Thread by @thatdalglishguy

#GoTSpoilers I'm sick and fighting off a fever, and no one may even read this or care, but I got to get this out of my system or I'll just keep dwelling on it. So here's my random, vaguely in order rant about last night's GoT episode. Spoiler: it was dumb.

It starts right at the beginning. Varys, the clever spider, the guy who has survived tyrants and takeovers, is suddenly a moron. Clever phrases? Careful wording? Nah, let's talk open treason with Jon Snow in broad daylight.

Varys, of course, dies to set the gloomy, unpleasant tone of this whole episode. And why did our clever spider die? Because, despite Dany having NOT DONE ANYTHING, is convinced that Jon would be a better ruler than her.

Why does Varys think this? Has she done anything to shake the confidence in someone who has helped her for years? But oh no, she's sulking after Missandei's death. Because if she'd been a true sociopath and not cared about it, then she'd be a better queen. Duh.

Btw, Dany gives Grey Worm Missandei's lone possession she carried over from across the narrow sea: her slave collar. A nice callback to last episode and the whole "women are defined by their trauma" bit with Sansa and the Hound.

And by nice, I mean, gag me.

But wait! Tyrion's told that Jaime's been captured! In perhaps the only decent scene in the whole episode, Tyrion gives a tearful goodbye to Jaime, telling him he'd not have survived his childhood without him.

He then sets Jaime free under the delusional idea that somehow Jaime will convince Cersei to surrender. Yeah. Sure. But now we're getting into how both these brothers have someone forgotten every single freaking thing Cersei has ever done.

Speaking of Jaime, he's now weepy and in love with Cersei. Yeah. Forget allllll that character growth, his steady emotional separation from his sister, culminating in having sex with Brienne, i.e. what I am pretty sure is his first non-incest sexytime ever.

Ok. Battle time. No one seems to mention this, but I'm going to, because it's too stupid not to. Cersei's vaunted mercenary company EXITS THE WALLS OF THE BESIEGED CITY TO LINE UP IN FORMATION OUTSIDE.

This enrages me because they did this AGAIN during the Winterfell siege.

Do the writers not know how sieges work? Do they not understand the reason those walls are there? Have they just abandoned even the slightest attempt at pretending the characters in charge in this show have a single functioning brain cell?

So before the battle has even begun, people are being morons. And then Dany and her dragon comes soaring in and toasts the Iron Fleet. This is neat and all...but it begs the question why Dany didn't do this last episode. Because nothing has changed.

So why does it work now? Because the writers have decided that it does. The arbitrariness of it, you can feel it, right? How no one is making decisions their characters would make?

Anyway, Dany's dragon blows open a hole in the wall, and her army marches in. An army that I swear looks even larger than it did at the start of the siege of Winterfell, and somehow contains hundreds of unsullied and dothraki despite showing 99% of them all die at Winterfell.

Whatever, you're hoping for consistency this season? Hah! So it's a route. Cersei's toast. But how is Cersei taking all this?

The brilliant, ever-practical, conniving Cersei is up in a castle spouting bad villain lines and being deluded about still having a chance to win.

She has no back up plans. No contingency plans. No stashes of wildfire or tunnel exits or additional ballistae somewhere. She's gone from smartest person in King's Landing to "my men will fight harder than their sellswords!" line reader. Ugh.

Whatever. So we come to a point where a crowd of Lannisters is staring down a ton of unsullied. Why aren't they fighting? Because the plot says so. They're just staring at each other.

Are the Lannisters surrendering? No.
The unsullied demanding surrender? No.

Just staring. In the middle of a battle. Waiting, because we're entering an Important Story Moment.

And then, after an interminable wait, the Lannister soldiers throw down their swords in surrender. Jon Snow and the army around him stare at the Lannisters with dull surprise.

Dany lands atop a nearby home, and suddenly, everything is about The BELLS. The BELLS are important, because the episode is titled The BELLS. Also because The BELLS represent the city surrendering...because Tyrion says so.

