What's with all the staring on Game of Thrones?

(Image credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO)

last updated 8 August 2017

"The Spoils of War" was riddled with interesting tensions over how titles and relationships map onto identity. Take Bronn. The guy who makes fun of Dickon for going to "Fancy Lad School" wants what Dickon has: a castle. The sellsword hungers for respectability; he'd like to be a lord. When Jaime reminds him of who he is, Bronn bridles and sarcastically calls Jaime "my lord" as he rides away. But it turns out noble blood doesn't get you very far either: When Arya, who's played so many other people, finally arrives home in her own face and announces herself as herself, it doesn't go as planned. (It's interesting, too, that for someone whose List of Names matters as much as hers does, the names she recites to the guards to establish her authenticity — Maester Luwin, Ser Rodrik — fail to work.) Only after she pieces together that her sister is in charge does she gain admission to her own home. Names and titles just aren't what they were.

There's a startling number of these kinds of conversations. The Iron Bank's Tycho makes a point of telling Cersei that he's "neither kind, nor a lord" in order to drive home that arithmetic trumps all, and Ser Davos' effort to endow Jon with a little grandeur backfires — is it King Snow? King Jon? "It doesn't matter," Jon says, and this seems to be the episode's point: that Sansa is "Lady Stark" now is both true and irrelevant. Bran repeatedly denies that he's Lord Stark (neither, for that matter, is he Bran). And when Podrick tries to compliment Brienne with a milady, she bursts out in annoyance: "I'm not a … never mind." And thanks him. Titles are squaring so oddly with identity that it's not even worth squabbling over them.

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So what does this mean? I wrote yesterday about how fluently this episode misdirects the viewer into thinking things happened (or are about to happen) that never quite did. For an episode that featured a massacre, it was oddly indefinite. Cersei's gold is fine, and the few characters at risk — Drogon, Jaime, Bronn — almost certainly survived. It seems to me that this cornucopia of blank faces invites the viewer to reach a (wrong or premature) conclusion in a similar way: It's very easy, for instance, to read the emotion you think makes most sense into Sansa, even if it's not actually there. I've seen people describe Sansa's expression as conveying variously that she's impressed with her sister, glad for her sister, angry with her sister, worried about her sister, jealous of her sister, jealous of Brienne, shocked by her sister, etc. That Sophie Turner's face is capable of generating that many conflicting explanations is interesting. Even more interesting is how long the camera lingered on it: As a viewer, you are being asked to reach some kind of conclusion about Sansa's feelings there, even if their content isn't clear.

I think I was inclined to read romance into that scene because of Ser Davos' subsequent ribbing. (There's some suggestive music, too.) But if you look at Jon and Dany during these talks, they seem more weary and concerned than flirtatious, so much so that I'm inclined to take Jon at his word when Davos teases him and he replies that "there's no time for that." He truly doesn't look sexually interested to me:

When she looks at Jon, her gaze is engaged and interested but it isn't sensual or even romantic. That doesn't mean romance can't develop; it just means that the acting in this episode is intriguingly at odds with the requirements of the plot. It seems obvious at this point that Jon and Daenerys need to pair up, but "The Spoils of War" only supplied a structure that a reasonable person could read romance into; it didn't go the extra mile and give us the romance itself.

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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