Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 5: For Whom The Bell Tolls

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” Ramsey Bolton (then Snow) once said this to Theon Greyjoy in the midst of torture. It was all I could use as a grim anchor as I reeled from last night’s episode, in which we watched Daenerys Targaryen lose her mind and raze the city of King’s Landing, destroying the Red Keep and the majority of the local civilians with it - arise, Mad Queen Dany.

I think what hurts the most is the fact that we’ve essentially grown up with Dany, following her assent with admiration and sympathy: she has overcome countless obstacles, liberated the slaves of half a continent, given signs that she would live up to her goal of “breaking the wheel” of what we might call tyrannical patriarchy – we’ve been rooting for her to defeat Cersei Lannister and take back the Iron Throne for years now. I didn’t really care for Dany until around Season 3, but she definitely grew on me (she’s no Arya or Jon Snow, but I respected her at least). So this whole descent into madness, though implied throughout the show (see: crucifying the masters of Mereen, burning the Khals in Vaes Dothrak, burning Slaver’s Bay, burning the Tarly men for refusing to bend the knee – picking up on a trend here?), feels like ham-fisted character assassination.

The show handled this transition with all the grace and nuance of a brick to the face, but unfortunately I think this was GRRM’s intention for Dany all along. Her trajectory as a protagonist has had sort of an inverse relationship to Jaime Lannister’s – while Jaime started out as a selfish monster, he’s steadily been redeeming himself one moral act at a time (until his redemption arc was blown up like a roadside IED at the end of the episode – more on that later); Dany has slowly been morphing into the very monster she’s been working towards exterminating. Daenerys’ journey has gone the way it has with the purpose of showing us how people with good intentions can be corrupted – by power, by grief, by love – into becoming the very thing they were seeking to avoid. She’s basically the Darth Vader of GOT now, which fucking sucks. Because we really didn’t get the opportunity to watch her convincingly unravel, her empathy and purpose chiseled away by all that’s happened to her, she’s basically been reduced to the trope of the hysterical woman – like Medea or Clytemnestra, resorting to murder out of revenge and spite.

The precise moment Dany lost her shit.

That being said, let’s get back to the actual content of the episode, which begins with Varys scribbling treason notes to be sent to leaders all over Westeros, I would guess. I bet Robyn Aryn and Lord Royce in the Vale got one, maybe the dude in Dorn – probably just enough to make trouble in the last episode. A young serving girl comes to tell Varys that Dany won’t eat, and she expresses that she’s nervous that the Unsullied are watching her – which, I mean, she should probably be worried about, but Varys gaslights her and sends her on her way. It wasn't until my second viewing that this made more sense - Varys said to the girl (a kitchen servant) "we'll try again at supper." Try what? Poisoning the Dragon Queen with some tainted food, perhaps??? I think that's what is being inferred, and if so - daaaamn Varys! You tryin' to put your head on spike?

Tyrion knows what Varys is up to and comes to tell Dany that someone has betrayed her – and the person she names is Jon. “Varys,” Tyrion corrects her, confused. But Dany isn’t stupid – if Varys knows the truth about Jon, it’s because Tyrion told him, if Tyrion knows it’s because Sansa told him, and Sansa knows because Jon did what she asked him not to do and told his sisters. Sansa’s snitching has put people in grave danger, so again – fuck Sansa.

Varys meets Jon on the shores of Dragonstone and brings up right away the old axiom about Targaryens: the Gods flip a coin each time one is born to decide whether or not they will be homicidal maniacs, and while he’s not sure if Dany’s coin came crazy side up yet, he knows that Jon’s coin came up sane. Jon knows Varys wants to prop him up as king instead of Dany, and he flatly refuses to challenge Dany’s claim.

Varys is writing some more treason notes that night when he hears footsteps in the hall. Curiously, he removes his rings and sets them into a bowl (maybe he left the jewelry for his little bird to find as a thank you for her service?), and then burns the note he was working on, knowing full well that the Unsullied are coming to arrest him.  It’s more than that, though. Varys is marched to the beach, where Tyrion, Jon, and Dany are waiting. Tyrion admits that it was he who turned Varys in, and the Whisper Master takes it pretty well, simply bidding his old friend goodbye – but not before saying “I hope I’m wrong [about Dany going darkside].” Tyrion clearly feels like shit about this – aside from Jaime, Varys is the person with whom he’s had the longest positive acquaintance, and he owes his life to him (he smuggled Tyrion out of the city after his conviction for regicide, remember?). Dany judges him guilty of treason and Drogon sneaks up out of the darkness (excellent use of CGI here) to toast him. Thus fulfilled is Melisandre’s prophecy – that Varys would die upon the continent of Westeros. She knew this, I assume, because she saw it in the flames – of his execution.