Except what did Tyrion say? "Ring the bells and open the gates so she knows you're surrendering."

At this moment in the siege, the gate is a broken and open, and the Lannisters have already thrown down their swords. They are already surrendering. Dany sees them surrendering.

The BELLS mean nothing. Noooothiiing. Cersei didn't order them rung. We don't even know who did. No one reacts to them. The Lannister soldiers have ALREADY SURRENDERED. But having the BELLS ring allows us to zoom in on Dany, who is having Issues.

She's staring at the Red Keep. Mad. Shaking a bit.

I mean, the city's surrendered, the soldiers have thrown down their swords. The Iron Throne is hers. This is everything she's fought for over eight seasons.

And how does she react to the culmination of her entire life's work?

Go insane. For no reason. And not "I'm going to torch the Red Keep because Cersei's inside and she killed Missandei". No, it's "I'm going to BBQ all the innocent men, women, and children because I'm a crazy bitch."

She is actively choosing to kill innocent civilians OVER killing Cersei DESPITE THE IMPLICATION THAT CERSEI'S KILLING MISSANDEI IS THE REASON SHE'S SNAPPED. AAARRRGGGH.

Seeing this, the unsullied and the dothraki go wild and kill and rape, because that's exactly what you'd expect from the scary non-white army of foreigners. But don't worry, Jon Snow is still a good guy. He saves a woman from rape, aka the hack writer's proof of male niceness.

Meanwhile Arya and Sandor are now in the Red Keep. They left for King's Landing while the northerners were partying post Wintefell siege, yet arrived later than everyone else, so forget any hopes of Arya killing Cersei and stopping this whole mess.

But before they can DO anything, Sandor has a heart to heart with Arya telling her revenge will have her looking like him. It's solid acting, just weirdly positioned and in the middle of the Red Keep collapsing. At least it gets Arya out, and she's somewhat spared in this idiocy.

But wooo, Cleganebowl! Now maybe it's just me, but after a gloomy, dour montage of thousands of people dying to dragon fire, over and over, shown to us viewers like dragon torture porn...it's hard to get pumped for Cleganebowl?

Not helping is how *pointless* this battle is. The Hound and Franken-Mountain fight. Why? They hate each other. Does it matter who wins? Not in the slightest. They're in a collapsing keep. They're both clearly going to die.

No one is defending anyone. No one is stopping anything. It's two meatheads fighting over zero stakes. Also, Franken-Mountain looks like a bloated roided Varys. At one point he pulls a dagger out of his head. It looks dumb. Oh, and both do indeed die. Wooooo.

But hey, we have more characters to ruin! First up, Jaime and Euron get into a battle outside King's Landing. Euron, a painfully bland and unwanted villain since the moment he was introduced, just blabbers on like your stereotypical movie villain.

Euron's been cast as a sellsword to his core, always willing to choose the winning side, no honor, no morality. So...why does he stay and fight after his fleet's been destroyed and Dany has clearly taken over King's Landing?

Why, as he is dying, does he laugh and boast about "I killed Jaime Lannister"? Has he ever given a single wet fart about Jaime Lannister before? More importantly, do WE give a wet fart about this fight? No. We don't.

So Euron dies to the one-handed Jaime who's been established to be a pretty lousy fighter now, but who cares about consistency at this point? Now Jaime gets to go to Cersei, and hug her, and both cry and lovingly embrace. Which....yay?

Does anyone else remember how, during the battle of Blackwater Bay, Cersei was making dark jokes about the women with her being raped? How she kept a bottle of poison with her, and was willing to kill her own son and then herself, all to keep control of her own fate?

Yeah, well know she's in a basement with Jaime sobbing hysterically about how she doesn't want to die. And then rocks fall, and the two die.

....

I'm not sure you could come up with a less satisfying ending to these two character arcs if you tried.

Thankfully it's pretty much over at this point. Just...toss in another twenty minutes of Arya getting knocked around, and innocent people being murdered, burned, and suffering. Plus a magic white horse out of nowhere that Arya sees and rides off on. Because...symbolism?