Plot points for the sixth episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones are discussed below.
Game of Thrones used to be a show where strategic missteps, both large and small, meant something.
Ned Stark lost his head when he trusted the word of a psychopathic brat with no true claim to the Iron Throne; his son, Robb, lost his when he chose to marry for love instead of political power. Renley Baratheon foolishly tried to skip ahead in the order of ascension only to be killed by his brother, Stannis; Stannis himself made blunder after blunder—pushing ahead to King's Landing even after most of his fleet was destroyed by wildfire; burning his daughter alive in a pagan ceremony to earn a brief reprieve from snowfall only to march off to his doom—eventually falling to Brienne of Tarth's sword when his depleted force was routed by Ramsay Bolton. Oberyn Martell got his head crushed like a melon because he didn't finish off The Mountain. Tywin Lannister was murdered on a toilet because he thought it'd be fun to bang his dwarf son's mistress. Daenerys "don't call me Dany" Targaryen got bogged down in a four-season, soul-crushingly-boring quagmire trying to free the people of Essos.
Et cetera, et cetera. But Jon Snow has always been annoyingly immune from this. To recap his series of monumental military disasters:
- He went beyond The Wall to find and kill Mance Rayder, was captured by the Wildlings, and only survived because Stannis Baratheon miraculously showed up at the last minute with an enormous number of horsemen.
- He trusted the Night's Watch would obey his commands to bring the Wildlings, their sworn enemies, south; this trust was repaid with a knife to the heart. He only survived because a witch miraculously revived him.
- He went beyond The Wall to evacuate a group of Wildlings from the oncoming wight army, found himself surrounded, and only survived because his Valyrian Steel blade miraculously cut through the White Walker he was fighting, giving him time to flee to a boat.
- He disobeyed every basic precept of medieval warfighting in the Battle of the Bastards, charging out into the middle of a killing zone in order to save a brother he knew Ramsay was going to murder before the battle began anyway. He only survived because the Knights of the Vale miraculously showed up at the last minute to rout Ramsay's forces.
- He went beyond The Wall (again) to capture a wight in order to prove to Cersei Lannister that the Walker threat is real, wound up surrounded by the army of the dead, and only survived because ravens travel at the speed of sound, apparently, allowing Dany to miraculously show up with her dragons. OH, RIGHT, and then he miraculously survived AGAIN when Benjen showed up out of nowhere and gave him his horse and was like "get out of here, dumbass."
I mean, seriously, you guys. This incompetent is who we're supposed to be cheering for? This idiot is the savior of men? We're supposed to want him and Dany to get together despite the fact he not only got one of her dragons killed but also did so in a way that got said dragon turned into a White Walker Dragon?
As my friend Peter Suderman noted on Twitter, "this season of GoT ... really does play like high-level, cinematic fan service. It has become a different show." It really has: from Jaime and Bronn's magical escape a couple of weeks back to the tidy way with which the Tyrells and the Sand Snakes were disposed of to the fact that time and distance means literally nothing anymore, it feels as if the show is dispensing with some of what made it so great: the languid pacing and muttered planning punctuated by bits of hyperviolence that often upended the way we expect the story to progress.
Now, maybe Benioff and Weiss have a surprise or two left up their sleeves. Maybe they're just piling plot armor on Jon Snow over and over again so we're really surprised when he finally finds himself out of Deus Ex Benjens and the such. Maybe they'll go full nihilist and put the White Walkers on the Iron Throne—which, as we know, is the only reasonable ending.* We'll see. But I have my doubts. And I'm preparing for a typical happy ending. I don't think we should expect much more.
*It seems pretty clear, though, that slapping Dracula Rules—that is, kill the creator and you kill his creations—on the Walkers this late in the game is a last-minute fix that allows the writers to wipe them all out in a few minutes of screen time. Stuff and nonsense, that.