Game of Thrones: Kill the Boy, season 5 episode 5, review
Never accept an invitation to a dinner party at Winterfell while the Boltons are in charge. Episode five marked the halfway point of the season with the world's most awkward dinner, although Danaerys’s human/dragon barbecue in Meereen was a close contender.
Despite a few outstanding scenes, the tension dipped a little in this episode after the pulse-racing action of recent weeks, and several storylines were disappointingly left hanging. It’s now been a while since we saw the magnificent Arya, for instance. For all we know, she’s still pushing a broom around in the dark in Braavos, starring in her own personal reboot of The Karate Kid. There was no word of the hell breaking loose in King’s Landing, either, and a too-brief glimpse of Tyrion.
But Daenerys’s spectacular loss of temper at the very beginning of the episode, with her decision to start feeding people to her dragons without a second thought, was a thrilling and visually awe-inspiring moment that lit up the screen with fire and fury, and the final burst of action from Tyrion and Jorah versus the Stone Men made for a heart-stopping cliffhanger.
Boltons Roose and Ramsay (Michael, seemingly, couldn’t make it) hosted dinner with Sansa, and she was reintroduced to the traitorous Theon (now Reek). It’s testament to just how effectively Game of Thrones builds atmosphere that even when Ramsay wasn’t doing anything, if he and Theon were on screen together my blood pressure went through the roof. Psychological torture can be just as spine-chilling as the bloody kind.
Ramsay was also enjoying strutting around Winterfell naked, as if it were a tropical paradise and not an icy wilderness. This sort of carry-on makes me wonder if Ramsay actively brainstorms ways to look terrifying, in between murdering women and chopping off the genitals of his human playthings.
After dinner there was a jaw-droppingly unnerving moment of father-son bonding. Roose revealed to Ramsay the story of his conception, in which Roose raped Ramsay’s mother under the swinging corpse of her hanged husband. It was cartoonishly repulsive, but Ramsay is nothing if not criminally insane, so he took the news in good grace. Though Iwan Rheon has mostly played Ramsay as a straightforward psychopath thus far, in this episode we saw some intriguing nuance. It’s still not entirely clear what he thinks of Sansa, and Rheon is keeping his performance nicely enigmatic on that front.
At the mid-point of the season, the pace in this episode felt once again as though we were gearing up for something bigger to come. But even in a slower episode, the show’s ambitions were still enormous.
Who will fall victim to Greyscale?
We’ve heard of Shireen Baratheon’s experience of the Greyscale illness, and Gilly has mentioned her sisters who became violent and animalistic as their skin turned stone-like. Here we met the Stone Men as a fully-fledged new supernatural threat, a refreshing development given how long it’s been since we last saw the White Walkers. But now Jorah has the disease, how long can he last? And will he pass it on to Tyrion?
Stannis: grammar nerd
I haven’t always been sure whether King Stannis is a good ruler, or even a particularly interesting person. But hearing him, under his breath, grumpily correct the use of the word “less” (when the right term was “fewer”) made my heart sing. If Stannis’s power manifesto includes a commitment to upholding decent standards of grammar in the North and beyond, he’s a leader I can get behind.
Is Daenerys becoming more like her father?
Daenerys returned to the only creatures she can really trust: her two remaining dragons. "A good mother never gives up on her children,” she said. As their fiery breath bathed Dany’s face in a malevolent orange glow, there was more than a little of the ruthless, unpredictable Mad King flickering across her features. And then there was her out-of-the-blue declaration of intention to marry. Are her days of wise rule coming to an end?
"Kill the boy, Jon Snow"
Jon Snow has been taking advice from all angles at The Wall, but the result is that we’re continuing to see his transition from adolescent into mature leader. There was also some intriguing hint-dropping about his true parentage, likely to bait followers of a popular fan theory. How many meaningful Targaryen references can people make in Jon's presence before he starts to put two and two together? Or is it a red herring?
Grey Worm lives
A heart-warming moment came in the revelation that Grey Worm survived last episode's massacre. Even better, he announced his love for Missandei. Their tender scene together was a perfect counterbalance to the horrifying hanky-panky going on courtesy of the Boltons in the North.