Shall We Begin?
- Alex Clark
- Jul 17, 2017
- 3 min read
Game of Thrones
Dragonstone
July 16th, 2017
There is no worse feeling than that period in between seasons of a TV show that you love, that sense of emptiness, where you have gone from watching an hour at the same time every week for 10, 12 even 24 episodes at a time. Ok, I might be exaggerating with a lot of tv shows, but one that a lot of us can agree with is Game of Thrones. I don't think there's a TV show on air at the moment that really feels like a drag before it comes back on TV, and where the hype really builds in the weeks building up to the season premiere. This can be down to there only being 10 episode seasons of the medieval based drama, with a much shorter season 7. Or that Season 7 is starting almost 13 whole months since season 6 drew its curtains with Daenerys Targaryen finally sailing towards Westeros with her army and dragons in tow, or the fact that it is one of the best things to grace our TVs in a very very long time (arguably ever?).
Season 7's premiere Dragonstone doesn't pull any punches at all in it's opening 3 minutes we see Arya starting to take the names off her list that started way back after the Red Wedding. Very early on, we get to see where all the Stark children are and what they are currently up to, with Bran getting back to the Wall with Mera, Jon Snow and Sansa controlling the North and Arya taking the mantel of the many faced God. Arya's arc i am looking forward to, i think she may have a huge part to play in this season if thats the direction she is going in.
This episode, as good as it is, feels very much of the opening episode that it is, in that every character gets some screen time of some sort. Really gives the viewer a sense of where they are and what their story's hold in this season. I am hoping however that this is the only 'building' episode that we are going to get with (already!) only 6 episodes left.
There was a lot of black coming through in the costumes I noticed, whether theres a hidden metaphor involved or reading too much into it. The only character we saw that was really wearing something that wasn't black was Sam Tarly at Oldtown wearing his white robes. Maybe its something that we will get to in the coming episodes.
One thing I didn't really care too much for is needless 'celebrity' cameos. This episode gave a small segment to Ed Sheeran, who was part of a group of Lannister soldiers who offer Arya some food for her journey. Other than grabbing Arya's attention with a song, Sheeran doesn't add anything to the story at all. And it's not like in previous episodes they have just dubbed singing over a normal secondary character. Game of Thrones has done well to exceed expectations as a TV show and beyond the book to not need these little cameos and I do hope that these aren't there to try an entice a new audience in when it can do that off it's own merit.
Back to the positives, we finally saw Daenerys landing at Westeros for the first time on both screen and book, in a brilliant final 5 minutes or so where the director managed to capture what it meant to be back 'home' in a silent segmant of her walking through Dragonstone. Looking upon the throne room and uttering quietly 'Shall we begin?' Quite Brilliant.
8.5/10 - Game of Thrones really didn't pull any punches in jumping back onto our screens, and really showed the audience how big the stakes are in this season. Where it leads in only 6 more episodes, is anyones guess. Winter is most definitely here.
Comments