Game of Thrones: Fighting Someone Else’s War

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts in installments.

Lenika Cruz: Over the course of five and a half seasons of battles, betrayals, and beheadings, Game of Thrones has racked up plenty of “broken” men and women. While the episode’s title was most directly referring to the traumatized and mutilated Theon, and to the Hound (whose return has been long the subject of speculation), it could’ve also been alluding to the one-handed Jaime, the still-imprisoned Loras, the aging Blackfish, the miserable hostage Edmure, or the good-natured septon Ray (RIP). Each was, in his own way, a casualty of seemingly endless cycles of violence. And yet the wheels of war continued to spin this episode, as characters worked to build alliances for looming fights or else failed to reason with rivals.

With the show heading into its final three episodes, “The Broken Man” did a lot of crucial set-up in economical fashion and via plenty of elegantly written scenes. We reunited with Sandor Clegane some time after he joined a kind of religious commune run by Ray (Ian McShane), a septon whose lax devotion to scripture seemed directly correlated with his desire to bring goodness into the world. It turns out he rescued a nearly dead Hound some time ago and nursed him back to enough health that he can chop wood and haul logs 24/7.

It would’ve been nice to learn more about Ray and his followers before they were unceremoniously slaughtered (offscreen!), but the septon’s conversations with the Hound offered just enough to jumpstart the younger Clegane’s reentry into the show. In summary: Hate kept the Hound alive (Hate for Arya? For the things he’d done? For the Lannisters?), and he’s both ashamed of his past actions and unable to embrace pacifism the way Ray, an ex-soldier, has. “Violence is a disease,” the septon said. “You don’t cure a disease by spreading it to more people.” A lesson unlikely to ever stick on this show: The hour ended with a newly enraged Hound striding off with his axe, presumably to hunt down the Brotherhood Without Banners.

Much of the rest of the episode saw characters either trying to justify the necessity violence to others or weighing its costs themselves. If anything, this installment reminded me just how many currently neutral parties still exist on this show to be recruited for one cause or another. On Bear Island, Lady Lyanna (easily the episode’s coolest character) posed the question powerfully: “Why should I sacrifice one more Mormont life for someone else’s war?” The key, as Davos realized, was turning “someone else’s war” into “our war”—selling selfishness to get people to buy into teamwork.

Many of these parties were forced to consider what joining the fray would mean for their entire house, or family, or race. Jon, with an assist from Tormund, managed to convince the reluctant wildlings that fighting the Boltons was in their best interest if they didn’t want to be the last free folk. The Stark siblings had worse luck with House Glover, whose lord declared his men would not abandon their “ancestral home to fight alongside wildlings.” When approached by Cersei to join forces against the Sparrows, Lady Olenna rejected her in hopes of making it back to Highgarden safely, and trusting that her granddaughter would do what she could at the capital to ensure the Tyrell name lived on. Yara, too, had to win her brother over to fight to take back the Iron Islands. Meanwhile in Riverrun, Jaime tried (and failed) to convince the Blackfish that the “war is over,” with the Tully lord stubbornly committed to defending his home against the people who murdered his family.

In keeping with the show’s increasingly rich gender politics, “The Broken Man” seemed to have quite a bit to say about the pitfalls of masculinity, at least the destructive, regressive kind often valued in the world of the show. Many of the broken men on display here were (or had once been) fighters: Jaime, Loras, the Hound, Theon. And each had, in some way, been emasculated, whether by losing their fighting ability, being unable to to father children or continue their family name, or being defeated by a woman.

Much of the episode saw characters either trying to justify violence to others or weighing its costs themselves.

The episode also showed women succeeding by adopting more moderate approaches to power than many of their male counterparts. In an early scene, Margaery quoted a verse in the Book of the Mother about, essentially, women being able to calm the “brute nature” of men—it’s not hard to imagine she sees herself as the King Whisperer and her brother’s savior because of her calculated poise with the High Sparrow. In the North, the young Lady Mormont showed herself to be eminently reasonable and honorable, swayed more by Davos’s reference to her fierceness than by Sansa’s looks-based flattery. Then, of course, was the scene where Yara got to flaunt her sexuality in front of her castrated brother, before promising she would take care of him and get him revenge.

Not quite fitting into all of this is Arya, whose bloody walk through a Braavosi marketplace after being stabbed in the stomach by the Waif couldn’t have been met with crueler indifference (“Ugh, another young girl exsanguinating on our cobblestones?” the onlookers’ glares seemed to say). But since the episode focused so much on penitence—with Cersei, Margaery, the Hound, Ray—it’s possible there’s something redemptive at work. Arya did, after all, deny the dying Hound mercy when he begged her for it, so maybe she’s being forced to suffer to learn a lesson. Whatever the reason, we can at least rest assured that she’ll live on to the next episode—even if getting stabbed multiple times in the stomach is something most people don’t get to come back from.

Spencer, what did you make of the Waif’s ambush, the Hound’s long-awaited return, and the general politicking of this episode? And did Bronn’s delightful shutdown of Jaime’s Lannister-debt speech (“Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say it.”) make you as happy as it made me?

We will update this post with entries from Spencer Kornhaber and Christopher Orr.