Welcome, my friends to another review of the fourth season of Game of Thrones! Today we look at the episode entitled "Oathkeeper", where Dany balances justice and mercy. Jaime tasks Brienne with his honor. Jon secures volunteers while Bran, Jojen, Meera and Hodor stumble on shelter.
At Meereen
We open the episode on Daenerys's camp where Missandei is teaching Grey Worm to speak Westerosi, with the two bonding over their pasts as slaves. Unfortunately, the scene with some meaningful character development is interrupted when Dany announces its time to begin the invasion. Disguised as an slave, Grey Worm and a batalion of soldiers manages to sneak into the city through the sewer drains into a dungeon where the slaves are gathering. He entices the slaves into rebelling, giving them weapons and the means to overwhelm the Masters. In the following mourning, Dany had taken control of the city and her first order is to have the Good Masters crucified the same way the children were in the way of the city... Now the Great Pyramid of Meereen is drapped with the Targaryen banner.
In all honesty I came this close to saying f*ck you to the TV when I saw all that build up to happen offscreen. We don't even get a fight, only one Master dude getting gangbanged by a bunch of angry slaves and next thing we know "WE WON THE BATTLE!!!", we don't even get to see the effects and consequences of the take over in this episode... I saw in the promo for next week that something interesting may happen next, but what the facking tease? Couldn't they had done that in this week's episode? Ugh... I am disappointed. The thing I liked was Grey Worm and Missandei's scene, small as it was... But so much for the epic city take over.
Nitpick: Why in the f*ck is the graffiti saying "Kill the masters" written in common language instead of Valyrian? -______-
At King's Landing
Jaime visits Tyrion in his cell after being admonished by Bronn during their swordfighting lessons. After they exchange some prison stories, Jaime asks if Tyrion did kill Joffrey, but Tyrion is suspicious if he is big brother was sent to kill him instead so he doesn't want to answer. He visits Cersei afterwards (despite their previous creepy scene they shared together in last episode), she is more angry to learn he visited Tyrion in his cell and tries to drive Jaime further away by implying he had betrayed her, when she demands that he bring Sansa Stark's head to him.
Instead of giving into Cersei's orders, Jaime gives Brienne a new task... To find and protect Sansa from whoever might threaten her... He gives her his own Valyrian sword which she names Oathkeeper, reminding both of them to their promises to Catelyn Stark, a new suit of armor and everyone's favorite squire Podrick Payne (who is in dire need to leave King's Landing). Jaime and Brienne part ways once again...
Also, the mystery of Joffrey's death was revealed to the viewers. During the voyage to the Vale, Sansa deduces that Littlefinger was involved in it somehow. He used poison that was carried over in her necklace given by Dontos, but the fool couldn't possibly be the one to have put it in Joffrey's cup, after all he is a drunk and a fool. Someone else in King's Landing was in roots with Littlefinger and when we cut back next we found out who the identity of his accomplice is....
.
.
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OLENNA MOTHERF*CKING TYRELL!!!!
For book readers this should come to no surprise, but come on viewers. We should probably see it coming... I mean, looking back to the Purple Wedding when she is stroking Sansa's face she probably picks a gem from her collar (which was given by Littlefinger, who provided the poison), Joffrey's cup was taken directly in front of her, you see the camera pan on her face as she looks Joffrey drinking from it and she is the first to scream to save the king just to divert her. Also, she had the motivation: to protect her granddaughter from a sadist such as Joffrey... I mean, I already knew that because it was in the books, but holy f*ck, the clues were right under our nose and we should have picked on it sooner.
We close King's Landing with Tommen being visited in his room by Maergery (who managed to slip through the four kingsguard stationed there). While she did intend to bond with him as they are meant to marry each other, I was creeped out to see Maergery trying to seduce Tommen, cause he is still more or less a kid, and getting really close to his face and saying things like "This will be our little secret".
Eeeeeeeeeeehhhhh... It doesn't help we had an accidental rape scene in last episode and (yes I am not going to let that live it down soon enough) so I was very worried to what that scene would lead. Glad Ser Pouce was there to stop anything serious of happening...
At the Castle Black
Jon and Grenn are training the new recruitees of the Night's Watch in hopes of getting all the men they can get. One such recrutee manages to impress Jon by beating one large man into the ground and forms a friendship with him... Except for the fact, he is Locke, Roose Bolton's enforcer sent to hunt down Bran and Rickon and also possibly kill Jon. The very second I recognized him, I went "Oh sh********t" and it turned steadily worse when I saw Locke managing to bs Jon into thinking he is a friendly guy...
