S4·E3 — Breaker of Chains

The hour retold

The bells are still ringing for Joffrey when the scramble starts. Sansa is rowed out of the city mid-chaos by Ser Dontos, the fool she once saved — and delivered to a waiting ship where Littlefinger pays off his ferryman with three crossbow bolts and explains, with professional pride, that the necklace Sansa wore to the wedding was the murder weapon. She has been an accessory since she dressed that morning. In the sept, Tywin conducts a job interview over Joffrey’s corpse, quizzing Tommen on what killed each bad king in history while the boy’s mother grieves three feet away — wisdom, the old lion concludes, meaning: listen to me. The dynasty does not pause for its dead.

The episode’s title belongs to Meereen, where Daenerys arrives before the walls and the city sends out a champion to insult her; Daario opens him with a thrown knife and a bow, and Dany’s answer to the jeering battlements is catapults — barrels bursting on the stones, spilling the broken slave collars of every city behind her. It is siegecraft as propaganda, and it works. In the middle distance, the hour banks quieter troubles: the Hound robs the farmer who sheltered them because the man will not survive winter anyway — Arya adding it to a private ledger — and at Dragonstone, Davos, jolted by a book about Braavos, hits on the idea of borrowing the Iron Bank’s patience. The realm’s wars, the episode keeps noticing, are funded, ferried and fed by people who never appear on the banners.

What happens

• Littlefinger spirits Sansa to sea; the necklace stone was the poison all along.
• Tywin begins schooling Tommen on what makes a good king — beside Joffrey's corpse.
• The Hound robs a farmer who sheltered them; Arya adds it to a different kind of list.
• Meereen sends a champion; Daario opens him like a wine skin, and Dany catapults broken chains over the walls.

The people of the episode