Who can you trust these days in a war-torn, backstabbing, deeply divided Westeros? After an opening episode pulsing with revenge and leadership issues, Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday, 2am/9pm) springs an episode largely given to matters of allegiance and loyalty, to battle plans and poisonous politics – with some eye-watering insights into the rudimentary state of medical science in the Seven Kingdoms.
It is a stormy night in Dragonstone, the gloomy ancestral home of Daenerys Targaryen, played in part by Derry. She has returned here with her amassed infantry, cavalry, navy, airforce and retinue of advisers, all sourced from sunnier climes. This ought to be a strong strategic position, but Dany has a glum manner, either suspicious of her motley inner circle or still coming to terms with the end of location shoots in the world’s warmer holiday spots.
She takes her mind off things by interrogating Varys (Conleth Hill), the servant of many masters, over his shifting affiliations. But Varys, a man with both the composure and dress sense of Buddha, is not easily rattled: he serves the people. Good answer.
Daenerys, whom Emilia Clarke plays with the immobile expression of someone posing for a portrait or checking their voicemail messages, is a callow and malleable leader with a worrying amount of firepower. "You're not here to be the queen of ashes," counsels Tyrion when she muses about just torching King's Landing. (He looks perturbed when she repeats the exact line later. Thank the Lord of Light she doesn't have a Twitter account.) Instead he advises this superpower to use local forces to choke off the Lannisters, thus winning hearts and minds on the ground, a tactic that has not worked out well recently in Iraq or Syria.
Their surprise first visitor Melisandre, a roundly despised religious cult leader, recommends they combine forces with Jon Snow, citing a nebulous and conveniently non-gender specific High Valerian prophecy about a coming saviour. That’s good enough for Daenerys. Meanwhile Jon – in need of dragonglass and firepower – also appreciates the benefits of alliance. In Winterfell, though, nobody else does: numerous massacres and occasional violent insanities have lessened both the Targaryen and Lannister credit ratings up north.
For a lesson in how such reputations can be tarnished by mendacious, unstable politicians resorting to racist language – as though any was needed – turn to Cersei, who paints a perfectly Trumpian picture of Westeros’s new immigrants: they’re savages, they’re mindless heathen, they’re coming here to rape our women, to enslave and butcher our men. And some, I assume, are good people. Behind this smokescreen is a burgeoning missile defence programme since Targaryen successfully tested her own intercontinental ballistic dragons.
As ever, behind the querulous courts or the grand set pieces, the better moments come in quieter corners. Who would be unmoved to find Grey Worm, a steely castrated soldier on the eve of shipping out for duty, fumbling for the language of romance? “You are my weakness,” he tells Missandei, before she takes this stern member of the Unsullied, and they get down to breathlessly sullying each other.
The other best line of the episode is Jim Broadbent’s slightly wounded, “We’re not poets, Tarley”, when Sam objects to the dry title of his forthcoming history book. In the meantime, Sam is secretly engaged in aggressively curing Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) of a fatal skin condition that leaves his body covered in grey scales, and which is called “greyscale”. (Game of Thrones physicians are not poets either.)
The climax of the episode is something much more vast; a maritime ambush waged by laughing weirdo Euron Greyjoy against his niece and nephew, Yara and Theon, and their cargo, Ellaria Sand and her assassin brood the Sand Snakes. Bloody and brutal, it is also shamefully lovely to watch, leaving the roiling black sea in flickering flames, and the individual fates of the younger Greyjoys and Ellaria entirely uncertain. Beware hubris.
Tyrion, no fan of Ellaria (who did poison his niece, after all), had seemed a little too sanguine about the efficacy of these tactics: “Then the game is won.” But with fragile alliances, the threat of despotic overreach, the efficient tactics of scaremongering and the bad guys gaining back some ground, this game is becoming much more interesting.
