There’s still so much the two warriors aren’t saying to each other, but their exchanges are nonetheless laden with meaning, thanks to the discipline of the script and the powerful performances from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie. That may simply be due to the confidence of Bryan Cogman’s writing (he’s penned 11 episodes, including some of the show’s best, like “Kissed By Fire,” “Oathkeeper,” and “The Laws of Gods and Men”), since even the crowd-pleasing moments - which some viewers might consider fan-service (like Arya and Gendry’s hook-up and Jaime knighting Brienne) - for the most part feel earned rather than heavy-handed.Ĭogman has penned many of Jaime and Brienne’s most pivotal episodes, and you can feel the respect and understanding he has for the characters in every scene they share. In many ways, episode 2 serves a similar function - it’s still an installment that has to establish loyalties, check in with all of our major players, and set the stage for the battle to come, but there’s a sense of urgency in this hour that was absent in episode 1 - an intangible flow that builds on every scene that has come before it, giving us one of the most satisfying episodes in recent memory. (Every episode has to do a certain amount of narrative legwork to get its characters from A to B, obviously, but the strings seemed more noticeable in the premiere than they have elsewhere.) While last week’s Season 8 premiere was a solid, scene-setting hour, it sometimes felt like the script was checking boxes rather than telling an organic story with a fluid sense of pacing.
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