Television Review: The Queen's Justice (Game of Thrones, S7X03, 2017)

The Queen’s Justice (S7x03)

Airdate: 30 July 2017

Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Directed by: Mark Mylod

Running Time: 63 minutes

The penultimate season of Game of Thrones often gave the unmistakable impression of being the final season of the series. This was a direct consequence of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss demonstrating a pronounced tendency to seek quick and simple solutions to the profoundly complex problems of concluding a saga so epic that its literary source material—George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—remained, and remains, unfinished. To say that this approach frequently led to unfortunate creative decisions and major disappointments for large sections of the audience would be a significant understatement. One such disappointment is The Queen’s Justice, the third episode of the seventh season, which spectacularly squanders one of the last genuine opportunities for meaningful worldbuilding and logical narrative progression in favour of hasty, contrived plot mechanics designed solely to accelerate the story towards its endgame.

Benioff and Weiss’s drive for simplification is most evident in their drastic geographical and thematic narrowing. The plot becomes almost exclusively limited to Westeros, and, more critically, all its multifarious conflicts are reduced to a simplistic, binary struggle between Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. This reductive framing is even mirrored in Daenerys’s own mindset. When Jon Snow arrives at Dragonstone to plead his case about the existential threat of the Army of the Dead beyond the Wall, she dismisses it as a fantasy or, at best, a minor distraction from her real war. Their differences in priority are exacerbated by a fundamental clash in political perspective: Daenerys considers herself the rightful ruler of the entire Seven Kingdoms and pointedly denies Jon his hard-won title as King in the North, a title earned through blood and sacrifice. It falls to Tyrion Lannister to apply some diplomatic finesse, smoothing over the immediate hostility by suggesting Daenerys indulge the Northerners with permission to mine the dragonglass beneath Dragonstone—a tactical concession that feels less like statesmanship and more like a narrative band-aid to keep the Jon-Dany alliance plot on life support.

Daenerys’s singular focus on Cersei is, in the moment, understandable. For despite being in a seemingly dire economic, political, and military situation following the destruction of the Great Sept of Baelor, Cersei suddenly finds fortune shifting dramatically in her favour. The episode’s most theatrically brutal sequence sees Euron Greyjoy triumphantly parading his captives—Yara Greyjoy, Ellaria Sand, and Tyene Sand—through the streets of King’s Landing before presenting them as a grotesque gift to Cersei at the foot of the Iron Throne. Cersei seizes the opportunity to deliver an exquisitely cruel retribution, mirroring the murder of her daughter Myrcella. Ellaria is chained, gagged, and forced to watch helplessly as Cersei personally administers the same Long Farewell poison to Tyene, ensuring the mother will witness her daughter’s agonising decay. It is a scene of pure, vindictive horror, brilliantly acted by Lena Headey and Indira Varma, and it serves as a potent reminder of Cersei’s capacity for monstrous violence. However, its narrative function is starkly utilitarian: to instantly eliminate two of Daenerys’s key allies (the Sand Snakes and Yara’s faction of the Iron Fleet) while bolstering Cersei’s position.

This shift in fortunes is compounded by a scene of profound narrative contrivance. Tycho Nestoris of the Iron Bank arrives in King’s Landing to collect the Crown’s debt. In a staggering departure from established lore, he explains that the powerful Iron Bank now favours Cersei because Daenerys’s anti-slavery crusade in Essos has disrupted the economy of the eastern continent and, consequently, the bankers’ own financial interests. This is a canonical abomination. Braavos, the city where the Iron Bank is based, was founded by escaped slaves; its very identity is built upon a foundational hatred of slavery. The notion that the Braavosi would suddenly defend the practice for vague economic reasons is not just a simplification for the sake of plot; it is an active defiance of Martin’s meticulously constructed world, sacrificing internal logic to artificially stack the deck against Daenerys.

The episode’s central military manoeuvres further illustrate this pattern of narrative corner-cutting. Tyrion, celebrated as a skilled strategic mind, devises an audacious plan to strike at the heart of Lannister power: Casterly Rock. The fortress, seen on screen for the very first time, is presented via a matte painting as an imposing, impregnable seat of power. The Unsullied, led by Grey Worm, infiltrate it thanks to Tyrion’s knowledge of secret underground sewage tunnels—a clever callback, admittedly. They successfully take the castle, but Grey Worm’s triumph curdles into horror as he discovers the garrison is merely a token force. Worse, the Unsullied fleet is ambushed and destroyed from behind by Euron Greyjoy’s miraculously ubiquitous armada. The capture of this iconic location, built up over six seasons, is rendered utterly pointless. Casterly Rock is revealed as a hollow symbol, its gold mines long exhausted, serving as nothing more than a strategic bait. The emotional and historical weight of the Lannister ancestral home is discarded in a single, dismissive plot twist.

