they’re both off to King’s Landing. Jaime would do better to let Cersei go, but you can’t just wish away a lifetime of codependency, no matter how terrific Brienne is. It’s a reminder that while humanity is safe from zombies, it’ll never be safe from itself.

So I loved all the big picture stuff. The plot itself was a little more clumsy, particularly after we headed down south. After relaxing comfortably into the first hour, “The Last of the Starks” blows through an episode’s worth of content in the last 20 minutes. As tightly edited as the final scene outside the walls of King’s Landing was — I mean, honestly, my heart was in my mouth both times I watched it — I’d like it more if it were informed by character-driven scenes the likes of which we saw in the first two-thirds of the episode.

And yes, the way Rhaegal died was dumb, but at some point you have to remember your priorities.

I’ve written a lot, but there’s a lot to talk about. What did you all think?

ARIBA: Alright, let’s talk “The Last of the Starks”. I have a lot of feelings about this particular episode, namely why certain narrative choices were made. But before I dive into that, I would like to preface this discussion by saying that Game of Thrones has always been a very intricate show with a lot of lore and history. So when certain events and moments occur that don’t exactly feel in line with the show, it catches me off guard. There’s always a reason for something on this show, but this week’s episode failed to help me see where this is all going, especially with only two episodes left.

The episode, as I expected, was slow to start and I definitely appreciated the characters mourning the loss of their beloved friends. But as we progressed, I began to question. For example, I’m definitely a Team Brienne/Tormund girl, but a part of me always wanted Brienne and Jaime to happen as well. What I absolutely didn’t want was for it to happen the way it did. Didn’t it feel like Tyrion was shaming Brienne for being a virgin? If they needed a segue into Jaime and Brienne’s hookup, I just feel it could have happened in so many different ways. And it doesn’t help that Jaime went running back to Cersei at the end of it all, which I 100% expected, but it only hurt more after seeing how Brienne’s heart broke the way it did.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the episode, for me, comes during the arrival at Dragonstone. Why the heck did Dany not see Euron’s fleet? More importantly, why didn’t someone case the area beforehand? It just feels like extremely clumsy planning on Dany’s part. Sansa points out earlier in the episode that resting and recuperating is a good idea, and I wish Dany would have listened because her judgment is a bit off if you ask me. I don’t know what the game plan is for the final two episodes, but what gives, we’ve lost two dragons!

I have a bone to pick with Jon Snow about Ghost. How are you going to just walk away from the animal that has protected you time and time again? I have no idea what the reasoning was here, but me, along with many others, are livid over Jon’s decision to send Ghost off with Tormund and then refusing to say goodbye. Not cool, Jon, not cool at all.

After Sansa spills the beans about Jon’s true parentage to Tyrion, I have to say I did rather enjoy the Varys/Tyrion scenes as they played the game of Who Does It Better: Jon or Dany? We haven’t seen Varys doing much this season, so I’m intrigued by what he had to say this late in the game.

As for the rest of the episode, I’m on the fence about Dany and co. arriving at King’s Landing at the very end and how that all played out.

I clearly have a lot of thoughts about “The Last of the Starks” but I’m saving all my major judgments until the end of the series. We are watching Game of Thrones, after all, and I want to trust that the show will help us make sense of these ends. At least I hope so.

RICHARD: I’m trying hard not to be too negative about “The Last of the Starks,” and that’s pretty easy since I felt it contained a lot of superb scenes. I can focus on those, rather than my sense that the final season might be heading into unfortunate storytelling waters. I’m not going to expound on the “what ifs” here, since I have no idea where the showrunners are planning to go with anything, story-wise. They’ve surprised the pants off us before.

What did I love about “The Last of the Starks?” I thought the scenes between Tyrion and Varys were excellent, with the two masters of wisdom and wit finally digging into weighty matters again. There were more great scene pairings, such as Arya/Gendry and Arya/the Hound. I thought Tyrion’s last appeal to Cersei at the end of the episode, him low and her high on the wall, was a chillingly good dramatic sequence.

