Episode Title: "The Bells"
Episode Grade: A
For many years, one of the primary criticisms of Game of Thrones was that too many Daenerys storylines were resolved through dragon ex machina - Daenerys would seem to be in an impossible spot, her dragons would show up, Emilia Clarke would smugly say "Dracarys" and all of the messy plot complications would disappear in a stream of dragon fire.
In a way, "The Bells" represents the obvious narrative conclusion to that line of criticism. Daenerys Targaryen had brought herself from the desolate steppes of a distant land to the gates of King's Landing thanks to fire and blood. She had transformed herself from the chattel wife of a brutal warlord into one of the most powerful human beings on the face of the Earth, and she had done it through the liberal use of dragon fire.
And, in the end, that is how she took the throne she believed was rightfully hers. It was the only way she could - with fire and blood.
There are so many adjectives to describe "The Bells." Breathtaking. Extraordinary. Brutal. Tragic. Intense. All are accurate. But somehow, even taken together, they fail to truly convey the sheer scope and strength and greatness of Game of Thrones' penultimate episode.
"The Bells" is already catching flak for its treatment of Daenerys, for supposedly ruining a much-loved character. But if the moment when Daenerys sits astride her dragon, hears the church bells ring out across King's Landing, decides to ignore the agreed-upon signal of surrender and proceeds to incinerate the city was not inevitable, it did not, we must admit, come out of nowhere.
Daenerys has always solved her problems in such a fashion. And we have always cheered her on. We cheered in "And Now His Watch Is Ended" when we heard "Dracarys" for the first time, when Daenerys roasted alive the slavers of Astapor. We cheered when she crucified the Wise Masters of Mereen. We cheered when she burned Vaes Dothrak to the ground in "Book of the Stranger." We cheered when she destroyed the forces of Slaver's Bay in "The Winds of Winter." We cheered when she roasted the Lannister army in "The Spoils of War" and we cheered in that same episode when she burned alive Randall and Dickon Tarly.
We cheered these acts of horrific violence because we thought of Daenerys as The Hero, because she was killing bad people and she was going to end tyranny in Westeros.
And in "The Bells," she finally succeeds. She kills the evil tyrant on the throne and eliminates all of her supporters. She fulfills her destiny and accomplishes the mission we've been watching her pursue for the better part of a decade.
And it is terrifying.
"The Battle of the Bastards" was a master class in showing the brutality of a pitched battle between competing armies. "The Bells," for its part, is an extraordinary, heart-pumping exploration of the on-the-ground reality of a city's destruction. Jon Snow is here with the Northern army, but the episode - directed brilliantly by Miguel Sapochnik, who should be using this on his clip reel for the rest of his life - makes very clear very fast that the The Battle of King's Landing isn't about him. Jon has only slightly more control of what's happening than the hapless men and women dying in agony in front of his eyes.
No, "The Bells" is the culmination of Daenerys' arc, and if that feels wrong to you, well, Game of Thrones has always made clear the darkness within the character. She is, after all, the daughter of a literal Mad King, and she is convinced of her own righteousness and of the glory of her purpose. Cersei is the great evil befouling Westeros, and Daenerys has seen her brutality first hand in the execution of her beloved Missandei. She believes the man she loves has betrayed her, she believes her advisers are either traitorous (Varys) or incompetent (Tyrion) and she believes herself unloved in her kingdom.
The innocent people of King's Landing aren't the masters of Slaver's Bay, of course, which is why so may feel like this episode represents a betrayal of a character they love. But the Daenerys we see in "The Bells" is a version of the character that has always been lurking - once you've decided that cruelty is an appropriate response to evil, the other lines grow perilously thin.
Game of Thrones has always been about subverting the audience's expectations and dashing its hopes, showing the dark side of heroes and the nuances of villains. Daenerys is (almost) the last in a line of hereditary monarchs known for their cruelty, a woman who believes she has a gods-given right to a throne and who possesses the Westerosi equivalent of a nuclear weapon. If you believed she would only ever use it for indisputable good, if you believed she would only ever be a simple, straight-forward hero, well, you can't rightly claim there were no signs warning you of the danger ahead.
We see much of this through the eyes of Arya Stark, just two episodes removed from slaying the Night King and literally saving the world. She enters King's Landing walking side by side with The Hound, a confident bad-ass on her way to finally wiping the last name off her list and killing Cersei. But when The Hound points out that Cersei is already doomed and convinces her to leave, Arya begins a descent into the Hell of war, fleeing helplessly before the onslaught of Daenerys and her dragon.
Maisie Williams, always great, is extraordinary here, selling every inch of the character's terror and exhaustion as she desperately scrambles through the guts of a dying city, looking for some escape. She recognizes a mother and her child and tries to save them, but fails. By the end of the episode, she is bruised and bloodied and covered in the falling ash of a burning King's Landing, and we have witnessed Arya finally discovering the horror of full-scale war, instead of the clean, clever assassinations she had been trained in.
There are some truly breathtaking moments in Arya's journey, including an epic long take in which she maneuvers through the crowded, panicking streets of King's Landing and an extraordinary shot near the episode's end of Arya lit by a setting sun amidst the falling ash.
While there's still one episode remaining, "The Bells" feels like a culmination of everything Game of Thrones has been building toward, both as a narrative and as a viewing experience. It goes straight into the show's pantheon as one of its best episodes, and is likely to be considered an extraordinary film-making achievement for years to come.
Notes
- I wanted this to be more of an argument than a traditional recap review, so there's a lot that I didn't really cover.
- One of my only disappointments is that Jaime really was coming to rescue Cersei and not kill her, as many of us imagined. The two die together, which is only appropriate, but it rather neuters Jaime's redemption arc to make attempting to save Cersei his final act.
- The long-awaited Clegane Bowl mostly justifies the wait. Some of the early sword fighting between Sandor and Gregor is too chopped up by camera cuts to really have an impact, but once Gregor removes his armor the fight becomes much more compelling.
- Euron also dies.
