Jumping off of that, there were a lot of mentions of Dany’s childlessness in tonight’s episode. Tyrion didn’t get in on the action beyond the Wall, but he did ask Dany some hard questions about her long-term plan.ĭany wants to break the wheel, he says, but how do they ensure that it stays broken? Good question. It was like Forest Whittaker in Rogue One all over again. His reasoning for not going with Jon to escape the wights was a little thin. I don’t know.īenjen is officially the Patron Saint of Lost Starks. Or maybe Game of Thrones has trouble writing relationships between women? Perhaps both. This feels more like an excuse to make Littlefinger relevant again than it does organic character development for Sansa or Arya.

The episode does little to try to explain Arya’s specific emotional state or motivations, so she comes off like the unhinged villain-of-the-week in an episode of Merlin. After all, Sansa and Arya share a complicated past and are both being manipulated by Littlefinger, but, instead, the interpersonal drama here is rushed and sloppy. With better writing or direction, this plotline may have worked. While I get that Arya has suffered heaps of trauma that have made it difficult for her to form emotional bonds, she comes off like a psychopath in “Beyond the Wall” with relatively little direct lead-up to the about-face. Perhaps there is a corner of the multiverse in which Game of Thrones could have sold the Arya Threatens to Kill Sansa storyline, but this is not it. While Gendry managed to set aside his differences with Beric and Thoros, two men who straight-up sold him to Melisandre in Season 3, Arya and Sansa, two sisters in a family lacking in members, couldn’t manage to do the same.

Now, it’s more murky.Īll of the joys of the Fellowship plotline were nearly overshadowed by the WTF-ness of the Winterfell storyline. When Dany had three fire-breathing dragons on her side, the outcome seemed inevitable. For viewers, it is a leveling of the playing field in the battle between the dead and the living. For the Night King, it is the gain of a major weapon, one that could possibly be the key to his crossing and/or destruction of the Wall. For Dany, it is not only the death of a child, but the loss of one of her three major weapons. The death of Viserion is important on many levels. No one living could tear their eyes from the mournful sight. The dragon went down in a wail of fire and blood, slipping beneath the ice to his not-so-final resting place. Game of Thrones went above and beyond with the visual effects in this episode, especially when it came to the manifestation of the dragons and the fall of Viserion. Tyrion and Dany, on the other hand? Punishing them will give her the revenge fix she values above all else. She doesn’t have any personal beef with the White Walkers. These days, Cersei is a true revenge junkie. The follow-up question is: Will belief change anything for Cersei? I don’t think so.

Game of thrones beyond the wall ratings