Television Review: The Dragon and the Wolf (Game of Thrones, S7X07, 2017)

The Dragon and the Wolf (S7x07)

Airdate: 27 August 2017

Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa

Running Time: 80 minutes

As Game of Thrones barrelled towards its conclusion, its scale became its defining, and ultimately suffocating, characteristic. The final episodes of its penultimate seasons were cultural events, shattering viewership records with each outing. This expansion was mirrored in their bloated running times, a trend that reached its zenith with Season 7’s finale, The Dragon and the Wolf. Clocking in at nearly eighty minutes, it was the longest episode in the series’ history to that point, a testament to the show’s unprecedented commercial and production heft. Yet, in a grim foreshadowing of the creative collapse to come, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s insistence on quantity—more characters, more runtime, more spectacle—failed catastrophically to translate into quality. The result is an episode that, while undeniably showcasing the series’ high production values and containing several seismic plot twists, feels hollow, mechanically plotted, and strangely forgettable when held against the taut, character-driven tension of previous season finales like The Winds of Winter or The Children. It is the moment where the show’s artifice began to show through the cracks, prioritising fan service and narrative housekeeping over the nuanced storytelling that once made it revolutionary.

The centrepiece of the episode is a clear attempt by Benioff and Weiss to achieve a feat previously rendered impossible by George R.R. Martin’s sprawling, brutal narrative: assembling a critical mass of major characters in one location. The excuse for this grand reunion is a parley in the ruins of the Dragonpit in King’s Landing. The contrived ‘wight hunt’ mission from the previous episode has succeeded, providing a macabre diplomatic prop. With Daenerys’s Unsullied and Dothraki armies at the gates, Cersei tentatively agrees to meet. The location is spectacular, a haunting relic of Targaryen power partially recreated at the ancient Roman amphitheatre near Seville, and it allows for a series of charged reunions—Tyrion and Cersei, the Hound and the Mountain, Brienne and the Hound, even Bronn and Tyrion—that provide a fleeting, nostalgic thrill. Yet, the scene is immediately burdened by its own ambition. It becomes a clunky exercise in exposition and repeated negotiation, characters stating and restating their positions in a vain attempt to generate tension. The dialogue, once the series’ sharpest weapon, feels functional and leaden, serving only to move pieces on a board rather than reveal character. The captured wight’s reveal is visually effective, and Lena Headey sells Cersei’s horrified reaction superbly, but the subsequent diplomatic dance is tedious. Jon Snow’s untimely pledge of fealty to Daenerys undermines the fragile truce, forcing Tyrion into a perilous solo audience with his sister. This private meeting is one of the episode’s stronger moments, relying on the actors’ deep-seated history, but its outcome—Cersei’s apparent agreement to send Lannister forces North—is revealed minutes later to be a ruse. Jaime’s subsequent disillusionment and decision to ride north alone, as the first snows fall on the capital, is a powerful character beat for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, but it feels like an island of genuine drama in a sea of manufactured conflict.

Meanwhile, in Winterfell, the long-simmering tension between Sansa and Arya Stark reaches its contrived climax. The season had laboured to portray their rift as one of deep-seated mistrust and ideological difference, with Littlefinger gleefully fanning the flames. Sansa summons Arya to the Great Hall for a trial, with Petyr Baelish looking on, expecting to see his machinations bear fruit. In a dramatic twist, Sansa turns the tables, indicting Baelish himself for a litany of crimes, from the murder of Jon Arryn to the betrayal of Ned Stark. Arya then executes him by slitting his throat. On paper, it is a moment of catharsis—the demise of one of the series’ most venomous and manipulative figures. In execution, however, it is deeply unsatisfying and emblematic of the season’s writing woes. To service this ‘clever’ twist, Benioff and Weiss forced both Sansa and Arya to act with a histrionic, out-of-character hostility for weeks, even in private. The revelation that this was an elaborate ruse all along comes from nowhere, with no prior hints, no scenes of the sisters conspiring, and no logical explanation for how they outmanoeuvred the master manipulator in his own game. Baelish, a character whose survival depended on anticipating every angle, is reduced to a passive, dithering fool throughout Season 7, inexplicably lingering in Winterfell while his influence waned and offering himself up to a woman who plainly despised him. His death feels less like an earned comeuppance and more like the writers briskly clearing a narrative obstacle they no longer had the patience or skill to integrate meaningfully.

