“I’ll just chop off one hand,” the Hound wheedles, though all he gets in the end are hangings.Īlthough it seemed like the Hound had a one-way ticket back to Villainville, he gets another shot at redemption-and perhaps one better suited to him than the pacifism that his short-lived septon buddy offered him. They've come to dispense justice for last week's village raid, which leads to a hilarious bout of haggling with the Hound haggles about who gets to murder whom and exactly how bloody those deaths will be. Does he still imagine himself a decent person too?īut the Season Three callbacks aren't done! We also get a touching reunion between the Hound and our two favorite members of the Brotherhood of Banner: Beric Dondarrion and Thoros of Myr. Of course, only moments later-after Jaime threatens to launch his infant son at the castle with a trebuchet-we find Edmure surrendering both his castle and the Blackfish to the Lannister army, arguably betraying his people and his family to their hated enemies. Their answers, though, would be ambiguous at best most of the truly decent people are dead, and everyone else is drowning in compromise. It’s a good question, one that nearly every character on the show could ask themselves. “How do you tell yourself that you’re decent after everything that you’ve done?” “Do you imagine yourself a decent person?” Edmure asks. He muses a bit about how funny life is his captive is far less amused. Jaime, who knows nothing about the new dangers facing his sister, is still busy sieging in the Riverlands, where he and Edmure Tully have a captor-to-prisoner chat that evokes the one he had with Catelyn Stark-though he was the prisoner that time around. This is winning, in precisely the way she understands it: the heads of your enemies lying at your feet. A small smile plays across her face when the Mountain rips the head off the Sparrow who tried to take her by force. The Mountain steps forward silently to defend her, and Lancel warns her to call off her giant zombie attack dog, lest there be violence. Her loss of power has been the High Sparrow’s gain, as evidenced by the ability of his cudgel-wielding lackeys to show up at the Red Keep and “order” Cersei to come to the Sept. The erstwhile queen is increasingly a bit character in the story of King’s Landing, a pariah in the making who watches big decisions get announced from a distance, rather than being in the room where they happen. It's also that property, though, that makes it even sadder to see Cersei-once the de facto ruler of the Seven Kingdoms-pushed to the sidelines of power.
It's that property that gives this episode's hell-yes moments, from the Hound's vengeance to Arya's escape, added impact. Martin's books restrict the storytelling perspective to a handful of characters, the show has enabled us to wander into rooms and conversations that would have otherwise been hidden from us, to develop the interior lives of characters who had previously been seen only through the eyes of others. One of the most delightful things about Game of Thrones as a television show is its ability to transcend the format of the novel.