WARNING: SPOILERS ARE COMING It was a tough week in Westeros for most people not named Cersei or Euron. Dany's forces were dealt another two serious blows, losing at Casterly Rock and Highgarden. Jon might not be able to leave Dragonstone. Sam is on thin ice at the Citadel. Yara is still her uncle's prisoner. Sansa had to be reminded of the show's worst episode by the creepy teenager and all-seeing deity her brother Bran has become. Jaime got bodied by a woman on death's doorstep. And then there's Ellaria, wasting away in the black cells beneath King's Landing, watching her daughter slowly succumb to the same poison she once used. All in all, lots of bad stuff happened this week. Still, there weren't only losers this week. Even through the Doom and gloom, several players managed to further their agenda―and in our MVP's case, stare death in the face and spit on it. LOSERS DAENERYS TARGARYEN Dany saw powerful allies fall for the second week in a row. Since Euron's Pirates of The Caribean audition took out her fleet and the Sand Snakes, she's lost a large portion of her Unsullied forces (who may not even make it out of Casterly Rock alive) and had Highgarden swept out from under her feet. Sure, she still has her Dothraki screamers and three dragons, but this isn't exactly the most auspicious way to begin the war for an entire continent. Tyrion most definitely shoulders the blame for some of this―the Casterly Rock invasion in particular―but the buck stops with Dany. She has many advisors, but she's the chief decision maker. So far, the only good decision she's made is letting Jon at that dragonglass. Look for her to make a big statement with her dragons next week. THE SAND SNAKES We may hate the Sand Snakes for how their plot line turned out in the show, but you have to admit, it was still tough to find out what Cersei had planned for these two. Tyene got off (relatively) easy―all she has to do is wait a few hours (or minutes or days, per Not-Even-a-Maester Qyburn) for the poison to take her. Ellaria got the brunt of Cersei's sadistic imagination: she's gonna be force-fed and kept awake as long as it takes for her to watch her daughter rot, and probably for some time after that. Pour one out for the end of the Sand Snakes, and props to Indira Varma for making us really feel for Ellaria for the first (and last) time. JAIME LANNISTER "But, he just took Highgarden and like basically the entire Reach!" Yeah, and he even won Bronn in the friend-divorce with Tyrion. But Jaime, poor Jaime, got dunked on harder than Frederick Weis this week. Twice. First, Euron went in on him in the throne room, right after laying Ellaria and Tyene at Cersei's feet. This ranged from the subtle ("I gave [Cersei] what no other man could... justice.") to the personal ("There's nothing quite like it is there, the love of the people? I suppose you wouldn't know...") to the downright vulgar ("Does she like it gentle, or rough... a finger in the bum?"), and Jaime had very few answers. Euron is potentially the biggest threat he's faced in the story, and Jaime is gonna need to work on his defense if he wants to keep the upper golden hand for the rest of the season. To his credit, Jaime does immediately ride south and wipe a great house out of existence as a countermove. Unfortunately, that's where he ran into his other spot of trouble. We're gonna talk more about the Queen of Thorns later, but suffice to say, the fire she spit on Jaime would've been hot enough to burn Drogon. Not only that, but he's walking away knowing he just gave mercy to the woman who murdered his son―and that the woman he loves is truly a monster. WINNERS JON SNOW (FEAT. SER DAVOS) The King in the North is a man on a mission, and though it was a little touch-and-go at the beginning, he pulled out a huge W this week by getting Daenerys to lend him Dragonglass Mountain. Jon is quick to remind anyone with two ears that he's seen the Night King and the army of the dead, and dragonglass is dead-cold-thing Kryptonite. He also saw a dragon for the first time, reunited with an old friend in Tyrion, and didn't get burned alive by the dragon queen. All in all a pretty good vacation, I'd say. Davos gets a nod here for being the people's champion and the man anyone would want in their corner when the fight was on. How does he respond to Missandei and all of Dany's titles? "This is Jon Snow.......... he's the King in the North." Legend. JORAH MORMONT This week was the win of a lifetime for Ser Friendzone. Apparently, all you need to do to have your hideous, brain-rotting infection cured is let an amateur surgeon peel it off with a knife and rub you with some aloe. Neat! To be fair, Sam is the one who miraculously cured a middle-aged man of an advanced, contagious infection―and it'd be interesting to find out if he used any dragonglass in that salve. But Jorah has escaped one of GRRM's cruelest fates, and has an open invitation from the dragon queen to stand by her side as she conquers the world. If you sold your Jorah stock last season, now's the time to buy buy buy once again. (Side note: with Jorah back on the field and now connected to the Northern storyline, look for a reunion between him and his little sister, Lady Lyanna Mormont.) CERSEI LANNISTER Cersei is a cold, hard bitch, and the punishment she gave to the Sand Snakes is one of the coldest and hardest things she's done (besides, you know, the terrorism). It's the episode's title event, and it's not even her biggest victory of the week. She also outmaneuvered Tyrion and trapped the Unsullied, bought some time to figure out Euron and his insistence on marriage, and won the season's most crucial victory by taking the Reach. The impact of this cannot be overstated; aside from being one of the largest kingdoms, it's also the breadbasket of Westeros. Suddenly, Cersei has enough resources to feed her citizens and army, and potentially a way to pay back the Iron Bank of Braavos. After starting this season near the bottom of the power rankings, Queen Bitch is now essentially in the drivers seat―well, until Dany busts out those dragons. And even then, Cersei has a weapon that's not only capable of taking out a dragon, but already did more than 200 years ago. Things likely won't stay this good forever for her, but as of this week, she's at the top of the game. Well, except for one other. MVP OLENNA TYRELL
There's no other choice for MVP this week. The Queen of Thorns was a crowd favorite ever since we first met her in the garden at King's Landing, and she lived up to her title, time and time again. She sparred with the most intimidating man in the land, Tywin Lannister. She absolutely schooled Cersei last season, when the queen-wannabe begged for help cleaning up the High Sparrow fiasco she herself created. She advised the dragon queen, killed a king, and was the last surviving member of one of the greatest houses in Westeros. And when Death came to her doorstep, she looked him in the eye and tore him a new one. Olenna's dismantling of Jaime Lannister was unlike few things we've ever seen on this show―or Worldstar, for that matter. And it's not just that she was cruel, although she did call him a massive failure and his dead son Joffrey a See-You-Next-Tuesday. Olenna is the MVP because, with her dying breath, she may have just toppled an empire. Jaime and Cersei's romance has been at the forefront of the story since Episode 1. It's the catalyst that set the entire series into motion, and the only force keeping either sibling afloat. Olenna was smart enough to see that, and she took her only opportunity to go to work on Jaime. She called Cersei a "monster," sure, but her masterstroke was admitting to the murder of Joffrey―and making sure the queen knows it. Tyrion's guilt or innocence is one of the few issues that ever truly came between the twins. It was enough to cause Cersei to ship Jaime off to Dorne and then Riverrun, and the wedge it created still hasn't gone away completely. Now that Jaime knows what really happened to his son, he knows a terrible truth about Cersei: that she really is a monster, one who wasted no time nominating her baby brother for the headsman's axe without a shred of evidence. When Jaime walked in the throne room at the end of last season, we knew he would never be able to look at his sister the same way again. With this new info (and will she even believe him if he tells her?), it may be the beginning of the end for this doomed couple. And I say "doom" because, well, Jaime's gonna kill Cersei. Probably. It's a long held theory for book readers, and one that's picked up a lot of steam in the show universe, especially after the Mad Queen routine last year. And in her final moments, it was the Queen of Thorns who may have put the seed of that idea in Jaime's head.
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