The episode’s other major narrative threads continue this trend of functional, often clumsy, plot advancement. Theon Greyjoy’s subplot on Dragonstone is a brief interlude of attempted redemption. Ashamed over his failure to rescue Yara, he steels himself to try again, asserting authority over a dissenting Ironborn captain Harrag (played by Brendan Cowell) by winning a brutal fist-fight. While it aims to show Theon reclaiming a shred of his identity, it is rushed and feels disconnected from the episode’s core, a box-ticking exercise in character progression.

Far more significant is the long-awaited revelation in Winterfell. Samwell Tarly, having fled the Citadel with stolen books, meets Bran Stark. Combining Sam’s historical research with Bran’s greensight, they uncover the truth of Jon Snow’s parentage: Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen were not a story of rape and abduction, but of secret love and marriage. Jon, originally named Aegon Targaryen, is the legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. This moment is handled with a suitable gravity, aided by the poignant use of flashback footage, and it is the episode’s most successful narrative beat because it pays off a mystery seeded since the very first episode. It is a rare instance of the show drawing effectively on its deep lore.

This profound revelation is immediately undercut by what follows. Aboard the ship sailing north, Tyrion witnesses Jon entering Daenerys’s cabin, deducing the start of their romantic relationship. The subsequent love scene feels jarringly obligatory, as if the writers were fulfilling a contractual quota for nudity and sex that the series had increasingly outgrown. The dramatic irony for the audience—the knowledge that this union is unknowingly incestuous—adds a layer of queasy tension, but the scene itself is perfunctory, lacking the emotional or political weight such a momentous coupling should carry. It underscores a growing problem: the show was now prioritising plot points over organic character development.

The finale’s closing sequence at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea returns to spectacle. Tormund and Beric Dondarrion watch in horror as the Night King, astride the reanimated dragon Viserion, unleashes blue fire upon the Wall, breaching it and allowing the Army of the Dead to flood into the Seven Kingdoms. It is a stunning visual effects set-piece, a formidable cliffhanger designed to leave audiences awestruck. Yet, even this triumph is tempered by logistical absurdity. The Night King’s acquisition of a dragon was the result of the previous episode’s much-criticised ‘wight hunt’, a plan so strategically idiotic that it relied on characters abandoning all established sense to facilitate a cool visual. The finale’s grand threat is therefore built on a foundation of narrative contrivance.

Ultimately, The Dragon and the Wolf serves a dual, flawed purpose: it is a narrative mop-up operation following the chaotic events of Beyond the Wall, and a lavish piece of fan service. The Dragonpit summit is impressive to look at but crippled by verbose, exposition-heavy dialogue and tension that feels manufactured through last-minute character reversals rather than earned through drama. The Winterfell storyline sacrifices character consistency for a shock twist that fails to convince. Like much of the season, the episode suffers from the showrunners’ now-chronic disregard for the series’ own internal logic—geography and travel time are collapsed into nothing, allowing characters to teleport across continents to serve the plot’s needs. Dedicated fans, whose numbers had swelled to a global audience, began to spot not only increasing deviations from Martin’s source material but frustrating inconsistencies with the show’s own earlier seasons, a sign of a writing room losing its grip on its own creation.

In isolation, The Dragon and the Wolf is a competently made piece of television. It has memorable moments, a major revelation, and a spectacular finale. But its flaws are systemic and glaring. The downward trajectory in writing quality, the substitution of complex character motives for plot mechanics, and the over-reliance on spectacle over substance are all unmistakably present. Viewed not as a standalone piece but as the prelude to an infamous final season, it ceases to be merely flawed and becomes ominously prophetic. It demonstrated that the show could still deliver shocks and scale, but had forgotten how to make those things matter.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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