The answer to Grey Worm’s bewildered question is delivered at Highgarden. In a parallel strategic move, Jaime Lannister has devised a counter-plan that involves ceding Casterly Rock to surprise the Tyrell forces. With baffling ease, the Lannister army marches into the Reach and captures Highgarden, the seat of House Tyrell. Director Mark Mylod never bothers to show the actual combat; the fall of the region that fielded the strongest army in Westeros—the very army that saved the Lannisters from certain destruction at the Battle of the Blackwater—occurs off-screen. The episode concludes with the captured Olenna Tyrell, facing the grim prospect of Cersei’s “queen’s justice,” being granted a merciful exit by Jaime, who provides her with a painless poison. In her final moments, Olenna delivers a superb curtain call for Dame Diana Rigg, calmly admitting to Jaime that she was the one who poisoned Joffrey. It is a powerfully acted, emotionally resonant scene, but it cannot mask the narrative convenience it serves: the decapitation of another great house with minimal effort or explanation.

Amidst this focused warfare, the episode attempts some necessary narrative housekeeping elsewhere. In Oldtown, Samwell Tarly successfully cures Jorah Mormont of greyscale through a risky, unsanctioned procedure. Archmaester Ebrose praises his skill and courage but, in a moment of tedious bureaucratic pedantry, punishes his insubordination by sentencing him to the exhausting, mind-numbing duty of copying manuscripts—a feeble narrative device to keep Sam sidelined. In Winterfell, Sansa is reunited with Bran, who informs her with robotic detachment that he is the Three-Eyed Raven now and thus cannot claim the lordship of the North, despite his hereditary right. These scenes feel like obligatory check-ins, mechanical plot updates that lack the depth and texture of earlier seasons’ subplots.

The Queen’s Justice was ostensibly poised to be remembered for finally granting audiences a view of two iconic, long-awaited locations: Casterly Rock and Highgarden. It technically fulfils this promise, but in a deeply disappointing manner. Both are depicted primarily through static matte paintings, lacking the lived-in grandeur of King’s Landing or Winterfell. Their captures are not epic sieges but narrative feints and facile victories. Casterly Rock is a barren trap; Highgarden falls without a visible fight. The tangible sense of place, so crucial to the series’ worldbuilding, is utterly absent.

This stems from Benioff and Weiss’s palpable eagerness to simplify the plot and forcibly shift the balance of power. In this episode, everything that can go wrong for Daenerys’s alliance does so with relentless efficiency. The Sand Snakes are captured, Yara’s fleet is lost, the Unsullied are stranded, the Tyrells are exterminated, and the Iron Bank turns hostile. The great houses of Westeros—Martell, Tyrell, Greyjoy (in part)—are wiped out, decapitated, or weakened into irrelevance in the course of a single hour. This wholesale clearing of the board is not earned through nuanced political drama or credible military strategy; it is achieved through a series of contrivances and retcons.

To achieve this artificial rebalancing, the showrunners not only defy Martin’s canon (as with the Iron Bank) but also retcon their own earlier established facts. The ease with which Jaime takes Highgarden is never satisfactorily explained, simply ignoring the prior established might of the Tyrell army. Similarly, Euron Greyjoy’s fleet achieves a level of omnipresence and naval supremacy that defies logistics and geography, appearing precisely where the plot requires it to be to thwart Daenerys. This growing disregard for continuity and internal logic represents an increasing narrative sloppiness, a willingness to sacrifice coherent storytelling for shock and acceleration.

This sloppiness is, to a degree, compensated for by a handful of well-executed emotional scenes. As noted, Cersei’s revenge on Ellaria is a masterpiece of chilling cruelty, and Olenna Tyrell’s final confession is a superb character moment. However, other attempts at emotion falter. The scene where Cersei, riding the high of her vengeance, talks Jaime into sex, feels like gratuitous fan service. Later, a careful obscuring of Lena Headey’s body, raises unanswered questions about the use of a body double, distracting from any intended character intimacy and reducing the moment to a cynical checkbox.

The dialogue, too, is uneven. While the exchanges between Tyrion and Jon Snow retain some of the series’ former wit and philosophical weight, the central discussions between Jon and Daenerys feel tiresome and repetitive. A significant part of this problem lies in the palpable lack of chemistry between Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke. Their interactions are stiff, governed by plot necessity rather than burgeoning attraction or compelling ideological clash. Harington’s portrayal of Jon’s stubborn earnestness often borders on the wooden, and Clarke’s performance as the imperious queen struggles to find a dynamic register with him, making their protracted negotiations a slog rather than the compelling centrepiece they were intended to be.

In the end, The Queen’s Justice stands as a stark microcosm of the seventh season’s—and indeed, the series’ later—failings. It prioritises plot mechanics over plot logic, shock over substance, and narrative speed over narrative richness. It pays lip service to iconic locations and great houses only to dismiss them with contemptuous ease. It bends and breaks established worldbuilding to serve a simplified, binary conflict. For every moment of effective drama, such as Olenna’s exit, there are multiple moments of jarring contrivance and wasted potential. The episode ultimately functions as a rushed, often clumsy piece of narrative table-setting, more concerned with clearing the deck for the final confrontation than with honouring the complex, textured world that made Game of Thrones a phenomenon in the first place.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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