S5┬ÀE9 ÔÇö The Dance of Dragons

The hour retold

Stannis BaratheonÔÇÖs march on Winterfell was always a wager against the season, and the hour opens with the bill coming due: twenty of RamsayÔÇÖs riders slip past his pickets in the night and burn his baggage train to ash, leaving the self-declared king stranded in the snow with a starving host and no way forward or back. It is the least glamorous kind of military disaster ÔÇö not a battle lost but a campaign strangled by weather and logistics ÔÇö and it strips Stannis down to the one resource he has always trusted more than food or men: his certainty that the red god wants him on the throne.

What that certainty costs is the hourÔÇÖs darkest passage and one of the showÔÇÖs most argued-over scenes. Melisandre convinces Stannis that ShireenÔÇÖs kingÔÇÖs blood can melt the snow the way RenlyÔÇÖs and RobbÔÇÖs and JoffreyÔÇÖs once seemed to end their claims, and the show refuses to look away from what follows ÔÇö a father walking his daughter to the pyre while she screams his name, believing until the very last second that this, too, is a kind of duty. It is the point at which Stannis stops being a rigid but honorable man and becomes something the audience cannot forgive, and the show is exact about making sure no music, no framing, softens the murder into anything other than what it is.

Half a world away, in the golden light of DaznakÔÇÖs Pit, the season stages its other extreme ÔÇö wonder instead of horror, arriving in the same hour as a corrective. The Sons of the Harpy spring their ambush during the fighting-pit games, cutting down soldiers and nobles alike in a locked arena, and just as the trap closes on Daenerys herself, Drogon answers a motherÔÇÖs scream for the first time since Astapor, landing in a burst of fire and carrying her up and out over the rooftops of Meereen ÔÇö the first Targaryen to fly in a hundred years, escaping a massacre on the same night her rival immolates a child for the exact opposite reason. The episodeÔÇÖs cruelty and its awe are not opposites; they are the same coin, the seasonÔÇÖs recurring argument about what fire and blood actually buy.

What happens

• Ramsay's twenty men burn Stannis's camp; the march to Winterfell strands in snow and hunger.
• Stannis burns Shireen. The princess who taught men to read screams her father's name.
• Arya sees Meryn Trant in Braavos and abandons the thin man for an older prayer.
• In Daznak's Pit the Harpies spring their trap ÔÇö and Drogon answers his mother's scream. She flies.

The people of the episode

The fallen ÔÇö spoilers

• Princess Shireen Baratheon ÔÇö Burned alive by her father's ambition and Melisandre's fire.
• Hizdahr zo Loraq ÔÇö Dany's Meereenese fianc├®, knifed in the pit by the Harpies he may not have led.