Smouldering Ash

 

 

There’s been a feeling that the fifth season of Game of Thrones has started quite slowly.

Three episodes in and Stannis and his clique are still lounging around at the Wall like a bunch of moochers; Arya’s sweeping up; Tyrion’s been stuck in his carriage; we don’t know whether the Hound is alive and we’ve only had two minutes of Dorne.

Contrast with the first three episodes of season four and we’d witnessed the Hound’s famous chicken scene, the introduction of Oberyn, Theon’s transformation to Reek, the poisoning of Joffrey, Tyrion’s arrest, Baelish’s ‘rescue’ of Sansa, Karl ‘fookin’ Tanner of Gin Alley leading the mutiny at Craster’sKeep and Daenerys putting Meereen under siege.

We were bloody spoilt in season four, in fact, from the period of the Red Wedding in the late third season up to Arya boarding the boat to Braavos every episode was sublime.

We’re now demanding a huge death or a cinematic battle every week, and the start of the fifth series hasn’t really provided that….unless you class the death of the most excellent Janos Slynt as big news, which I most certainly do!

But look at it like this – the longer the show takes to get going, the more we’ve got to watch. If season five had wrapped up most of the main events in the first three episodes, we wouldn’t have much to look forward to. Just as winter is coming, you know in season five excellence is also not too far away.

And besides, I could quite easily watch three hours of the characters in Game of Thrones talking to one another about ‘what their father once told them’ anyway. They’re that engrossing. In fact I’d rather watch a conversation between a pair of Game of Thrones characters than I would real, actual people, but perhaps that’s just me being a weirdo.

I like to think of Game of Thrones as being akin to a volcano. If late season three and the whole of season four was the violent eruption, we’re now in the stage where the landscape has changed, ash has settled but the lava underground is bubbling and rumbling for the next explosion to rock Westeros and Essos.

You can already feel things picking up.

 

Of the slow three episodes, this week’s episode was the least slow. 

Baelish is to force Sansa into marrying the deranged Ramsey Bolton. We say ‘forced’, on paper he gave her the choice ‘look, you don’t want to do this? Fine, we’ll turn everybody around and go all the way back home if you’re not up for it’, but that was Baelish’s reverse psychology at play. The wily fox pulled the famous move where it’s easy to convince somebody to do something by suggesting they don’t have to, instead of outright ordering them to do it.

Think of an example in your own lives, let’s say you’re 17 years old and you ask your Mother for a lift to the train station. 

Which technique works better?

‘Are you ok to drop me off at the train station? I mean you don’t have to. I was going to walk through the snow, I’ve got plenty of time. Up to you.’

Or

‘Give me a damn lift to the train station….now’

The first option is the most effective and Baelish knows this. It is the illusion of offering choice and making the person believe they have the power to decide. 

Of course Baelish further influenced her decision by doing that creepy thing he does where gets all up in her grill, putting his face about 2 inches away from hers, immediately forcing her on the back foot. Let’s hope he’s had a few Tic-Tacs for lovely Sansa’s sake. 

The decision to give Sansa to the Boltons seemed baffling at first, but when Baelish gave his speech about it being high time Sansa went on the offensive and avenged her family, it started to make a lick of sense. Sansa would become some kind of sleeper agent amongst the Boltons with perhaps the ultimate aim of taking them out from within. 

 

Bit of a risk though.  

Sansa is the key to the North, handing her over to a maniac who peels the skin off people, chases attractive women through the woods with a pack of dogs and eats *ahem* sausages, means lovely Sansa could be one wrong move away from being turned into a pair of shoes. 
 

Baelish did say to Ramsey that he hadn’t heard much about him, so perhaps Littlefinger’s intel isn’t as good as it once was. But if Sansa is successful, and she launches some kind of coup and retakes Winterfell…then Baelish would have his niece as Wardeness of the North and with his power accrued in The Vale, our ambitious pimp could feasibly gobble up half the country.

 

Are the dynamics changing between Margaery and Cersei?

Too early to say, but Cersei cut a broken figure when she was being mocked by the rose of the Tyrells ‘We’d have got some wine in if we knew you were coming, but it’s 10 o’clock in the morning and we’re not all pissheads’, ‘oh, what should we call you now that you’re essentially irrelevant?’
 

Cersei looked haunted. Her voice quivered.
 

Until she left the room that is and marched away with her Lannister guard, looking quite menacing, seemingly off to plot something wicked. Perhaps we shouldn’t write the lioness off yet.
 

Slynt was beheaded by Jon ‘the housewives favourite’ Snow. The temptation is to see Slynt as an argumentative, cowardly idiot. But ponder the other argument for a moment…
 

At the end of season one he foiled a King’s Landing coup against the King’s son [Slynt doesn’t know the truth behind Joffrey’s parentage], and how was he repaid for saving the realm? Oh he was shipped off to the Wall.
 

He hid as 100,000 Wildlings attacked the 100 Night’s Watch men. But wouldn’t you feel bitter at the prospect of dying in defence of people down south who punished you for protecting the royal family, who are now sunbathing and drinking wine while you have to contend with certain death in a frozen wasteland? I don’t think I’d be motivated to die in such circumstances.
 

And now the traitor, the terrorist’s son is Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and is trying to ship Slynt off to exile. Isn’t that a galling situation for Janos? You’d be pretty riled too.
 

Do you deserve your head cut off for back chatting to the bastard son of a terrorist who is trying to exile you? Well…I’m not sure.

Raise a glass tonight to the honourable, loyal, Janos Slynt.

The episode ended in Volantis as the dirty cow Jorah reappeared on the scene, not dancing for loose change in the gutters of Qarth as I once speculated, but here he was leering and leaching over a Daenerys lookalike in a brothel.
 

As soon as Tyrion decided to get out of his box and go into the brothel I thought something bad might happen. I’ve been to too many away games with Birmingham to know when you don’t go into a drinking establishment on hostile soil. It reminded me when we went to Derby once and a tattooed mentalist in the beer garden of a rough local pub kept asking us the time every 10 minutes, obviously trying to determine whether we had Birmingham accents. When he realised that we did, he went running back inside the pub.

Shit. Shit. He’s gone to tell them that we’re Birmingham fans.
 

I noticed a fire exit in the corner of the outdoor space. 
 

We debated whether to just bail out of the fire exit and get out of there while we had the chance. In the end we waited, we took the gamble. Luckily at that moment, more Birmingham City fans entered the beer garden, dressed in flat caps and fitted jackets. They nodded to us, we nodded back, we were now under the protection of the Peaky Blinders.

The Derby goblin re-entered the garden, took one look at the Blues Peakies and walked off.
 

We let out a sigh of relief.

 

How Tyrion wished he’d have bailed out the fire exit before the local nutter started watching him pee, before wrapping a rope around our favourite dwarfs bonce and announcing that he was going to take him to ‘the Queen’.

But which Queen is that? We’ll have to wait and see.

Looks like the steam has well and truly started to rise from the Game of Thrones volcano.