![]() ![]() ![]() But the whole “not trusting Lannisters” thing only makes sense at all with the benefit of hindsight while obviously smooth political operators, and with the taint of Jaime’s kingslaying on the family, the Lannisters haven’t, prior to this generation, had a reputation as particularly devious. When Sansa protests that she was a child and frightened and that she thought cooperating would help Ned, Arya taunts her for being “stupid” enough to believe the Lannisters and mocking her with comparisons to Lyanna Mormont. Instead, all this episode’s so-called drama at Winterfell is a boring, tedious rehash of the show’s longstanding commitment to pitting women against each other at every turn while devaluing and vilifying femininity, often in hopelessly sophomoric fashion.įirst up, we get Arya confronting Sansa with the letter and blaming Sansa for their father’s death. However, the story being shown on screen doesn’t suggest any understanding on the part of the show’s writers of girls, sibling rivalry, normal human interactions or even just basic logic. The two girls have extremely different temperaments and skill sets, and it makes sense that they would have disagreements among themselves on how to deal with their current situation. It’s not hard to imagine that Arya and Sansa’s different experiences along their wildly divergent paths over the last several seasons of the show might set them up for conflict. ![]() ![]() It’s nonsensical, and there’s not an honest motivation or compelling emotional beat in the whole episode. However, that’s only an aside in this week’s storyline, which is almost entirely focused on Arya’s general hatred of and resentment towards Sansa and more specifically on Arya’s grievance over this note and Arya’s threats of violence towards her sister. Now, to be fair, Arya wasn’t in on any of those conversations, and her own memory of Sansa at the time was of Sansa standing with Cersei while Joffrey gave the order to have Ned Stark beheaded, and that’s something that could be fodder for conflict between the sisters. Everyone who read the note at the time basically agreed that Cersei had dictated it to Sansa and that Sansa shouldn’t be blamed for cooperating under the circumstances. So, last week Arya found the letter that Sansa wrote way back in season one asking her mother and brother to come to King’s Landing and bend the knee to then-King Joffrey Baratheon, and it wasn’t clear exactly what Arya might (or even could) do with it, since it was pretty clear at the time that it was written under heavy duress by a traumatized child being kept as a prisoner and being lied to by her captors. It’s also profoundly stupid and deeply, infuriatingly misogynistic, just an absolute quagmire of hot garbage from start to finish. The other two major storylines in “Beyond the Wall” are intertwined enough to make them worth looking at together, but this one is self-contained and almost entirely separate from anything else that happened this week. We’ll start at Winterfell, with Sansa and Arya, though the episode doesn’t begin with their story. However, Benioff and Weiss still profess to be writing this pablum in good faith, so let’s dig in. If I didn’t know it was in earnest, I’d think “Beyond the Wall” was a cruel, absurdist experiment to see how far audiences are willing to follow this show as it descends into complete nonsense. Unfortunately, the show continues to be plagued by the same pacing issues and the same bizarre character work that has been emblematic of the season so far. After last week’s constant jumping around between characters and storylines, which all seemed to be increasingly spread apart from each other, “Beyond the Wall” is all about bringing storylines back together (with the season finale looking to do so even more). This penultimate episode of season seven continues the storytelling trends that we’ve already seen in the last five episodes, and it manages to be boring, to boot. ![]()
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