Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
On last week’s Game of Thrones, the titular Battle of the Bastards took front-and-center attention. In the aftermath, all the talk was of Sansa; her Mona Lisa smiles and her tactical withholding of information from Jon, and whether she lost her soul in the process or re-taking Winterfell. But there was also that small matter of the siege of Mereen. Thinks were looking grim for Daenerys, Tyrion, and the rest of the Mereen faithful, with the slavers from Astapoor and Yankee attacking them from the sea. It’s a good thing none of the slavers thought to remember that Dany controls effing dragons.
The importance of Daenerys’ three dragons — Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion — to the Game of Thrones and Song of Ice and Fire universe cannot be overstated. We may not know much about how the series is going to end, but it’s a near certainty that we will eventually see Dany (and others?) ride atop her dragons into Westeros and at least attempt to re-take the Iron Throne for the Targaryens. That’s what the dragons WILL do. That’s been what the dragons WILL do since they first hatched from their little faberge eggs at the end of season 1. The problem has been what to do with them in the interim.
For a while, in season 2, they were small enough to be held captive in a hostile city. Remember Qarth, you guys? Of course you do. Qarth was terrible. Remember a whole season of “WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS?” So no, that was not ideal. The dragons were kept largely at bay during Dany’s tour through Slavers Bay. It was only in Yunkai, when Dany (and Game of Thrones) needed some real pyrotechnics that the dragons came back into play.
Initially in Mereen, there were some interesting moments regarding the logistics of keeping fire-breathing dragons around the city, free to roam and hunt and roast goats (and children) at will. But ever since Dany unleashed Drogon during the Sons of the Harpy rebellion last season, the fact of her dragons have become a narrative problem for the series. That problem in a nutshell: the dragons are too powerful a weapon. We saw this last week. Sure, it was cool to watch all three dragons, united at last, team up to take down the slavers’ ships and soldiers, saving Mereen (or what parts of Mereen weren’t scorched black) from their attackers. But it’s all too easy now for Daenerys to just snap her fingers and let her dragons get her out of jams.
And when you say that we’ve only seen the dragons do that twice now, that’s an even bigger problem. Because now that we know Dany can summon the dragons whenever she needs them, it becomes almost impossible to accept her being in any sort of peril. Last season, after Drogon rescued her from the coliseum, Dany found herself suddenly surrounded by a Dothraki horde and kidnapped. Plainly speaking, HOW did she allow that to happen? She couldn’t have summoned Drogon back from his run to the goat fields to come and save her? If your answer to that is “her methods of communicating with her dragons are primitive and limited,” then I refer you to the incredibly coordinated attack on Mereen last week.
Either the dragons are wild, fickle, unpredictable beasts whose moments of assistance are ephemeral and unknowable, or else they are Dany’s loyal children capable of of cresting a hilltop at exactly the moment their mother needs them to. This season of Game of Thrones has been accused of reverse engineering character motivations in order to justify big TV moments (see the Knights of the Vale showing up at a dramatically opportune moment rather than earlier when they might have saved a lot of lives). Dany’s dragons are the ultimate examples of that. They are the perfect rabbit to pull out of the hat. But now that those dragons are out and about, how are we going to accept Dany as being in danger from external forces ever again? Maybe her adversaries are going to have to learn to be a lot sneakier in the future. One thing’s for sure: don’t ever roll up on Dany’s doorstep with an army ever again.