Dany tells Tyrion that Varys’ death is as much Sansa’s fault as it is Tyrion’s (or Jon’s, I guess) as a kind of mea culpa, and she informs him that her forces intercepted Jaime enroute to Kings Landing. He begs her to promise that if the city’s bells were rung, conveying Cersei’s surrender, that she would call off the invasion to protect the citizens within. She agrees, signaling so to Greyworm, and sends him away, promising that if Tyrion failed her once more – it would be for the final time.

Jon comes up to visit Dany, who just before had an emotional moment with Greyworm, in which she presented him with the collar Missandei had worn before her liberation – her one possession. He tossed it into the fire, echoing Missandei’s final word: dracarys. Now alone with her newest political rival, Dany laments that she has no love in Westeros – literally all of her close advisers from the beginning of her conqueror’s journey (the people keeping her in check, I believe we’re supposed to infer) are dead, only Greyworm remains, and he’s never been a strategy adviser, only a gifted soldier. Tyrion has fucked up left right and center and Varys betrayed her. She only has fear to secure her rule. “I love you,” Jon tells her, but the words are hollow – he may love her now in the way that she loved Jorah – he can be loyal but he can’t be her lover; their failed kiss is proof of this. Dany plagiarizes Machiavelli and says “fine – let it be fear.” As in – if I don’t have the love of the people, I will make them fear me. Christ.

As Dany’s military prepares for battle, Tyrion badly lies his way into Jaime’s prisoner tent; butchering his request multiple times in Valyrian, only to have the soldier roll his eyes and tell him that they speak Westerosi. Jaime reveals that the reason he was captured was because he failed to disguise his golden hand – I mean, seriously? This moment was clearly orchestrated so we could see Tyrion and Jaime say goodbye to each other, which I’ll admit was touching. Tyrion is convinced that King’s Landing will fall in the morning and practically begs Jaime to go to Cersei to try to save her and their baby’s life, although Jaime is quick to point out that Cersei never listens to Jaime’s advice, so there’s little chance of convincing her to give up her crown to flee. This still seems out of character to me – not the saving Jaime part – Tyrion says he’s happy to repay the favor for Jaime springing him to escape after his trial. Cersei and Tyrion have always been at odds – why would he care about saving her this much? The baby? I don’t buy it. But Jaime is freed with instructions to make sure the city’s bells were rung to prevent the worst of the sacking, and Tyrion sullenly returns to his duties. Arya and the Hound arrive at the front, and the soldier on duty doesn’t want to let them pass. “I‘m Arya Stark – I’m going to kill Queen Cersei,” she says simply. “Think about it,” the Hound chimes in: “if Cersei dies, the war is over – and you might survive tomorrow.” The guy isn’t entirely convinced but they get past him without any violence. After all – Arya just took out the Night King; Cersei should be easy to kill comparatively. Why not let her try?

To their credit, the tension in the build up to the actual battle was intense. Euron and the Ironborn in the Bay, the Lannister soldiers along the battlements of the walls of King’s Landing, the mass of Golden Company soldiers parked in front of the city gates, Cersei smirking from her porch in the Red Keep – it seems unlikely that Team Dany has a chance in hell of winning.  Jon and Davos and company wait, eyeballing the Golden Company from what I think is way too close across the field to avoid an unintentional clash.

Meanwhile, we see Arya and the Hound just make it into the walls of the Red Keep after elbowing a mom and her young daughter out of the way. Jaime is maybe 100 feet behind them; waving his golden hand around as if some soldier would recognize it and let him pass. The Kingslayer is forced to get in the back way and starts winding his way around the backstreets to the sewer entrance, where he’s supposed to escape with Cersei from under the Red Keep.

The dragon killing ‘scorpion’ weapons are all over the damn place – which makes it all the more unbelievable to me that Drogon could successfully destroy all of them without a single injury. Like, seriously – was the element of surprise all Euron needed to kill Rhaegal and fuck up Dany’s armada? Because when she nosedives Drogon into the Bay, he avoids all the spears shot at him and burns the whole fleet with ease.

We feel glad to root for her for now – Drogon decimates the threat in the water and moves on the scorpions along the city walls after blowing the gates completely to hell, taking out half the Golden Company within seconds. Jon and Greyworm lead the charge into the city while Dany finishes off the dragon defenses.

This whole time Cersei’s denial becomes more and more pathetic– she repeatedly dismisses Qyburn’s warnings and reports of defeat, until finally, Dany brings Drogon to rest on the wall near the front of the city, the scorpions all burned, the Red Keep breached by the her forces.

