“Has there been a Game of Thrones episode that felt so resolutely Game of Thrones-centric? So totally uninterested in the larger world? I mean, this was an episode that paid off so many of its own plots, that resolved all sorts of things and moved the ball forward, but the show feels much less like a mirror held up to our reality than it often has in the past.”
“My sense is that the show has fully committed to a new approach. At the beginning, the subject of this show was: politics. How to establish a steady government. As many, including me, have often said: “politics” is not a problem with any kind of tidy end point. There is no satisfying resolution to the question “Who will be king?” because the answer is always going to be, “Well, someone, for a while, and then someone.” History, as we have come to see, doesn’t end!”
“I am really proud of Benioff and Weiss for just being like: you know what, let’s forget about the version of Game of Thrones that is a particularly nebulous Samuel Beckett play and really double down on Dragons vs. Ice Zombies.”
“After all, in the past, this show has often approached mise-en-scene as a problem of which room to put the characters in while they talked about things. “Sexposition” is a good example of that cinematic laziness, and expression of an essentially foreground-background sense of what staging is: the actors have a Content they need to deliver, and so, the question is how to deliver it?”
“There was no necessary coordination between form and content, just co-existence. Rooms were the places where conversations happened; conversations were what happened in rooms. And sometimes there was violence.”
“What we’re circling around, here, is the question of how this show is managing what is clearly its biggest cultural ambition: to really put powerful women front and center. Game of Thrones has been such a mix of so awful and so smart about its depictions of women’s lives; it has taken so much heat, and one way it’s responded it seems, is by really committing to the question of what it would mean, in this world, to have women rule.”
“Also important to note: Arya continues to connect death and pastry in new and exciting ways.”