Season 8, Episode 4:
‘The Last of the Starks’
There were plenty of broken hearts to go around Sunday on “Game of Thrones.”
There was Brienne, who realized her long-standing dream of bedding the Kingslayer only to have all her feelings slain soon after.
Gendry, buoyed by his new nobility, showed how little he knows Arya by asking her to be his lady and received the predictable reply. “That’s not me,” she said, this season’s latest callback to the earliest chapters of this story. (Seriously, Gendry? You think she saved the human race last week so she could host parties at Storm’s End?)
Then there was Grey Worm, who saw his beloved Missandei lose her head in one of the show’s crueler executions. I knew the Naath love nest they dreamed about a couple weeks ago would never come to pass, but figured (hoped?) it would be Grey Worm’s end that prevented it.
But it was the other primary witness to Missandei’s death whose broken heart will have the most world-shattering repercussions. That would be Daenerys, who lost not only her most trusted confidante this week but also her dragon Rhaegal, who had survived having his wing tattered in the White Walker battle only to get shot out of the sky, thanks to the Euron fleet’s exceptional marksmanship. (I guess while we’ve been in Winterfell for the past two weeks, they’ve been taking target practice on the Scorpion range.)
You’ll recall how utterly indestructible Team Daenerys looked as it crossed the Narrow Sea at the end of Season 6. The occasional Loot Train Attack aside, much of the show since then has been about evening the odds between her and Cersei’s forces, with Dany losing Viserion, Greyjoy ships (twice now) and a bunch of Dothraki and Unsullied while Cersei gained Euron’s armada and about 20,000 Golden Company mercenaries.
“The balance has grown distressingly even,” Varys noted Sunday, and that was before Rhaegal went down. (Imagine where things would stand now if Cersei’s elephants had come through.)
This season there’s been a parallel effort to strip Daenerys down emotionally and back her in a corner, making her paradoxically more likely to go off even as she continues to lose firepower.
Sansa has openly resented her, even after Dany paused her own aspirations in order to join the White Walker fight. Her boyfriend has a better claim on the Iron Throne than she does, and people like him better, too.
This week’s episode opened with her weeping over a dead Jorah and ended with Missandei’s getting decapitated in front of her. Along the way her boyfriend denied her pleas, her dragonbaby died, and her Hand hatched yet another plan — ask Cersei to surrender — that blew up in her face.
Daenerys’ messianic qualities and single-minded throne lust has always made her a dicey candidate for realm-ruling. “I have served tyrants most of my life — they all talk about destiny,” Varys said, and he’s not wrong.
But in Dany’s defense, how much more is the woman supposed to take? She seems done listening to anything aside from her own sense of justice. And if that means tens of thousands of King’s Landing innocents have the sky fall down upon them, so be it. The question is whether she’ll end up falling along with it.
We’ll have more later. But for now, here’s what else happened Sunday:
— Jaime embraced his better self and Tyrion’s tall jokes before word of Cersei turned him into a sort of one-handed Manchurian Candidate heading back for King’s Landing. “She’s hateful, and so am I,” he told a sobbing Brienne. I know the show needs him to have a final showdown with his partner in twincest, but it all felt pretty abrupt.
— Maybe he can catch up to Bronn on the way. He finally showed up with the crossbow and his counteroffer, and left with yet another Lannister IOU: Highgarden. Castles were being doled out all over Winterfell.
— Also headed to King’s Landing: Jon, Grey Worm and their remaining army, and Arya and the Hound. By reuniting perhaps the best road duo of the show and portending a Cleganebowl (“some unfinished business”), it’s a two-for-one fan service deal, but I’m OK with it.
— So was that the last time we saw Ghost, Tormund, Sam and Gilly? Gilly mocked Sam for trying to explain to Jon where babies come from, but I think in his own clumsy way, Sam was trying to brag.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.