<em>Game of Thrones</em> Hints at the Apocalypse

Spencer Kornhaber and Christopher Orr discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones. (Amy Sullivan is away this week.)

Orr: Happy Mother-of-Dragons’ Day, Daenerys! To honor the occasion we got you this lovely dragon’s egg, tulip, and iris arrangement. Oh, and also, the corpse of Ser Barristan Selmy, destroyer of the Blackfyre Pretenders, rescuer of King Aerys II, and hero of the Greyjoy Rebellion.

I confess that I was more than a little sad to see Barristan the Bold go, especially after it seemed that Grey Worm might have saved him at the end of last week’s episode. In the George R. R. Martin novels, he’s still alive, and a moderately important figure. But showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss warned us they would be charting their own course this season, not least when it came to fatalities.

I like Grey Worm fine, but given the many, many storylines already in play, I could really live without his non-canonical romance with Daenerys’s interpreter, Missandei. The latter seems to have incorporated elements of a handmaiden character with whom Daenerys occasionally had sex in the books; who’d have imagined that Benioff and Weiss would have punted on this opportunity to sex things up in favor