BLOGGING GAME OF THRONES, ep. 8: Holding Pattern

A wise man once said, "They can't all be showhorses. Otherwise, where would we get glue?" That wise man was, of course, me, on some other blog post somewhere. But it is as true today as it was in 2009 or whatever. And after the stomach-churning downward spiral at the end of the last episode, we were either going to immediately smash into the ground and explode or pull out of the nose dive and skid along the ground for a bit. This metaphor is totally still working, right? Good. This is not a very eventful episode, is what I am saying. Oh, except for the zombies.

The Stark Enterprises section of King's Landing is attacked after Ned's capture.  Sansa's nanny and Lil Katniss's sword coach stand nobly in the way of the attackers--teachers really ARE the true heroes, you guys. I bet the education budget in Westeros is pretty terrible too, though. Lil Katniss escapes (after getting her first kill on some random chubby kid) and Sansa is brought before the Queen, who has been soaking her mind-sponge in mental brine all night so as to best prepare of the BRAINWASHING (That one worked too, right? I just want to make sure someone is keeping score). Unfortunately the one thing Sansa inherited from her father was the SUPER STUBBORNNESS gene, and every time the queen keeps taking the metaphorical sword off of her neck, Sansa is like "are you sure you don't want to keep this here for a while?" Luckily King Ladyboy's peen is mightier than the sword, so Sansa is probably good.

There's a repeated refrain of characters saying "not today," underscoring the way this episode puts off the inevitable conclusion from last time. Everybody is moving around, positioning themselves, but not quite getting down to boning (so to speak--boning in this case being "killing"). Ned Stark waits in a dungeon. From Winterfell, Kevin Jonas, his mother and Not-A-Stark McTeethyface gather an army and start marching without really deciding where they're going. Tyrion Lannister and Bro have a testy run in with some angry hill people, but Tyrion talks them into joining forces. And the rest of the Lannisters just kind of rub their hands together fiendishly.

Up by the ice wall, some bodies recovered from the woods COME BACK TO FUCKING LIFE. Everybody is like SHIT SON except for Samwise Gangrene, who is a nerd and is thus prepared for this kind of thing.

The Dothraki are on the vague warpath too, and Dany is dismayed to realize that world-raping speech Drogo gave last time was pretty much literal. She stops a few rapes-in-progress and then appeals to her husband for an official policy change.

Drogo is like, "Baby, do you really expect me to teach these guys about enthusiastic consent RIGHT NOW?" and Dany offers a compromise: why not rape them AND THEN marry them? This girl is a true legislator, y'all. In the end Dany takes every surviving woman on as one of her servants--this is the episode of the sitcom where a character adopts every dog at the pound to keep them from being put down (I'm pretty sure that happened on BOTH 30 Rock and Parks & Rec this year. It's the new "two characters trapped in a elevator"). She puts one of them to work immediately, sewing up Drogo after he's cut in a fight defending the new "no rape" law. And then one branch of the Dothraki government gets together and symbolically attempts to appeal his decision 33 times in a row.

So, to recap where we are now, going into the last two episodes of this season: most of the Stark family is marching against the capitol and/or the Lannisters. Some of The Lannisters are marching on The Starks, the rest are taking over the Capitol. The Dothraki are marching on the Capitol, or like, whoever. Zombies are marching toward the ice wall. Oh, and Bonus Jonas has a creepy new ghost friend. 

Next time: all the armies, zombies and ghosts meet in a big field and decide to hug it out!