Game of Thrones season 7 episode 6 review: Fire and ice and nothing is nice
Warning: If you haven’t seen “Beyond the Wall” yet and don’t want to be screwed yourself, we suggest that you stop reading now.
Okay, if you’re still with us, let’s all try to breathe a collective sigh while shouting “holy crap” at the TV. This week’s episode proved to be every bit worthy of its extended run time based on the big reveal at the end. The Ice Dragons were stuff of legend before this show down, but within this episode we saw proof of them as one of Daenerys’ dragons found themselves transformed. First, the Night King murdered him with his mighty ice javelin (someone qualify that dude for the Olympics!); then, at the conclusion of the episode the White Walkers yanked the dragon back out of the water, and in a mere matter of minutes we saw him resurrected with an eye as blue as ice. This is bad. REALLY bad. We’ve already seen just how dangerous these dragons are when they breathe fire, but now the White Walkers have one of the most powerful weapons that nobody else seems to know about.
Oh, and they also murdered Thoros of Myr, meaning that Beric is now officially out of lives, and also Benjen Stark seemingly in the closing minutes. Benjen sacrificed himself so that Jon Snow, left behind after Daenerys rescued many of the other travelers, could escape and rejoin the team. At that point, we were reminded once more that he and the Mother of Dragons are totally into each other, even in spite of the fact that A) she is in mourning and B) they’re related, but they don’t actually know that just yet.
Now that we’ve got you up to speed on some of the insanity in this episode, let’s take a step back and take a few deep breaths as we try to process some of that further. This episode was insane for many different reasons, with the biggest one being the epic showdown between Team Jon and the Night King before the dragons even showed up. They were able to capture a White Walker as proof to bring to Cersei, but that’s just about the only victory they had other than seeing Tormund, Jorah, and The Hound somehow emerge through the battle still breathing. Daenerys now really understands the threat the White Walkers pose, and if Cersei can realize it, as well, it’s possible that all of Westeros will band together and deal with this very real problem before they are all wiped out.
Jon made his first big move towards a union tonight: He metaphorically bent the knee (he was too tired to do anything else) within the final minutes of the episode.
How much danger is Sansa in?
Severe danger, most likely. She remains somewhat oblivious of the machinations of Littlefinger, who continues to do everything that he can to play her and Arya against each other. While Arya didn’t murder her sister tonight, she certainly seemed intent on scaring the living daylights out of her with talking about The Faceless Men. Where is Bran during all of this? Couldn’t he just see what Littlefinger is up to and tell them that he’s bad news?
Sansa also sent Brienne down to King’s Landing after Cersei requested her presence, which suggests more problems given that one of her greatest allies is not there to support her and we’ve already seen that the folk in the North are a rather fickle bunch when it comes to who they want to support.
What else is there to say?
We don’t think that it’s much of a hot take to proclaim Game of Thrones one of the greatest shows on television, but this episode was a reminder of just how powerful and visceral it can be. This episode set the course for the final episode of the season with a massive new threat, character deaths, and some of the craziest battle sequences to date. Consider this another episode for the ages. Grade: A.
Where do we go from here?
If you head over to the link here, you can take a look at some more news on the show, including a preview for the upcoming finale. (Photo: HBO.)