Spaghetti Westerosi
Cold opens on Game of Thrones never seem to bode well for the characters they introduce. It's been a while—a good while—since a director decided to employ one on the HBO show, and much like the poor ranger in the very first episode, one of the major faces we meet will (not very much) later end up on the receiving end of some rather stark punishment.
Of course, the other face is one fans have been expecting back for months, scars, soulful eyes, and all.
At this point, maybe it should go without saying that this post will deal with events from Season 6, Episode 7, "The Broken Man". It certainly does go without saying, and yet etiquette compels it nonetheless, that if you don't enjoy having those events spoiled in some form or another, just... just stop now.
Because I'm telling you the Hound is back, Margaery is an expert fraud, and whoa law, Arya (maybe) got got. It was a far tighter episode than last week's, both thematically and technically, and more than a few moments made this episode stand out against the rest of the show like a bronze thumb.
Listen people: Winter is coming, but autumn in Westeros looks like a most promising season. One of the most striking elements of this episode was the use of light and color to soften shadows, rimlight characters' heads, and generally highlight the gentleness of the landscape over which armies ranged and communes bled. At times, the episode started to look like it was passed through an Instragram filter. Valencia maybe?
And with the trees changing color (and, I'm sure, the flocks of Dornish leafers coming to admire the foliage), we are met with a genetically satisfying shift in tone in the show—the petty storylines, the politics, are all still in play... and yet now they propel the plot about as much as Old Nan's stories did in Season One. No—now we're looking at human politics, and, well, environmental politics: vengeance, love, allegiance, family, hatred, obsession, madness... These are the dragons circling the narrative Wall, and, just like the introduction of the abject supernatural, their arrival was so gradual and natural that the beating of their wings may have been mistaken for wind. Character development—watching Arya move from tomboy to assassin to fugitive, or observing Sansa's tilt towards the underhanded—has benefited from a lengthy run, and we're collecting dividends.
No more so than in the case of the Hound.
Yes, yes, we all knew he was coming back. Meribald in the books talks about him. His horse is outside the sept-monastery-tower that Brienne encounters. Yes yes yes yes, sure. But look how they did it! Guys! This past week's Game of Thrones was a Western of Eastwoodian dimensions! The brutal enforcer, world-weary and wary of his own past (but warier still of giving in wholly to the new peace which surrounds him), out on the frontier, helping settlers while remaining aloof, counselled by another former swordslinger with his own reprehensible past but a genuine (if imperfect) conversion to provide a hopeful model for our hero... is, despite his objections that he's done with that old life (and that he really doesn't care all too much for this new life, although he also doesn't seem to be in any hurry to leave it), confronted by an outlaw band of no allegiance, one which most likely recognizes him from his mottled past, whose actions destroy his new peace and its adherent women and children, and eventually, once he is left no choice but to waste and mourn or just lay waste... he grabs his axe.
Perhaps most satisfying, the Western tropes scattered throughout the Hound's new storyline are mirrored throughout the episode—in 'Arya's' "I just got out and here they are, dragging me back in", in Jon and Davos and Sansa's renegotiated allegiances, in Margaery's signal to her grandmother, in Yara's whoring (and pep talks), in the swaggering showdown at Riverrun.... This episode may as well have been named "Once Upon a Time in Westeros".
Allllright, pardner—we're getting closer to a Hound-Mountain throwdown, so let's stop reading a blog post and start hopping up and down on our heels for tonight's episode. And... DRAW!