Game of Thrones
Sky Atlantic
★★★★☆
So, after legions of deaths, a few resurrections and more shagging than the Brazilian edition of Love Island, winter has finally come. Snow is falling on Game of Thrones, the armies are gathering and sex and violence are suddenly being rationed.
There was no nudity in the opening episode of this penultimate series (spoilers ahead), the writers ditching their trademark “sexposition” in favour of meaty, old-fashioned exposition. The deaths, meanwhile, all came before the opening credits, as Arya Stark completed her satisfying revenge on Walder Frey by disguising herself as the vile old git and poisoning the rest of his clan.
This new mood of austerity was rather enjoyable, the seaminess coming from a script sprinkled with C-bombs and bitter rejoinders. My favourite lines were Euron Greyjoy’s unvarnished description of his native Iron Islands (“Rocks and bird shit and a lot of very unattractive people”) and Sansa’s brush-off to the circling Littlefinger: “No need to have the last word, Lord Baelish, I’ll assume it was something clever.”
Like many season openers, the episode featured pieces being moved around the board; the writers acknowledged as much by featuring not one but two maps of Westeros, one being painted on the floor of Cersei Lannister’s courtyard, the other being re-acquisitioned by Daenerys Targaryen (now rocking a winter wardrobe) as she and her horde returned to her family’s ancestral seat at Dragonstone.
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Yet there was still time for absorbing character work on the fringes. The Hound had one of his occasional, touching flashes of conscience, burying the corpse of a father and daughter whom he had robbed long ago, and revealed a new talent for flame-based prophesying. Samwell Tarly, meanwhile, discovered that his internship at the Citadel amounted to little more than stacking books and cleaning bedpans, a reality check that was amusingly summarised in a montage of tomes and turds.
With the women more badass than ever, the men were left to do the touchy-feely stuff. We need to talk about Tommen, said Jaime to his sister-lover Cersei, referring to their son, who killed himself after Cersei incinerated his wife. All three of their incest-children are now dead. “We’re the last of the Lannisters,” Cersei said icily. The violence won’t be gone for long, you feel.
The only bum note came, as it often does, with Ed Sheeran. The singer-songwriter had a very obvious cameo as a soldier in a clunky campfire scene in which he grinned gormlessly and slagged off King’s Landing. There was also, inevitably, a song. “Hands of gold are always cold but a woman’s hands are warm,” Sheeran trilled, which I suppose is an improvement on “I’m in love with your body”.
He was following in the footsteps of Coldplay and the ethereal Icelanders Sigur Ros, who have also appeared in Game of Thrones. A show so full of brutality has a distinctly wussy taste in pop stars. Here’s hoping for the Wu-Tang Clan and Napalm Death in the finale.