dir. by Jeremy Podeswa
HBO's Game of Thrones has been struggling to find its way without its source material for a season and a half now. Season 5 suffered under the weight of excessive brutality and the uninvolving Dorne storyline, and season 6 frequently resorted to feel-good pandering. Going forward, HBO has reduced its order from 10 episodes to 8, and it remains to be seen whether this will serve to reduce the show's bloat and repetition, or if it'll simply cramp the storytelling.
As always, the premiere is not the right place to judge the quality of a season. "Dragonstone" is dedicated primarily to setting up the season to come, and as a result is packed with expository conversations and minor developments. But these minor developments show promise, and the episode ditches the hacky sentimentality of season 6 in favour of moments of quiet observation. Ultimately, the world and characters of Game of Thrones are still compelling enough to make even its slowest patches enjoyable, and "Dragonstone" satisfies most of all by setting almost every one of the show's storylines into motion.
Spoilers follow.
The episode starts strong by continuing Arya storyline right where it left off. Now disguised as Walder Frey (using her newfound shapeshifting powers), Arya invites the entire Frey clan to a toast... and proceeds to murder them, coldly looking on as they drink from chalices of poisoned wine, leaving a couple girls alive to spread a message: "Winter came for House Frey." It's a beginning which is very much in character for Game of Thrones, violence perpetrated in retaliation for earlier violence, beginning the season with a ritual of blood. One of the show's cruder pleasures is its often elaborate murders, and while poison isn't new territory for this show, the artful framing and sheer scale of the scene begins the episode on a note of spooky excitement.
It makes sense to begin with so much death, as many of the following scenes in "Dragonstone" exist in reaction to death, be it one in the past or one yet to come. For instance, Arya's other scene is a much lighter moment, where she encounters a group of red cloaks around a campfire (including a cameo by Ed Sheeran), who invite her in and share some wine. In any other episode of the show, this encounter might have gone sour, but here, it ends without incident, cutting away right after the men heartily laugh at her declared intention to kill the queen. There's death yet to come, but it's not here yet.
Instead, what this episode often focuses on is connections. One highlight of the episode involves Jon deciding what to do with the Karstark and Umber families, both of whom had members fight for Ramsay Bolton. Sansa wishes to take away their castles as retribution and give them to families loyal to the Northern crown. Jon makes a different decision: he insists on allowing these families to keep their ancestral homes, and instead calls the heads of both houses - both of whom are now children - to pledge loyalty to the King in the North. Winter is here, and at least to Jon, it demands the North keep as many allies as it can. Compared to Arya and the red cloaks, the wisdom of this connection is less certain. Ned and Robb were killed by their leniency. Jon's decision may be final, but its outcome is yet to be determined.
Those scenes still predominantly feature chatter and exposition, however. The best scene in the episode occurs in the Hound's storyline, where he and the Brotherhood Without Banners have come across the house of those farmers who took in him and Arya way back in season 4. Back then, the Hound robbed them and left, but he's not the same person he was back then. Now, that family is dead, having starved in the winter. While the broad strokes of what happened to this family are exposited, the emotional fulcrum of the scene relies on the viewers' memory of who these people were, and the emotional peak comes not from anything anyone says, but from a few silent shots of the Hound simply burying these farmers, a form of penance for the man he once was. Even in an uneventful episode, this show can still find moments of quiet beauty.
"Dragonstone" has one other moment of quiet beauty, right at its very end. Danerys has finally landed in Westeros once again, arriving at the same spot where her family first began its conquest of the Seven Kingdoms. There's a scene, several minutes long, where she merely walks through the tower of Dragonstone, right beside an ancient, dusty strategic map. She's here to reclaim her birthright, disrupting the cyclical power games of the realm just as the Targaryens did once before. Unlike nearly every other plotline, that of Danerys is largely free of exposition, but the mere event of her landing is perhaps the single most significant thing to happen in this episode. Before, she was always a distant threat, slowly building power but always feeling far away from Westeros. Now, she's here, and that's a big deal. Season 6 began with Jon revived to maintain the status quo. Season 7 begins with everything about to change.
Indeed, despite little happening in this episode, each of its scenes presents a new status quo as well as the beginnings of the season's narrative threads. Arya is headed towards King's Landing. The Hound sees a vision of the White Walkers in the fire. Other stories are less involving. Both Bran and the White Walkers only get very brief scenes, the former now finding his way through the wall, and the latter simply being shown marching south.
In King's Landing, Cersei and Jamie exposit their situation. The King's Landing story picks up when Cersei proposes an alliance with Euron Geryjoy (and his leather pants), but this plotline is stalled when Euron asks to marry Cersei in exchange for his fleet, which Cersei promptly declines. The more expository a scene is, the less visually interesting it becomes, as dialogue is given a rudimentary series of close-ups and wide shots which feel flat and increase the expository feel of these scenes. The Lannister storyline has begun to drag in recent years, and unfortunately, it's still a weak link here.
Finally, the episode offers some levity in the form of Sam's monotonous tasks from the Citadel, represented in a montage of changing bedpans, gagging at their smell, and serving soup. This plotline builds a little narrative momentum as well, as the Archmaester tells Sam that he believes the latter's story about the White Walkers, and notes that the Maesters have some books on them in the restricted section. Sam sneaking past his superiors to steal the key to those books, and later learning about a "dragon glass" mountain near Dragonstone, forms the narrative hook of these scenes, but much more interesting is the Archmaester's reaction to Sam's concerns: not skepticism, like the rest of the maesters, but rather apathy. He knows that winters have come and gone without the wall falling, and he perceives the world as static and unchanging. The Wall is eternal, and nothing changes.
But the seventh season of Game of Thrones might just prove him wrong. Dragons have returned, the dead are walking, and the Targaryen heir has landed with an army partially consisting of emancipated slaves. These are all new, radical changes from the world at the start of the show, but maybe the biggest changes in "Dragonstone" come in smaller places. Maybe the real changes are the young heads of the houses Umber and Karstark. Maybe the real changes are Arya's trust and the Hound's penance. The episode hints at this without resorting to the sentimentality of season 6's low points, and while this premiere serves to do little other than set the table for later episodes, it once again finds the show planting seeds for more exciting stories to come.
7/10
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Todd Throndson
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