So the second episode of Game Of Thrones season 8 has just gone to air and yes, there will be spoilers in this review and post episode discussion. Please watch the episode before reading this review.
Coming out of last week’s episode, I was quite keen to see the second episode of the show this week. Last week we saw the beginning of what I think is some tension between Jon and Daenerys about who will rule on the iron thrones in the future. Last week we also learnt about the birth of Jon Snow, which gives him a claim to the iron throne. This week we see a little of this continue. John tells Daenerys about this and while I think this is quite foolish considering his position and her position in the world, he trusts Daenerys and tells her anyway. They end up getting interrupted by the battle, but I know that Daenerys isn’t pleased with this information, it goes against her goals and makes Jon a direct threat.
We also see in this episode a conversation between Daenerys and Sansa where the two try to forgive each other for their awkwardness last week. Towards the end of the conversation Sansa and Daenerys didn’t really get anywhere in the end, with the talk ending on the point of what will happen after the war with the dead. I think going forward with this season, the main tensions will be about who will rule the iron throne between Daenerys and Jon. But for now the characters will work together to fight the dead and by looking at the trailer for the next episode today, it looks like this will be what next week’s episode will be about.
There were a lot of development this week for Jaime Lannister. The start of this episode had the character on trial and Sansa and Daenerys were figuring out what to do with him. In this scene I felt that it seemed like in this setting that Sansa was more in control of the room, even though it is probably Daenerys who is supposed to be.
Overall the episode was quite good for Jaime and he was welcomed back in rather quickly by the majority of characters in the show. I enjoyed seeing Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Peter Dinklage act alongside one another again, with the two sharing quite a bit of screen time this week.
Much of the rest of the episode was a little gloomy. They’re all in that castle waiting for the dead to come and attack them and there doesn’t really seem to be a character that is motivating everyone to fight. They all seem rather worried about it all. Most of them go to sleep, others stay up and drink, Brienne gets made into a knight and Arya has sex with Gendry. The Arya scene was probably the most surprising out of this, especially since the character was basically a kid for much of the series. Having not known how old she was or how old she is I tried to search it on Google and it seems everyone else is as well, just look at the top Google search results below. I have done some research and found out she’s 18 now.
Overall, I found this episode to be quite good. While it was a little gloomy to see the everyone just sit around and wait for battle, it was also nice seeing them all sit around and chat with one another. It’s great to see Jaime get accepted into the group and I am keen to see what happens between Jon and Daenerys next week.
