Game of Thrones Is Already More Humane in Season 7

Nothing happened in the first episode of Game of Thrones’ seventh season. I loved it anyway. The show, which returned this week to a great deal of fanfare and some truly massive ratings, also served up a season premiere that put tone ahead of plot.
The expectations around this season are more intense than ever, in part because it contains fewer episodes than previous years. With this reduction in episodes comes an expectation that plotting will be brisker. After all, there’s still like, four wars to fight.
In “Dragonstone,” though, Game of Thrones reminded us that the plot isn’t why we’re here. Game of Thrones is the rare series where a return to the world is perhaps the best treat that can be given. It’s a place so vast, filled with so many people worth following, that simply returning to it can be more satisfying than any single plot development. At its best, the show has never needed massive twists to be thoroughly compelling, even if they don’t hurt anything.
That’s why this episode’s final sequence is so wonderfully thrilling. It relies heavily on what the show has been building toward for years. Daenerys is returning to her home soil for the first time in the entire series, and that weight is carried without any dialogue that reminds us that this moment is a historic one.
The sequence is ballsy, especially in a writers’ medium like television. There’s always an impulse to break the tension, to say something to make it clear just how momentous Daenerys’s return to her homeland is. Instead, the showrunners decided to lean on the show’s own history, and it worked.
Everything that comes before this closing scene is equally compelling, not because of the ways it moves the pieces on the board, but because it seems to come from a firm understanding of where these characters are in their stories. For Arya, that place is a vengeful one. The episode’s cold open may have felt like a light retread of the revenge she’d already taken against the Freys last season, but it’s also a reminder that that revenge is her primary motivator.
All “Shape of You” singers aside, Arya’s second scene, in which she runs into a group of Lannister bannermen who basically complain non-stop about the Lannisters, was a careful reminder that while the nobility fight this war on giant, painted maps, they’re not the ones who pay for it daily. Arya wants a clear idea of who is and isn’t good inside of Westeros, but this scene complicates that notion by reminding us that soldiers don’t always love the people they fight for. Sometimes a job is just a job.
This focus on characters in conflict was extended to Cersei and Jaime, whose relationship begins to splinter because of Cersei’s need to consolidate power, and Jaime’s unwillingness to push blindly ahead. He wants to take a moment to acknowledge what they’ve both lost, but she can’t do it. Cersei’s pushing everything down. She’s fighting the urge to mourn her children, all of whom are dead, and she’s determined to busy herself by proving that she can do this job, that she can succeed where so many men have failed before. She’s determined to prove that her decision to blow up the Sept was worth something, anything at all.
The night’s best scenes were were reserved for Sandor Clegane, though. A gruff, cynical man, The Hound may have finally found something to believe in. The man known as The Hound has developed, subtly and slowly, since we first met him. Like many of television’s best characters, he’s developed without changing. The Hound is still the type of man who describes his companions as “bald cunts,” but that doesn’t mean he’s still the type of man who will rob a family he’s sure won’t survive, even if he discovers that his suspicions about the family were right.
As The Hound looked into the flames conjured up by Thoros of Myr, flames that still terrify him, he seemed to believe for the first time that the world might be organized around something other than random terror. It’s this realization that leads to his eulogy for the man he robbed, and the man’s daughter, one in which he explains that they both deserved better. The Hound of a few years ago might not have believed in the idea that people “deserve” anything, but this new version does. He’s longing for a world that’s ordered around anything, even if he acknowledges that that order is something he can’t comprehend.
That need to believe is running through the blood of every fan of Game of Thrones. The home-stretch is upon us, and the showrunners’ desire to burn through plot as quickly as possible could lead to some truly terrible characterization. Thankfully, “Dragonstone” suggests that Game of Thrones might be able to have it both ways in its last two seasons.
As thrilling as season 6’s finale was, it was also jam-packed with plot. Season 7 started by suggesting that, while that plot was deeply engaging, what matters most is execution. “Dragonstone” felt like “The Winds of Winter,” if nothing had happened in “The Winds of Winter.” It felt more human. It felt like a show with some swagger, some confidence, and a belief that what we really want is more time with these characters, even if we don’t deserve anything at all.
