S7·E7 — The Dragon and the Wolf

The hour retold

The dragonpit summit is the season finale’s first great set piece and its strangest: two queens, a king who won’t call himself one, and the Lannister siblings who ruined each other, gathered under the ruins of the throne’s old dragon-keeping cages to be persuaded by a screaming, snarling wight that the real war has nothing to do with any of their claims. Euron Greyjoy provides the comic menace, Cersei provides the reasonable-sounding lie — an armistice, her armies pledged against the dead — and Tyrion, brokering the whole affair, believes her exactly as much as the show wants the audience to, which is to say not at all.

The lie unravels fastest for the person closest to it: Jaime Lannister, learning in private that Cersei intends to keep her armies in King’s Landing rather than march them north, rides away from her — and from the capital, and from every year of loyalty the show has spent complicating — as the first snow of the coming winter starts falling on the city behind him. At Winterfell, Sansa and Arya spring the trap Littlefinger spent the whole series building, except in reverse: Sansa reads the charges, Arya holds the Valyrian dagger that was once meant for Bran, and the man who started the entire war with a lie about a knife and a dwarf finally runs out of words that work on the people in front of him.

Two revelations land in the same hour, one quiet and one enormous. In a rocking ship’s cabin, Jon and Daenerys, ignorant of the parentage a maester and a broken boy have just confirmed at Winterfell, become lovers precisely as Bran and Sam finish piecing together that Jon is not a bastard at all but Aegon Targaryen, the trueborn son of Rhaegar and Lyanna — a secret the show plants with excruciating, deliberate irony. And at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, the Wall’s oldest defense fails in seconds: a blue-eyed, undead Viserion breathes fire where no dragon ever has, and eight thousand years of ice comes down into the sea in a single shot, ending the season on the exact image its every episode has been building toward — the wall between stories, finally, gone.

What happens

• The dragonpit summit: a screaming wight makes the argument; Cersei pledges her armies — and lies.
• Jaime learns the pledge is a lie and rides north alone as the first snow falls on King's Landing.
• In Winterfell's hall, the letter-trap springs backward: Sansa sentences, Arya executes, Littlefinger begs.
• Sam and Bran do the arithmetic: Aegon Targaryen, trueborn — as the boat cabin door closes.
• At Eastwatch, the dead reach the Wall — and a blue-eyed dragon melts it into the sea.

The people of the episode

The fallen — spoilers

• Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish — The man who started the whole game, out-played in a hall he thought he owned.