This week on Game of Thrones

We’re coming up to the final episodes of the second to last season of this show and they apparently still have the time to meander around for an episode with nothing particularly interesting happening. Ah well, here’s a recap anyway.

We open with Lady Crane giving her monologue as Cersei at Joff’s death again, but we can see that she took Arya’s advice to bring anger to the scene. As she leaves the stage she finds Arya, stabbed and bleeding, in her bed asking for help. Bit of a turnaround there. Two days ago Arya decided to not murder her at the last minute then now she’s begging for medical help? Arya has a quick chat about her career aspirations before getting drugged up.

Next up, we have a few guys sitting around in a forest, fingering each other. I love a bit of bromance. The Hound marches in and puts a stop to that with some axework and commits the definition of adding insult to injury “You’re shit at dying, you know that?”. Later he runs into the guys that actually killed his mates about to be executed by the Brotherhood without Banners (They are really liking the throwbacks this season aren’t they?) and Beric and Thoros allow him to kick them off their hanging blocks. Generous blokes they are. I’m interested to see how this is going to join up into the bigger story.We then have yet another scene of Tyrion and Varys strolling through Meereen intellectually sparring before Tyrion says goodbye to Varys who’s going on some secret mission back to Westeros, apparently to get some ships for Dany. Seems to me he’d be put to better use trying to actually find their Queen but hey, I’m not the Master of Whispers.

Cersei’s just having a nice sit down in the Red Keep with her massive zombie bodyguard when her cousin Lancel shows up and lets her know that Il Papa wants to see her in the Sept. She disagrees. There’s a short zombie fight scene before the monks all run away scared. She eventually shows up to the throne room and Kevan tells her to fuck off up to the balcony and all the other girls keep their distance from her. She’s like the Regina George of King’s Landing. Tommen announces that Cersei and Loras are to have their trials soon and that trial by combat isn’t happening. She shits herself slightly at this announcement (as does anyone in favour of Cleganebowl) then has an odd, cryptic conversation with her evil scientist friend. Continuing on the bromantic theme from earlier, we get a nice reunion of Bronn and Pod when Brienne turns up at Riverrun; Bronn is totally sure they’re fucking. I almost forgot about Podrick’s magic cock. Brienne enters Jaime’s tent to have a quick catch up and she tries to return Jaime’s sword to him but he declines. When they get down to business (not like that) she reveals her plan to get Blackfish and the Tully army back up North, Jaime’s just like ‘Look you can try if you like but that plan is awful’. I’m inclined to agree with that one. Just a little bit more sexual tension between the two before she heads into the castle to talk to Blackfish. He explains to her that he’s not going to abandon his ancestral home to travel all the way North to die for his great-niece that he barely knows. Honestly, you could’ve predicted that response Brienne.

Back in Meereen Tyrion’s using peer pressure to get his friends to drink. Initially they refuse but he tells enough bad jokes that they decide that they definitely are going to need to get drunk for this. Grey Worm goes for a bit of banter too but his is so bad that the Wise Master’s begin bombarding the whole city (ShitLAD). He freaks out at Tyrion’s poor negotiating skills then Dany storms into the palace like a BAMF.

Back to Riverrun and Jaime’s chatting with Edmure Tully, first offering him a nice life in a castle before dropping the ‘I will murder your baby because I want to fuck my sister’ bombshell. Edmure complies. As soon as he lets himself back into his castle he tells them all to bitch out of the fight so he can see his fit wife. Brienne escapes in a boat but the Blackfish decides that he might as well die now in a blaze of glory. Sadly, the show didn’t have the budget for that swordfight so we get the news when some random soldier tells Jaime he died. We then get more sexual tension in the form of an awkward boat wave.

We finish up the episode with Arya’s surrogate mother being murdered followed by the Waif chasing down Arya like the bloody Terminator, this ends poorly for the Waif. Arya then displays her face as a trophy for Jaqen, like when a cat kills a bird then drags its corpse into your house. Honestly, this is probably the weakest episode of the season. There was a lot of wasted time which you wouldn’t expect so close to the end of the season, particularly the Tyrion scenes could have had much more purpose to them. Oh well, next week we have The Battle of the Bastards, that much be where the swordfighting budget from this episode went.

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