The Throne Room: What’s done in the dark comes to light

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t watched the episode yet, you might not want to read this. There are indeed spoilers!

Petyr “Little Finger” Baelish strikes again! At the strangest times and at the expense of innocent people, he makes decisions that create chaos and greatly tip the scales of power in King’s Landing. First, he betrayed Ned Stark in season one and now, in season four, he has allegedly conspired with Lady Olenna Tyrell to kill Joffrey by a poison that was hidden in Sansa’s necklace.

Baelish has been particularly quiet this season and now we see why. Plotting the murder of a king is probably very time consuming. On the surface his motives are obscure, as Sansa was quick to point out. By providing the poison for Joffrey’s demise, he was able to secure a “friendship” with the powerful Tyrell family who turned out to be more opposed to the marriage arrangement than suspected. And that’s great for him, but once again Sansa finds herself taken hostage by someone else with secret designs for her life. Baelish may say he’s marrying her aunt, but the way he looks at Sansa says something else. It says, “If I can’t have your mother, who I loved first, I’ll settle for you!” Gross. Meanwhile, Margery herself is somewhat treading on paedophillia with the way she’s creeping on Tommen in the midnight hours to gain his favor, lining herself up again for the role of queen.

With each passing episode, the family that seemed to shine brightest  — with good morals and virtues — experiences increasingly terrible hardships. The Stark children continue to suffer at the hands of others, constantly beaten down and stripped of any small happiness allotted to them. While Bran has finally found himself close to his half-brother, Jon Snow, it is questionable whether Jon will find him in time. And if you didn’t notice, one of the Boltons has infiltrated Jon’s group of volunteers. How long until he makes his move to eradicate Jon? Karl, the leader of the mutineers Jon will be hunting, seems like a real nutcase. If you thought Craster was gross, this guy takes the cake and he doesn’t seem to care much about anything or anyone at all. How long will it take for him to kill Bran or one of the Reed children?

Hope and sympathy are in short supply everywhere you turn — including in Meeren where the Mother of Dragons raised her flag. It was all going according to how you figured it might with Daenerys’ scenes. She came, she conquered the hearts of the slaves and came out on top of things. However, there was a reminder of a very important fact — she is still a Targaryen. Given their family’s track record of being crazy, it isn’t surprising to see our girl exacting cruel justice on the Masters. Even though she’s defending the downtrodden, it doesn’t mean she lacks the capacity to be cruel. Daenerys clearly proved, when she obtained the Unsullied, that she does what she wants and will be ruthless when she wants to be. I think her retainers are slowly starting to realize this. What can they really do about it though? She’s their queen and she has dragons. So they just shut their traps and hope it doesn’t go too far. There dims another shining light of “goodness.”

All this time we’ve been dealing with the dramas around King’s Landing, the Wall and the deserts, but what about those White Walkers everyone was talking about way before? In the last few minutes of the episode, we finally learn what happens to the babies left outside for the White Walker. Kudos to the cinematographers that worked on this scene because the camera angles, until the last moment, had me on the edge of my seat, straining to see who was coming to take the child. Slowly the stage is being set beyond the Wall for something huge. But what that something will be is still shrouded in mystery. Until the veil is lifted, we’ll just have to sit tight and wait to see what happens with these White Walkers.