Below, the citizens scream for Cersei to sound the bells – but her stubborn arrogant ass won’t budge. Tyrion glares at the bell towers, psychically willing them to ring, until finally – they do. Team Dany is poised to take out the Lannister army along the main road in the city – Team Cersei hears the bells and throw down their swords in surrender. It all seems like a resounding success, until Dany appears to have a psychotic break. In the recap that preceded the episode, there was a supercut of voices played over Dany’s enraged face after Missandei’s murder – among them, Lady Olenna, who once told Dany: “Be a dragon.” There was also Missandei’s final request: “Dracarys.” This was actually a really great device that should have been included in the episode itself, because I assume this is what’s running through her head as the bells sound, deafening her.

At any rate, Dany glares at the Red Keep, and it looks like she’s going to fly up and roast Cersei out of her tower – but much to our horror, she starts torching the city itself on her way to the Red Keep. This gives Greyworm the permission he needed to take his revenge on the Lannisters – who have already surrendered – much to Jon’s surprise. He tries in vain to get the army to fall back, but it’s too late – the carnage has begun and taken on a mind of its own. He can only fight the men who attack him on his way to the castle, bewildered and remorseful.

This was hard to watch, and with purpose – the show had gotten away from its more gruesome violence in recent seasons; most of the casualties being undead wights or roasted soldiers. No longer – the pillaging and resultant gore was vividly on display, thousands of unarmed civilians killed, either by sword or by the collapse of buildings or from dragon’s fire.

Jaime reaches the secret backdoor to the castle at the exact moment that Euron Greyjoy washes up on shore, which is about as plausible as Bronn sneaking in to Winterfell and finding both Lannister brothers alone in a room together. Euron is eager to kill Jaime – there’s lots of banter about Kingslaying and boning Cersei, which results in a brutal dual which ends in two mortal stab wounds (or so it would seem) taken by Jaime, and Euron being run through and left to die with a smile on his face, convinced that he was the man who killed Jaime Lannister. Jaime gets away, even though he really should be on the stones bleeding out. Glad Euron got speared like Rhaegal did, but this was really shoddy in terms of plot development.

The Red Keep finally gets attention from Drogon and begins to fall – Cersei, Qyburn, and the Mountain make for the basement as Arya and the Hound get to Cersei’s chambers. The ceiling is starting to crumble around them, and the Hound stops Arya, convincing her that her revenge isn’t as important as her life. The Hound has resigned himself to the fact that this is his last stand – his final chance to take out his brother, the only thing that has been driving him since he got sucked back into Westerosi politics and saw the Mountain at the dragon pit last season. If she stays here with him, either to help him in his quest or to hunt down Cersei – she’ll certainly also die. Arya’s kill list – a checklist to avenge her family as much as a mantra for her sanity – has kept her going in rough circumstances, and it ultimately resulted in her defeating a huge threat to the realms of the living due to the skills she picked up along the way. But she’s only a teenager and still has family to live for – which is why I think she chooses to comply with the Hounds wishes – he has been a father figure to her, even if neither would admit that – a comrade in motive and temperament. He risked his life repeatedly for her safety, even after she left him for dead. It’s essentially his dying wish for her path to diverge from his once more, and rather than defy him like she did the last time she was convinced he was going to die, she agrees. She even calls him Sandor, humanizing him and acknowledging his importance in her life, before thanking him. I definitely shed a tear as he walked away.

The Hound eventually finds the Queen and her retinue after surviving the crumbling of the  stairwell they were descending; he quickly dispatches the few other guards who survived the falling debris and calls out the elder Clegane. Cersei demands he remain by her side, but apparently Sandor is overriding the controls in the Mountain’s zombie brain because he moves to fight. Qyburn, aghast, commands his creature to obey its master – and promptly gets his brains dashed against the stones for his trouble. How very Frankenstein – killed by his own hubristic creation.

The Hound allows Cersei to pass, because she’s as good as dead as far as he’s concerned. Thus commences Cleganebowl – a showdown we once thought for certain would never be. It has a bitter sweet conclusion – after failing to kill the gross zombie after multiple stabbings ("Fucking die!"), the Hound gets one of his eyes gouged out, Oberyn Martell style – but finally succeeds in killing them both after charging his brother into the crumbling wall, sending them both over the edge of the tower to the fiery chaos below. I for one will miss the Hound and his curmudgeonly quips – he died well, the only satisfying end to a character in this tragic endeavor of an episode.

