Season 8 Episode 1 “Winterfell” review: A Clash of Reunions

 

I’m conflicted about this episode. Really, really conflicted. On the one hand, in about an hour, it presents the culmination of moments that have been set in motion eight years ago, if you’re counting show-time, or even 23 years, if you’re counting book-time. People who haven’t seen each other since the first third of “A Game of Thrones” come back together on screen. In this clash of reunions, the possibilities and limitations of the medium TV all converge into one messy hour of screen time.

We can’t really talk about this episode and its impact (or lack thereof) without talking about TV. I want to purposefully leave out the storylines from the books in this discussion; it is very difficult to separate the two if you’re as mired as I am in them, but the attempt must needs be made. So, in a book, you have hundreds of pages to tell your story. You can indulge in, let’s say, the food people eat, without it taking on any significant meaning. In a TV show, you’re restricted to around 45 to 60 minutes a week. Every shot you include in your episode counts, and every shot you leave out counts as well. There’s no room for indulgence in this format that does not also drive plot and characters, at least not since season 2 or so, when the cast became so crowded.

Why is this important? The Clash of Reunions basically took place over two episodes in season 7 and this one here in season 8. That’s not much, if you think about how many of those reunions (and first time meetings!) are happening. Now, the difficulty for any writer, including hallowed George R. R. Martin himself, is that we as the audience know all about the characters, but the characters don’t. Letting them rehash everything is boring, skipping over it rids us of the vastly emotional moments we absolutely need to move forward. You’re between a rock and a hard place there.

So, that’s the conundrum facing the GOT writer’s staff. The approach they chose to take was to lean heavily into nostalgia about earlier seasons and let that do a lot of work for them. Considering the dilemma they had, it was a smart choice, but it doesn’t always pay off. Let’s look at some examples.

The first shots are reminiscent of the pilot; we have a small Winterfell boy climbing high to witness the arrival of the King and Queen. Arya’s even standing in the crowd again, unrecognized, looking awestruck. This time it’s the dragons that make her smile, not the splendor of the royal party. The shot works because our brain is making these connections, letting us think about what has happened since then and fill in the blanks about how Arya’s feeling about all this by ourselves. The shot’s not working because it doesn’t really communicate anything other than “boy, Dany’s army and dragons sure look epic” that we don’t already know; the Winterfell crowd are anonymous faces that won’t play any role, and the locale is known to us.

Arya’s own reunions are laden with meaning and emotion. She reunites with Jon for the first time since THE SECOND EPISODE OF THE FIRST SEASON for christsakes, she’s meeting Gendry again for the first time in four seasons, and the same is true of the Hound. Her reunion with Jon works splendidly and is the major emotional anchor of the show; him not understanding what she’s been through (“did you use [Needle] yet?” is just great), them comparing swords and again letting nostalgia carry a lot of the dialogue, him being surprised by her maturing into living Ned Stark’s words about the wolf pack in winter that she needs to form with Sansa, it’s the show at its best. Her reunion with Gendry comes off as mainly transactional, unfortunately. She’s asking for a weapon, and he, who has been relegated to being the Q of Winterfell, will provide it, as we learned when he gives the Hound an obsidian axe. Even worse is her meeting the Hound. The dialogue not only falls flat, it’s also meaningless. Yes, she left him to die and robbed him. Is she about to feel sorry for him? Are we as the audience? It remains muddled, and so does the whole scene.

I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but this back and forth between reunions working out and not working out dominates the episode. Jon and Bran works perfectly and economically: Jon’s joy turning into ash when he realizes how far gone Bran is, just communicated in one reaction shot. Jon and Sam is also a marvel, for reasons we’re going to get into in a moment. Sansa and Tyrion leaves you shouting at the TV screen. Maybe one of the two might leave a sentence more about the giant misunderstanding between them that they should stumble over if the dialogue wasn’t purposefully written around it. This way, Sansa implies to Tyrion that, yes, she killed Joffrey. Another reason it falls flat is that, unlike others, it’s a random meeting, not infused with any special emotion.

We also get first-time-unions, such as Dany meeting Samwell Tarly. This scene is just great, also showcasing the highs “Game of Thrones” can reach when it digs deep into its well of established back-story. As I’ll discuss later, this marvelously ties back into the big reveal of the episode, but the sheer range of emotions Emilia Clark and John-Bradely West convey is astonishing, and it really ties them together. West in particular manages to combine such conflicting emotions as loyalty, love and hatred for his relations with the demands of his order and the conflicting ties to his best friend’s new girlfriend within one single reaction shot – it’s an impressive feat of acting. I want to have more of this, and more, and more.  

