GAME OF THRONES Season 5 Episode 1
Episode Title: “The Wars to Come”
Writers: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Director: Michael Slovis
Previously on “Game of Thrones”:
It’s fitting that the fifth season premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones kicked off with the series’ first flashback. We’re starting to enter uncharted territory in this show as it will potentially run out of material from George R.R. Martin’s published A Song of Ice and Fire novels later this season.
If anything, I wish the switch to flashbacks had come sooner. Game of Thrones has had a lot of success with getting its performers to monologue about important moments in their lives. Jaime Lannister’s story about why he killed the king was a personal favorite. But this scene with young Cersei Lannister (Nell Williams) wouldn’t have worked as well as a monologue. We needed to see young Cersei react to the witch’s prophecy in a hopeful way that the older Cersei (Lena Headey) couldn’t have fully conveyed.
The witch’s prophecy was so accurate that the memory of it may actually be foreshadowing Cersei’s fate to be replaced by a much younger queen. Hence the death glare she shoots Margaery (Natalie Dormer).
There are full spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones’ fifth season premiere! You’ve been warned!
Cersei and the rest of the powerful elite in King’s Landing are so busy mourning her father, Tywin (Charles Dance), that they haven’t realized the broader implications of his death. No one really loved Tywin, but everyone feared him. And without Tywin, the Lannisters will probably have a hard time holding on to power.
None of this stops Cersei from lashing out at her brothers, even if Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) is beyond her reach at the moment. The more surprising turn was the reappearance of Lancel Lannister (Eugene Simon), Cersei’s cousin and former lover whom I didn’t recognize at all. Lancel has become a bit of a religious fanatic since we last saw him, but Cersei won’t even acknowledge the crimes they committed together.
Cersei’s younger brother, Tyrion, reappears in Essos after spending the oceanic voyage stuck in a box. Amusingly, we even get a box eye view of Tyrion’s perspective and an explanation of how his presence was hidden from the other people on the ship. But more intriguingly, Varys (Conleth Hill) proposes an alliance with Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) to install her as the new ruler of Westros. That’s a very exciting prospect.
However, neither Tyrion nor Varys are aware that Daenerys isn’t having much luck as the ruler of Meereen. There’s already an uprising against her rule and Daenerys can’t even control her dragons anymore. Without Ser Jorah, Daenerys has only Daario Naharis (Michiel Huisman) to tell her how badly she’s screwing up… and it’s not enough. Daenerys realizes that Daario is right about needing the dragons as symbols. But her two remaining dragons nearly attack her when she visits them.
Apparently Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson) isn’t the only member of the Unsullied to have sexual needs. The murdered Unsullied soldier in this episode was killed at a brothel, which appears to mystify Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), the object of Grey Worm’s affection. Meanwhile, Daenerys appears to have taken Daario as her new lover. Unfortunately, he’s still not very interesting.
My favorite part of the episode was Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and his increasingly complex relationship with the two kings in his life: Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) and Mance Rayder (Ciarán Hinds). As much as Jon seems to defer to Stannis, he openly defies his new king to spare Mance a very painful death by fire. It’s an act of defiance that probably won’t sit well with Stannis or Ser Alliser Thorne (Owen Teale), the man most likely to lead the Night’s Watch as Lord Commander.
But then Jon’s never done things the easy way. Hilariously, Jon admits that he’s not a virgin to Melisandre (Carice van Houten), which probably spared him from also getting burned as a sacrifice to the Lord of Light. Stannis even had enough respect for Jon to ask him to convince Mance to fight under Stannis’ banner and retake the North from the Boltons.
Stannis’ offer was actually fair, but there was no way that Mance could take it. Mance lived by the idea that the Wildlings (or the free folk) bow to no king. He would literally rather die than capitulate to Stannis’ demand to bend the knee. Although I loved the glimpse of fear in Mance’s face when he learned how he was going to die, and his desperate attempts to keep himself from screaming as the flames approached. It feels like a waste to kill off Mance so quickly, but this isn’t the first time that Ciarán Hinds has died on HBO.
I was less enamored with the appearances of Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish (Aidan Gillen) and Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) as well as the brief cameo by Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) and Podrick (Daniel Portman) which did little more than remind us that they exist. Unless Brienne and Pod are going to cross paths with Sansa and Littlefinger in the near future then the scene where Sansa’s carriage rode by Brienne and Pod was really unnecessary.
This episode of Game of Thrones wasn’t the strongest season premiere as the writers reshuffled the characters. But the potential new alliances are something that I’m very eager to see in the upcoming episodes of season five.