The remainder of the episode mostly tracks Arya as she tries to flee the city – a disorienting and horrifying sequence that plays out like a disaster movie. We also catch a glimpse of Jon and Davos, who are trying to get their forces and the civilians out of the city. Jon also stops an attempted rape by killing one of his own soldiers; his disgust and dismay evident. The weight of what’s happening is heavy on his shoulders – he’s already blaming himself for not preventing this massacre, as if he could have. There are bursts of green exploding along the streets as Drogon razes the city – a reminder of the fact that Dany’s father, the Mad King, had stashed wildfire all over the city, poised to use it in lieu of dragonsfire to destroy it. These must be the stashes Cersei didn’t get her hands on when she blew up the Sept of Baelor – the stashes Jaime was trying to prevent from being lit up when he killed the King all those years ago.

Cersei gets back to her chambers, where she runs into Jaime. C’mon– how the fuck did he not bleed out climbing all those steps up to the high parts of the Red Keep without getting crushed by the falling stones? Seriously? At first, I was convinced Arya had crossed paths with Jaime and taken his face and gone back to kill Cersei, but then the scene cuts away from the reunited Lannisters to Arya trying to outrun dragon fire and falling buildings – so it couldn’t be her in disguise.

The twins eventually make it back down to the underground tunnels, only to find their exit caved in, with no way to get out. Only then does Cersei acknowledge that she’s about to die – all of her scheming and all the people she’s murdered and double crossed, and she’s going to die beneath the weight of the very kingdom she so badly wanted. Jaime grabs her and tells her that it doesn’t matter – they’re together at least – from the womb to the tomb, just the two of them. They hug tightly and then the ceiling collapses on top of them – almost assuredly killing them, probably from the crushing suffocation that would follow being buried alive. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?!?!? This fucking bitch gets to die like the old people in the bed in Titanic, at peace with her lover/brother, while Lyanna Mormont gets crushed by a giant and Theon gets run through by the Night King? Judge me if you want but this was the most infuriating thing to happen in this episode – Dany becoming a homicidal tyrant was sadly always an endgame possibility and I had steeled myself for it. But this!? The valonquar prophecy a misinterpretation – Jaime didn’t choke her to death, but was merely present as they both suffocated under the Red Keep? Fuck this death scene – if anyone deserved to die suffering alone it was Cersei Lannister. And also – fuck this fucking aborted redemption arc for Jaime Lannister! Another character assassination –I like him even less now than I did when he threw Bran out the window, and Jaime was my favorite Lannister! The magnetic pull of his doomed sister was enough to tank a possibly healthy and happy future? What are they trying to say (as if they’re trying to make any points)? It comes across as “family is more important than your growth as a human being” or “no matter what you do, certain behavior is beyond redemption.” If I wasn’t such a completionist I would fucking RAGE QUIT. *kicks soapbox into rush hour traffic*

Tyrion stalks the terrorized streets of the city in shock, knowing full well that his planning has led to the annihilation of thousands of civilians - his worst nightmare come true, Varys was right after all. The last moments of the show follow Arya as she tries to help the mom and daughter she pushed aside earlier in the episode to escape the city. Her machinations culminate in the immolation of both – a close up on their charred bodies shows the remnants of a wooden figurine still clutched in the girl’s hands, a call back to Shireen Baratheon – because it’s not Game of Thrones if children aren’t being burned to death.

Arya regains consciousness to a sky darkened with ash – the only other living thing around a dirty white horse stained red with blood in the street across from her. This feels strongly like an allusion to the Book of Revelation: the White, Red, and Pale horses of the Apocalypse carry the embodiments of Conquest, War, and Death, respectively.  My take is, the horse represents an amalgamation of all three concepts, given the circumstances. Naturally – Arya gets on the horse and rides it to safety: “behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death.”

I think it would be too much to give Daenerys’ assassination to Arya, considering it was she who took out the Night King, and not Jon Snow. I’m sure she’ll try to kill Dany for her war crimes – but ultimately it has to be Jon that takes her out. Jon will likely kill Dany over something more personal – my guess is that she’ll try to put Sansa to death along with Tyrion for treason, and Jon won’t just sit by and let his once- love kill his once-sister.

They’ll inevitably try and crown Jon – but after the shit he’s seen and the killing he’ll have to do, he probably will quit society altogether, my guess is he heads North to the Wall to rejoin the Wildlings – or what’s left of them.

I have a hunch no one will sit on the Iron Throne – I don’t know nor do I particularly care what form of government replaces Cersei’s reign. By now I’m more concerned with them wrapping up the Three Eyed Raven mishegas – where was Bran warging all that time during the Battle of Winterfell? Are the White Walkers truly gone? What happens to Drogon when Dany dies – does Jon kill him somehow also, or does Jon assume ownership of him?

There will be no happy ending – I just hope whatever we get is final, with no cliff hangers.