We Need to Talk About Last Night’s Episode of Game of Thrones: “The Last of the Starks”

Note: This post contains serious spoilers from the most recent episode. Spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers

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Okay, ready?

I know the Dungeons and Dragons bros are under the gun to get thing wrapped up here, but their inattention to details is starting to really ruin the show for me.  It was easy enough to simply sit back and enjoy the spectacle of “The Long Night” without thinking about it too much, but last night’s episode “The Last of the Starks” didn’t have a fun, massive, dimly lit battle to distract me from all the Kimberly-sized plot holes.

The first thing I want to complain about is Daenerys’s decision to forgo any rest and march straight for Winterfell.  Since this is in principle an NFL satire site, I’ll make an NFL analogy.  Imagine you are the, let’s say, Jacksonville Jaguars.  You just beat the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game (aka the Tom Brady Invitational).  It took almost EVERYTHING you had to pull it off, and in the end you got saved by some faceless, undersized, scrappy slot receiver making a miraculous play in the waning seconds of the game.  In the real world, you’d have to face the Detroit Lions in the Super Bowl in two weeks.  But in my made up fantasy here, Roger Goodell gives you a call and says that you are welcome to take as much time as you’d like before scheduling the big game.  You can wait all the way until June, if you’d like.

A smart team would take advantage of this opportunity, and let everyone get back to full strength before stepping on the field again.  It’s not like your opponents are going to be signing any new free agents.  And they are going to have to pay the ones they’ve already signed, who aren’t going to be just stand around twiddling their thumbs for free.  An even smarter team would realize that one of their coordinators has an entire network of spies that could be relied upon to obtain incredibly valuable intelligence about your opponents’ offensive capabilities, troop movements, and whether or not their fucking fleet is still in harbor, or if they just up and pulled anchor and sailed off somewhere at the exact same time your ships are headed in their direction.

Which brings me to my second point: Rhaegal’s death.  Imagine that you’re Mike Glennon.  Even from a vantage point of just a few feet higher, you can see threats from pretty far away, right? Now imagine that you’re hundreds of feet in the air.  You can see even further!  In fact, if there was a ship trying to hide behind a rock long enough for you to get within a line-of-sight so they could shoot at you with their ballista, you’d probably get within a mile and say to yourself “hey, what are those stick things pointing up there from behind the rocks? Is that a safety cheating over to take away the deep post?  No!  Those are ship’s masts!  Well they’re not the ships from my own navy, I should probably circle around a little bit and see what’s up. Oh, they have ballistae!  Better keep my distance.”  Listen, the ballista is a pretty cool piece of siege machinery.  But we’ve already seen one dragon taken down by a miracle projectile.  Rhaegal deserved a better death than the equivalent of a horror movie jump-scare.

My third point, which is more of a wistful suggestion for what would have been an awesome shocker twist: imagine if, when Cersei was whispering in Missandei’s ear, the latter had simply grabbed Cersei’s arm and pulled her off the battlements, plunging both of them to their deaths.  How baller of a death would that have been?  And imagine them both splatting on the ground in front of Tyrion while he stands there stunned, open-mouthed, splattered with blood?  I get chills just thinking about it.  And then the remaining two episodes are about mopping up Euron, Qyburn, and the rest of the Lannister crew.  Ah well.

Finally, I’m hoping that it’s Arya that kills Cersei while wearing Tommen’s face.  At this point I’m not sure I really care who does it, though.  I just want it to be over with.

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Note: much love to Brian Grubb/Danger Guerrero for the post title inspiration