Saturday Waffling (May 23rd, 2015)
Let’s see. Got the edits back on the first two seasons of Eruditorum 6. About 3-4000 words from the end of Book One of Last War in Albion. Logopolis books will finally go out Wednesday.
Several unrelated things kicking around that I’d love to find time for, but I’m not quite sure where that time would go right now.
“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” is still very much on my mind right now, and rather making moving on to A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.x a bit of a sour experience. I’d been going to roll out a new feature on the GoT reviews for the back half of the season in which I made next episode predictions, and was left in far too foul a mood after that episode to do it. But anyway, here’s predictions for “The Gift,” based on officially released HBO material and the books.
It looks like we have the Wall, Winterfell, Dorne, King’s Landing, and Meereen up this episode, but no Braavos.
The Wall: Probably where the episode’s title comes from. Jon Snow will commence the rescue mission of the Wildlings at Hardhome. Dissent in the ranks will continue. This looks straightforward.
King’s Landing: The arc here is clearly that Oleanna is going to throw Cersei in the path of the High Sparrow as well, with Lancel providing evidence of her crimes. Whether Oleanna will enact that plan this episode, or merely fail at talking Margery out out of jail is unclear. I’ll bet on her enacting it, though.
Winterfell The presence of snow and the repeated talk of “the snows starting” suggest we are going to do a variation of the plot in which Stannis gets bogged down in a snowstorm. But I think we’ll be in the early stages of that here. As for Sansa, my guess is that she’s going to be a functional prisoner, but that she’s going to get Theon to signal for Brienne. I hope this plot advances pretty far, obviously. It’s perfectly plausible that Ramsey is going to die this episode.
Dorne: Tricky, as Jaime’s presence now prevents most of the obvious plot arcs. I’ve seen speculation of Bronn being poisoned. Could happen. All we know for certain is that Jaime and Myrcella are going to have a chat. It’s entirely possible that’s all there will be; they’ve hardly been putting Dorne at the forefront of the plot, and there’s not necessarily a lot more to do with it either. Really all that’s guaranteed is a big Doran scene in the next four episodes.
Meereen: By far the hardest to predict. It wasn’t clear Daenerys was in it until some publicity photos emerged. All we have to go on is that Daenerys is in it, and a trailer shot of Tyrion (looks like indoors, but in theory could be on a ship). This could be a straight plate-spin. Obviously we’re building to a Tyrion/Jorah/Daenerys/Drogo collision, but as with Winterfell and Dorne, it’s very hard to tell how far we’ll go in this episode.…