Ahead of Game of Thrones season 8 home video release on December 3, deleted scenes are slowly making their way around the internet. One of them showed Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) in a more light-hearted moment. This next one, from the premiere episode, is much more awkward, as Dany and Jon Snow inspects Winterfell’s defenses.
So Daenerys stands before the mix of Unsullied and Northern soldiers digging trenches, and while the Unsullied stop and stand for their queen, the Northerners keep working, and in one case, empty the spit valve. This reinforces the idea that the Northerners are not on board with Dany as their queen, and that the Unsullied will follow her no matter what. Both of these points come up again, so maybe the producers thought the scene redundant.
On the flip side, one could argue that the show didn’t lay enough foundation for Daenerys’ abrupt heel turn later in King’s Landing. Over on Essos, Daenerys was used to getting resistance from the ruling classes, but the common folk generally loved her, and she acted accordingly. Even at the height of the Sons of the Harpy rebellion in Meereen, Daenerys confined her wrath to the Wise Masters, and to anyone actively involved in the conspiracy. As we see, things are different in Westeros. Getting a better idea of how the people she thought was saving were rejecting her could have helped explain why she did what she did in “The Bells.” And given the scene’s short length, it doesn’t seem like it would do much harm to leave it in.
That might just be me though. What does everyone else think? Was the scene worth including? Or did we not miss out on anything?
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