SPOILER ALERT – Do not read any further if you haven’t seen Season 8 Episode 4 of Game of Thrones.
- Game of Thrones Season Eight Episode Four spoilers ahead
- After the Battle of Winterfell the joint forces of the Stark and Targaryen army look towards King’s Landing
- Meanwhile, Euron and the Golden Company are lying in wait in the capital to protect Cersei
- And Missendei is captured
After a long, weird episode of Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen finds herself in the shittiest position possible going forward. They might have won the war against the undead, but the worst was yet to come. In the fourth episode of Season Eight, Daenerys’s army is decimated. Yet, she still sails her fleet south to begin the war against Cersei. This is… a terrible idea, as literally everyone has warned her.
But, before she can even begin her conquest, Euron and the Golden Company are there waiting for her, with their dragon-slaying weapons. It takes two scorpion bolts to take down Rhaegal. Then, in just a few more moments, all of her ships are decimated. Missendei is captured, and things are looking pretty damn grim.
Then, as she attempts to broker peace with Cersei, the Mad Queen beheads Missendei in front of Daenerys, sending the Mother of Dragons into a rage. “Dracarys,” Missendei says in her final moments, telling Daenerys to burn, burn it all.
And seeing Dany’s face, it’s hard not to imagine that’s exactly what she’s going to do next week with her one remaining dragon.
It doesn’t help that before sailing south, her most loyal advisors are questioning her leadership abilities. Both Varys and Tyrion are concerned with how they’ve seen Daenerys acting lately. And now, they also know of Jon’s true lineage. As do Arya and Sansa, the latter of whom discussed with Tyrion the possibility of a better suited leader to sit on the Iron Throne.
Meanwhile in the North, Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth have had tons chemistry since they were first paired together way back in Game of Thrones Season Two, spawning a legion of shippers who just wanted to see the two fighters bone. And tonight, Jaime and Brienne shippers’ dreams came true: After the celebratory, post-Night King victory feast at Winterfell, the two finally do it.
The romance was a long time in the making. The pair bonded over the course of Seasons Two and Three, which found Brienne escorting Jaime as to King’s Landing as Catelyn Stark’s prisoner in hopes of trading him for Sansa, who was in turn the captive of Cersei. On the way, the two were both captured by Bolton men, and Jaime helped save Brienne when their captors nearly raped her, and later saved her once again when the Bolton soldiers force her to fight a bear for their amusement. Jaime, dogged by his reputation as a faithless Kingslayer, came to respect Brienne’s decency, loyalty, and adherence to to a moral code, while Brienne gradually came to regard Jaime as being more honorable than his monarch-killing reputation suggested.
But though their pairing is years in the making, the execution was lacking. The first half of Episode Four was wall-to-wall fan service—Tormund chugging pints of ale, Sansa and the Hound reuniting, Gendry getting down on one knee to propose to Arya. In the context of the episode, Jaime and Brienne’s romance feels less like well-earned character development and more like a cheap thrill. Cheap though it may have been, the thrill was short-lived—Jaime departed for King’s Landing at the end of the episode in a bid to save Cersei from Daenerys and her army—a move that left Brienne heartbroken. Gwendoline Christie (who plays Brienne) told EW “I was so upset.”
So here’s where we stand going into Episode Five: The North remains loyal to Jon while Sansa, Varys, and Tyrion flirt with the idea of betraying Daenerys. Meanwhile, Daenerys is beginning to lose her grip, and making irrational, emotional decisions. In other words, she’s in a pretty shitty position as she attempts to fight Cersei’s recently strengthened army with her own tired forces, while down one dragon.