What did I not love about “The Last of the Starks?” Thrones always seems to stumble when its characters are partying and/or playing drinking games. The long opening sequence at the Winterfell victory celebration (or wake?) went on way too long. It felt perfunctory, as if the writers felt forced to visit every character and have them remind us of what they’d already done. I didn’t like drunk Tormund nor the Jaime/Brienne hookup, but I know that’s all subjective.

Also, having Bran tell the Jon/Aegon secret to Sansa and Arya offscreen was an awful narrative choice. The Stark sisters’ reactions to that Westeros-shattering news are incredibly important and I felt ripped off that we didn’t get to see them.

In all, you can see I felt “The Last of the Starks” was a lukewarm success at best. It’s flaws would be less unnerving if we had more episodes left … the abbreviated final season places every remaining second of screen time at an absolute premium. Of course, there have been a few uneven Thrones installments before (as all shows have) and they’ve never lessened my love for this magnificent fantasy-drama, and neither will this one.

(C’mon HBO– Don’t erase the coffee cup! #ThronesCupForever)!

DAN…again: I suspect I may be one of the few to enjoy the episode, and while I had problems with it, I’m gonna have to stick up for the parts I really did enjoy.

One of them is definitely the party/wake. To each his own, Richard, but I loved Drunk Tormund. I loved him sloshing wine around the room, and I loved him (fruitlessly) crying on the Hound’s shoulder. And although I know everybody is getting mad about Ghost, Jon’s goodbye with Tormund was very sweet, and could prove important if he does indeed choose to live in “the real North” one day. In fact, this is the first time I thought Tormund really resembled his book self. The show version always came off too somber for me, but not here.

Not everything at the party was perfect — Sansa’s unfortunate line to the Hound has been much discussed, and I agree with Ariba that Tyrion shaming Brienne about her virginity was off-putting — but there were so many moments I did like. I liked the interplay of emotions and motives when Daenerys legitimized Gendry, and Brienne letting go and smiling playing drinking games with Tyrion and Jaime, and Davos ruing that he didn’t get to kill Melisandre, and Bran laying down a very sad line about living mostly in the past. I really enjoyed the Bronn scene — that guy has been incredibly consistent over the course of the show — and I thought Emilia Clarke was killing it throughout, particularly when she was begging Jon not to reveal his secret.

And let’s talk about that secret for a second. I’ve heard that argument a bunch, Richard, that Jon and Bran should have explained it on screen. I simply don’t agree. That would have been the FOURTH time we saw someone explain Jon’s origins — Bran and Sam did it in season 7, then Sam told Jon, and then Jon told Dany. I was in full “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” mode when I heard so many people arguing that we should have seen it explained AGAIN.

I grant that seeing Arya and Sansa’s reactions could have made for good television, but not so good that it overcame my objections. Plus, I thought Sophie Turner did a splendid job telling us everything we needed to know about Sansa’s reaction in her next scene with Tyrion. I had no questions.

I DID have problems with the episode, most of them having to do with the last 20 minutes, but I also think it did a lot of things very well. We haven’t even discussed the very effective funeral scene, with Dany crying over Jorah and Sansa christening Theon a true Stark and Jon giving a Night’s Watch speech!

Okay, that’s off my chest. Carry on.

RAZOR: Oooookay, so…I could sit here and describe everything I hated about this episode, but it’s Friday and I’ve seen way too much whinging for my tastes. Did I have problems with “The Last of the Starks?” Sure, but at the end of the day, it’s the final season of Game of Thrones and if this show hasn’t earned a mulligan or two along the way then you haven’t been watching the same show as me.

I think my favorite parts of came from the individual performances from Emilia Clarke (Daenerys), Sophie Turner (Sansa), and Gwendoline Christie (Brienne). If you go back and watch the episode by focusing on those characters, you can see the emotional tolls that Jorah and Theon’s deaths had on Dany and Sansa, and how wrecked Brienne was when Jaime abandoned her for his sister.

Also, I believe Sansa is playing a much larger game than anyone is giving her credit for. She knew exactly what she was doing when she told Tyrion about Jon’s true parentage, and I also believe she sent Arya to King’s Landing on a mission to kill Cersei so the path to the Iron Throne will be clear for Jon, once Daenerys is out of the way.