Of course, you can’t do 60 minutes of reunions, not even with a cast as talented as this. In the “Making of” of the episode, Weiss makes this explicit by saying that they needed to do “something” else, citing the plot around Sansa not liking Dany, and oh boy, this is where the episode really gets intro troubled waters.

See, every story needs a dramatic question, a conflict that everything revolves around. For this episode, it was “Will the North accept Dany as their queen?” It’s a perfectly fine question for a show about games and thrones and politics in a fantasy setting, but last season ended with the Wall crashing down and an army of zombies led by a guy on an undead dragon marching south. There’s this very weird sense of non-urgency to the whole proceedings. We learn in a well-crafted horror-movie-sequence that the White Walkers took Last Hearth (which was also incorporated well into the Northern plot with young Ned Umber’s “we need wagons”), but in general, people place awful lot of emphasis on whether or not someone holds a title that under the current situation really doesn’t bear all that much significance. The whole thing feels like a left-over from season 7.

And speaking of leftovers, there are quite a few. Game of Thrones always suffered from the aforementioned time and space problem: where the books can easily let major characters slide into the background and only check up on them much later, they’re very visibly around in the show. If you have nothing to do for them, you’d better remove them from it – which the show has done well (Stannis, Olenna) or badly (the whole of Dorne, Osha, Rickon). But some of these characters are still around, serving no real purpose. That’s concerning Bronn, who gets an assassination plot attached in a gruesomely tired rehash of the sexploitation formula that has a giant red-herring-sign attached to it. Brienne isn’t even in the episode, and Yara is rescued by Theon and then sent off to reconquer the Iron Islands in less time than it takes me to take a piss, up to the point where one might ask if it wouldn’t have been better to end the Greyjoy offshoots in season 7. Another reunion with Theon in Winterfell only promises diminishing returns, unfortunately. In Winterfell, Varys and Tyrion are the most feeling their fifth wheels. There’s simply no need for so many advisors, especially when the course of action is so obvious: consolidate and buckle up. What else is there to talk about at this point?  

The biggest problem of them all, though, is Cersei. Lena Heady is acting the shit out of the material she’s given, transforming her take on the character into such an evil-queen-menace that we fear for the fate of fucking EURON GREYJOY when he finally goes into her bed (who else is thinking of Oberyn Martell’s words of the bed of scorpions?). But really, who is she kidding? She’s like Saruman, insisting that he’s the main villain after Aragorn decides to attack the Black Gate. The arrival of an army of Red Shirts (the “Golden Company”, with a nice nod to book readers about elephants) isn’t exactly piquing my interest, either. Aside from Bronn, Qyburn and Euron, there’s no named character left with Cersei. And she just sent Bronn away, who was never a good fit for her anyway. This could become a problem for her story arc FAST.

But back to the real center of events after which the episode is named. Besides the drama about whether or not Jon is King in the North and who follows whom when an apocalyptic army is at the doorstep (great call, Lord Glover), there’s also an emotional side-plot woven into this: Sansa doesn’t like Dany. At these moments, the show’s becoming “Winterfell High”, and the disconnect to the ostensive situation with the White Walkers is becoming even more stark (heh). The political plot also retains its main feature from season 7 of being dumb as doornails. We get consistently told that Sansa is “smart”, as we’ve been told that Tyrion is “smart” in seasons 5 to 7, but nothing we see onscreen actually conveys that. If you have to tell because your show is the exact opposite of the text, you’re in trouble, and Sansa as a character is really badly served by these developments. I hope there is some payoff coming for these clumsy setups, but I don’t really see how.  

But let’s come to real reveal of the episode. Directly after having heard the devastating news from Dany that she killed his family, he runs into Bran, who tells him “now’s the time” to tell Jon (why now remains unclear). Sam goes down into the crypts where, in dramatic convenience, Jon has positioned himself before Eddard’s statue. And then, full of suppressed rage and grief, he tells Jon, directly, that he’s Aegon VI Targaryen, nephew to his girlfriend and king of all the realm. Will Dany step aside? “Things don’t last”, Varys told us in the beginning of the episode, and with five more to go, he’s surely right. We’re in for some major drama next week. If it’s as well done as this reveal, I can hardly wait.