Game of Thrones “Hardhome”: Winter has come

Are you not entertained? The image that has been making the meme rounds from Sunday's Game of Thrones

Photo Credit: HBO 

Some quick bullet point thoughts on what is perhaps Game of Thrones’ finest hour as soon as I drink every drop of water on the floor…

“He always comes back”

-Sam

Holy Crap!

Beyond that I don’t have too much time today so let’s get straight to the bullets…

• I’ve very much enjoyed this season of Game of Thrones and believe it is the best the series has done yet. Being a reader of all of Martin’s novels I’m finding that the more and more that Benioff and Weiss are deviating from the source material the better and better the show is getting. What works in Martin’s novels at times hasn’t worked in the show particularly keeping the characters so far apart and having the overall plot move as slowly as the books let the character development stew. A lot of that does not work on television and it seems as though the writing crew has begun to speed things up a little bit. Characters are going through plot and meeting each other on a great frequency. There have still been flaws, evil Ramsey does not seem to have any point or any other characteristics then being evil, and the show uses rape or attempted rape with a surprising frequency without ever really paying it off with all that much emotional significance, but there have been so many exceptional elements that the flaws often feel marginal in comparison.

• Speaking of, how about the final 30 minutes of this episode. Game of Thrones often feels like it has a pretty large budget for even a big HBO drama but boy this takes the cake. Jon and the wildlings’ confrontation with the dreaded white walkers is perhaps the greatest action set piece in television history. The jaw dropping CGI, and camera work were second only to the simple amount of storytelling that happened in one 30 minute sequence. One of the flaws of last season’s big penultimate episode action sequence was that I really did not care about much of anything going on throughout the sequence despite it being filmed and beautifully put together. That was not a problem here as the sequence focused on not only creating a grand sense of dread and tension but  focused on small character arcs within that gave the sequence a little extra punch. The death of the main wildling woman as she couldn’t kill the undead children with the setup of her loving her own daughter more than anything else in the world made it extra special and devastating when she woke up as an undead at the end of the episode. In all it was completely jaw dropping on a scale that we haven’t seen before and has become the new gold standard of what an action sequence can accomplish on television.

• The rest of the episode was much quieter but almost as fantastic. As mentioned earlier many of the show’s character interactions have been made better with many characters coming together and that is no more evident with the interactions between Tyrion and Daenerys. Sure we are only at the very beginning of the arc but the two awkward dynamic sequences between the two really popped throughout the opening half hour of “Hardhome.” Peter Dinklage lights up every part of the show that he is a part of and these two sequences suggest nothing different with the mother of dragons’ portion of the show. Daenerys’ arc was always my least favorite part of Dance of Dragons and the infusion of Tyrion into the fold on the show is a very welcome touch.

• Cersei’s imprisonment is also working in a very good fashion and being bit by the hand that she thought would feed her is a great arc for her as the show progresses. While it’s hard to not rout against Cersei for all the chaos that she has caused the show has done a wonderful job of making her captors almost equally as terrible which creates a nice quandary for viewers.

That’s it for me for this week! As I said earlier this has been a pretty awesome season of the show and “Hardhome” has been its crowning achievement. I’m hoping to write a bit about the final two episodes over the next two weeks but it honestly depends on what the work schedule looks like and how quickly I am able to see the coming episodes.

That’s just me though. What did everyone else think?