benreviewer

In my opinion, this is the weakest episode of the season so far. After all the crazy events of the last episode, the stakes felt so high and the tension at its maximum. The dance had begun. But this episode is very chill which does not really make sense to me. And I feel like there are so many aspects they could've explored in the aftermath of the insane battle last episode that they didn't. I would especially love to have seem them explore Aemond's character more, now that he literally attempted kingslaying AND kinslaying and is now on the iron throne: what kind of person has he become, what his motivations were, etc. As for the scenes we did get in this episode, most of them are okay-good, but nothing was.particularly captivating or engaging to me. Some scenes felt repetitive or like they didn't accomplish much, like Rhaenyra's arguing with Ser Alfred and the council yet again. Daemon's visions were cool in ep3 and ep4 but they're getting tiring now. Moments I did really like were the common folk trying to escape King's Landing and Baela and Corlys' conversation. The Brackens denouncing Daemon as a tyrant was also a good scene, but I honestly wasn't invested enough in the Brackens/Blackwoods conflict to care too much. Overall, this was just a good episode, rather than a great or outstanding one like the first 4. Ep2, for example, was a much better example of an episode that was focused on the aftermath of a huge event and was nearly entirely dialogue-based with little action, while still being excellent in quality. But I'm hoping that most of the less interesting bits in this episode are setup for the final 3, so I may look on this episode more favorably in the future.