That leads me to my final point: I think Sansa is playing chess while Dany is playing checkers. She sees a woman unraveling in front of her eyes, and if she can get Daenerys’ closest advisors to turn on her, then she’ll have effectively neutralized the Mother of Dragon…that’s not a plural anymore.

I hope the final two episodes are better than “The Last of the Starks,” and until it’s proven otherwise, I choose to believe they will be.

SARAH: This episode was another grower, and I think it’s getting too much hate. There. I said it.

I’m always wary of reacting to an episode immediately after watching it because I know that I sit down to watch new episodes of the show in a heightened state of emotion which can definitely affect my first impressions. Things that bothered me about the episode upon first viewing — for example, that we were denied Arya and Sansa’s reactions to the truth of Jon’s parentage — don’t bother me now. Dan is right. We’ve already heard that bombshell several times without needing to sit through it again. It was never going to change how Arya felt about him, and we saw exactly how Sansa chose to digest the news in her later scene with Tyrion.

In the spirit of positivity, because y’know, Game of Thrones is known for sunshine and rainbows, and because the worst thing about this season has without doubt been the internet aggressively insisting that I shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy it, I’m going to focus on what I liked about this episode.

I loved Bran’s little chat with Tyrion and pondered it at length afterwards. Poor kid. The payoff for losing his legs seemed to be the birth of his magical powers, but then those powers took away the essence of who he was and left him with…what, exactly? A shell-like existence? The complete obliteration of his own identity? It was hard enough for me to watch Arya attempt to shed hers without seeing it forcibly taken away. In calmly reminding Tyrion that he is not a man to be envied, Bran quietly broke my heart. In a myriad of ways, he’s got it worse than any other character on this show. Although he does have some of the best memes, so every cloud, I suppose.

I liked that Jon didn’t say a proper goodbye to Ghost. It rather expertly reflected how thoroughly the discovery of his parentage has ripped seams out of his own perceptions of himself. Jon is a character who suffers constantly at the hands of other people who tell him who and what he should be without pausing to think of what he wants, but those other people are usually in agreement as to what he’s supposed to be doing. This growing divide between Daenerys and the Starks is pulling him in two completely different directions, so it makes perfect sense to me that he is further than ever from any real sense of peace with himself. At this point, I honestly hope he ends the show by heading up north to live with the wildlings and spoon with Tormund every night (he is the little spoon, obviously) while Ghost snoozes peacefully at their feet.

Arya and the Hound are on the road! I don’t think it’s a secret that Arya Stark is my chief concern at all times, and in the interest of seeing her arc get a happy ending, I think there’s no better person for her to be with right now than Sandor Clegane. Whether he’ll admit it or not, Arya might be the only person who the Hound has ever truly loved, and like any good dad, I don’t think he’ll want to see her throw her humanity and all potential for future happiness away for the sake of vengeance. Hatred has shaped Sandor into the person he is, but there’s still hope for Arya to choose life. I think a scene in which he is mortally wounded whilst killing his brother and gives her a characteristically blunt pep talk before she grants him the gift of mercy would be a fitting way to end their time together, as well as setting Arya up to accept light into her life again.

“I’m not Gendry Rivers any more.” And you never were, you sweet dumb dork.

One thing I will forever admire about this show is that it never shies away from showing us how shitty people can be in their darkest moments, even good people, and this week it slapped us across the face with that very ugly truth. I’ve seen the fandom spontaneously combust online this week, in part because the show made a few shaky errors, but mostly as a direct result of the choices that were made for and about characters in this episode, whether they’re mad at Sansa for breaking her promise or raging over what seems like an inevitable King’s Landing barbecue, courtesy of Dany and Drogon. And you know what? I don’t necessarily believe that such vitriol is a bad thing. We were warned going in that this season was going to be divisive, and it’s a testament to the show itself that its fans are reacting with such ferocious passion as we sprint towards the end. The worst response that a piece of media could elicit is apathy, and I haven’t seen much of that about.

What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments and vote in our poll below!

Game of Thrones Episode 805 airs Sunday at 8:00 p.m. on HBO!

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