The film goes through its motions too quickly for its imagery to convey the irrepressible force of provocation.
The episode gives the audience exactly what it expects, and absolutely nothing else.
Three episodes into this truncated seventh season and Game of Thrones is spiraling toward a preordained place.
The episode manages to set up future conflicts without interrupting its rapid pace.
Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality more palatable.
Death is momentarily thrilling, but the struggles of those who live on are what sustain the series.
The power of the latest episode of Game of Thrones is that it leaves nothing to abstraction.
Many of the events in Game of Thrones are developing so quickly that plot, by necessity, substitutes for development.
The episode sees the writers ruthlessly beginning to sew up loose (or underdeveloped) plots.
The film is a complication-smoothing take on Jesse Owens’s elegant riposte to Hitler’s racism at the 1936 Olympics.
It’s long been a given on Game of Thrones that “All men must die.” The question, then, is less a matter of whether they will, but how they will.
The deeper irony here, of course, is that “The Dance of Dragons” refers to the divisive, needless war between two siblings for the Iron Throne.
The problem these men face is that there are plenty of boys who find themselves in positions of power, and that’s not even mentioning King Tommen in King’s Landing.
Considering how many people are neither feared nor loved in “Sons of the Harpy,” respect is all that matters.
There’s plenty of death in the fifth season of Game of Thrones, and those deaths are understood as cautionary symbols of power.
The episode’s saving grace lies in the contrast that the series continues to develop between the two young women of the Stark family.
True to the more muted tone of the premiere, the second episode offers minimal indication that anything is wrong.
Game of Thrones finally feels liberated from its own extensive mythology and now moves with thrilling fury and purpose.
The film is guilty of some of the same quick judgment it clearly doesn’t endorse.
The series feels like it has some firm footing and a newfound sense of certain direction that was lacking intermittently in the second season.