Though Thorne is unwilling to attack Craster' Keep, but Janos Slynt convinces him to let Jon lead the assault so that the mutineers can get rid of him for them. Thorne allows Jon to march to the keep, but so long as he takes volunteers with them. Among those are Pyp, Edd, Grenn, a few others I didn't recognize... And Locke. Geez, he managed to make a friend out of Jon so well and the poor dude doesn't know what is going on.
What annoys me about this scene is that Thorne still holds contempt for Jon despite coming off as reasonable in the last episode, and he lets that little worm Slynt drive more of an edge in the Watch. Can he not see that the Watch is in deep sh*t right now, they gonna need every help they can get and Jon is the one guy that almost everyone else likes and they can get them working no problem? Does he really puts his dislike for the guy above the Watch's needs? Smh...
Beyond the Wall
We cut to Craster's Keep, where sick f*cks turned the place into their rape camp, the poor women became their sex slaves and their leader Karl Tanner sits in the "throne", drinking wine from Commander Mormont's skull (as if we didn't have enough heroic characters having their corpses being desecrated enough). When there is still one Craster boy left, Karl orders his bootlick Rast to leave it outside to be sacrificed to the White Walkers.
Not to far from there, Bran and his friends hear the child's crying and he wargs into his direwolf to investigate. Summer is captured when he gets near the keep, but not before catching a glimpse of Ghost (Jon's direwolf who is being held captive in the keep). When they decide to get nearer, the mutineers captures all of them, torturing poor Hordor for their sick amusement, threatening to do with Meera what they did with Craster's wives and when they learn Bran's identity as heir to Winterfell, the mutineers see a lion's share of fortune to hold a noble and his friends hostage...
Oh sh*t... I didn't anticipate this at all, that they would have Bran's storyline tie with the mutineers at Caster's Keep since none of this takes place in the book. With Jon marching to silence them before Mance can find them, while unknowingly taking Locke, a man that was sent to kill him and his brothers... And conveniently enough, he is being taken to a location where Bran is being held too. All of this tied out make sense, but at the same time, it can lead to a mess. I mean, lets say for sake of argument that Jon is reunited with Bran... Do you really think that if he finds him at Craster's Keep, he is going to let his little brother going further north to find the three-eyed crow where Mance's vast army is marching south?... Unless if for some contrived reason, Jon doesn't meet up his little brother, Bran and his friends manage to escape during the battle which would make the two storylines work out their own separate way, but have made this unifying these somewhat pointless.
Oh f*ck. Where is Coldhands when you need him?!?!?
As if those scenes weren't intense enough, we close the episode with what happened with the baby... He was taken by an White Walker to the Land of Always Winter before a court of Others, where one Walker identified as the Night's King dressed in black armor and bearing a crown the touches the baby's face, which starts turning pale and his eyes become eletric blue. Presumably turning him into a White Walker himself. Not going to lie, I was on the edge of my seat how tense that scene with the baby was. The gifs I just posted doesn't make it justice, I can't tell how freaked out I was over that during the first time I watched it.
Probably because it wasn't what I expected as none of this wasn't present in the book. We know very little about them, almost as much as characters in-universe do. We do know that the zombies we see are NOT White Walkers themselves, those are wights - the White Walker's servants raised from the dead; and we know that dragonglass is their one true weakness... But where do they came from, how many of they are, their true relationship with mankind is not elaborated in the books either. What happened with Craster's sons? Well, the book doesn't tell, but the show apparently did. So is that how they create more of their kind? Did the TV show just spoiled what happened in the books?!?!
Want to hear something worse? Its outright confirmed by HBO that this dark lord character is supposed to be none other than the Night's King, the treacherous Night's Watch Lord Commander that wed a female White Walker and turned the Watch into his private army, sacrificing innocents to their kind the same way Craster did.
Closing Thoughts
Oh well... This was a good episode, if only for its latter half. I was legitimately letdown by the way Dany's plot was resolved here given the set up from last week. I figure the revelation of Joffrey's murderer should probably come to a surprise for TV viewers only. The stuff at the Night's Watch and Beyond the Wall was really good, but at the same time, they were taking a drastic direction from where the books were going as Jon and Bran's storyline were not supposed to align and showing way more than they should about the White Walkers. In all that, Oathkeeper is a step up from Breaker of Chains.
Thank you guys for reading it... Next episode will be "The First of His Name"
See ya next time =P
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