Joel Fry-days: Game of Thrones: Season 5, Episode 4 – “Sons of the Harpy” (2015)

*Episode premise spoilers, which includes some spoilers from earlier in the season.*

Not gonna lie—given that the episode is called “Sons of the Harpy,” I was hoping for more scenes in Meereen and more Joel Fry/Hizdahr. Alas! The Meereen storyline does get the big dramatic ending scene for the episode, though.

Ser Jorah has kidnapped Tyrion. Jaime and Bron arrive in Dorne, with Jaime aiming to bring Myrcella home without starting a war with the Dornish. Cersei, looking to rid herself of the Tyrells once and for all, thinks she’s found a useful tool in the High Sparrow and his fanatical sect. The Red Woman tries to convince Jon to help her and Stannis oust the Boltons from Winterfell—little does he know, Sansa has already been brought there by Littlefinger. The Sons of the Harpy try to take back Meereen from Daenerys’s forces.

• Even though, as I’ve said, the Tyrion-in-Essos arc isn’t my favorite storyline for him, Peter Dinklage never disappoints. He does a great job in Tyrion’s scenes with Ser Jorah, especially when he finds out what Jorah is planning to do with him.
• The interactions between Jaime and Bron are also good. I enjoy them discussing their preferences among the various “shit ways to die,” Bron not-so-subtly clocking Jaime for referring to Myrcella as his niece, and a clutch use of Jaime’s golden hand during a fight. I also like Bron knocking one of their attackers off his horse and then telling Jaime “that one should be slow enough” for him to take on lefthanded.
• Not to mention, as they’re traveling to Dorne, there’s a nice moment where they’re going past the Sapphire Isle, where Brienne is from.
• The Dorne plot also introduces the Sand Snakes, Oberyn’s badass love children. I remember hearing excitement about them going into this season, but this is another plot where it feels like the show fumbles the execution. By the way, one of the Sand Snakes is played by Jessica Henwick, who went on to play Colleen Wing on Iron Fist, another show that unfortunately knows a little something about squandered potential.
• Cersei is so focused on taking down Margaery that she sees no problem opening the door to the wolves in Sparrows’ clothing. By rearming the “faith militant,” she hands violent authority to a devout group and sets them loose on King’s Landing, which is just not a smart move for a woman who’s previously been accused of bearing bastard children through incest. Get ready for her to start sobbing, “I never thought direwolves would eat my face!”
• I always love watching Margaery’s machinations, and it’s interesting to see her frustrations with Tommen here. She has the young king wrapped around her little finger, but he’s too earnest and upstanding to be effective in the way that she needs. This leaves her in a position of reminding Tommen, at length, that he’s the goddamn king of the Seven Kingdoms, while he just kind of shrugs at her and says his hands are tied. Wait—is Tommen a tiny bit Viserys-Targaryen-from-House-of-the-Dragon-coded? Either way, Margaery’s reactions to this are great.
• Lovely scene between Stannis and Shireen—this is another episode where they bring up her greyscale, with Stannis recalling the story of how she was infected as a baby and how he refused to give her up for dead.
• Interesting that we get Rhaegar Targaryen reminiscences in two different storylines in this episode. In Winterfell, Sansa and Littlefinger talk about his abduction of her aunt Lyanna while Sansa is down in the Stark crypt. And then in Meereen, Ser Barristan tells Daenerys about some of his gentler memories of her late older brother, sharing a side of Rhaegar that Dany had never known about.
• I won’t say too much about the actual Sons of the Harpy scene here—given that it’s the Big Dramatic Ending, I’ll avoid major spoilers within this episode review. (Yes, I know the episode is ten years old. This is just the way that I do things!) I’ll just say that there’s some good fighting and dramatic tension, and although it’s another episode where a white character takes some of Grey Worm’s narrative thunder, Grey Worm is still allowed to hold his own this time.

In between the happy memories of Rhaegar and the Big Dramatic Ending, we have Hizdahr’s one scene of the episode, another private audience with Daenerys. He’s returned to his efforts from the start of the season, trying to convince Dany to concede to a certain Meereenese tradition: reopening the fighting pits. As usual, he’s coming to Dany with a request that he definitely knows she won’t like, and he does his best to sell it. He begins, “All men must die, but not all can die in glory,” going on to bring up Dany’s ancestors who conquered Westeros. When Dany makes it clear that she has no interest in Hizdahr’s valorizing of this bloody “tradition,” he changes his approach, arguing that the fighting pits are the only thing former slaves and former Masters have in common.

Meereen is a hotbed of simmering resentment right now, and as we’ve seen, things can quickly escalate into violence. Reopening the fighting pits feels like a bandaid on that issue at best—and even if such a thing could bring about lasting peace, Daenerys would still be justified in questioning whether she should bring back such a brutal practice. To Hizdahr’s credit, he at least acknowledges that this would be unlikely to solve all of the conflict in Meereen, only promising that “it’s a start.”

A good chunk of my interest in Hizdahr is that he’s so unlike the rest of the characters I’ve seen Joel Fry play so far. That keeps the performance engaging for me—he never gets more than a few minutes per episode, but I always enjoy his scenes.