The makers of The Game of Thrones love, love, love to play around with their fans and fanatics. What are the first few images that pop up in an episode everyone has been dying to watch for almost a year? A little girl wandering through the woods. Arya? Meera? Myrcella, maybe? Nah, someone we have never seen as a kid, someone who keeps bragging about her powerful father!

GoT5.1, the season premiere titled “The Wars to Come”, masterfully tosses up the theme of the show in its very first scene — nothing is for keeps. In a very Macbeth-ish opener, a witch in the woods tells that little girl: “You will be Queen... for a time... then comes another... younger, more beautiful.” Yes, that little girl would grow up to be Cersei Lannister and she sure would be Queen.

The flashback makes you wonder: despite knowing her reign would be brief, why would Cersei have the King killed? Something that would come up again as her cousin and former lover Lancel shows up, completely transformed from that jittery cupbearer to a calm member of a religious order named Sparrows. He had got King Robert drunk during that fateful boar hunt at the order of the Queen and now he asks for forgiveness for “leading her into darkness”.

Things continue to be strained between Cersei and Jaime. First their son and now their father dead, their carnal past seems to be catching up with the twins. Convinced that he helped Tyrion escape and hence had a role to play in Tywin’s murder, Cersei clearly cannot trust Jaime no more. More than anything else, the Queen Regent seems to have lost all her plotting partners. Who will fill that empty seat? “Sister” Margaery, maybe?

The other living Lannister, Tyrion, shipped off from King’s Landing in a crate with a hole by Lord Varys, who had also decided to flee with him, is in Devdas mode. He was always “the god of t**s and wine” but now he wants to drink himself to death. Of course, his suicidal tendencies are not unfounded. Not every night do you strangle your love to death and kill your father with a crossbow!

Varys, of course, has plans. Like he always has. The Spider agrees with the Imp — “a drunken dwarf will never be the saviour of Seven Kingdoms” — but he wants Tyrion to power someone else to the Iron Throne — “someone stronger than Tommen but gentler than Stannis; (someone) with a powerful army and a right family name”. Yes you can do your calculations but Varys will spell the name out for you.

Interestingly, these monarch musings are happening in the palace of Illyrio Mopatis, the same guy who had helped arrange the wedding between Daenerys and Khal Drogo for Viserys Targaryen back in the first season.

Dany takes up from where she left off in Season Four — “I am the queen”. But as Dadu Tywin had told Joffrey: “Any man who must say, ‘I am the king’ is no true king.” Things are going out of hand for The Breaker of Chains as a murderous group named Sons of the Harpy attacks and kills her Unsullied warriors in Meereen. 

What’s scarier though is that the Mother of Dragons can no longer control her babies. Well, they are babies no more. Viserion and Rhaegal, chained in the dungeons, have grown big enough to get an audition call for Jurassic Park, even as Drogon remains missing. You can argue that if you lock up your kids in a cell, they are unlikely to remain obedient. Maybe silly ol’ Dany needed to watch How To Train Your Dragon before hatching those eggs!
The prospect of someone else on the show disciplining those dragons and going “Dracarys!” is mouth-firing, though.

That’s unlikely to be Sansa Stark, but then you never quite know in Game of Thrones. And now that Little Bird is being mentored by Littlefinger himself, she can sure grow large wings. Leaving the work-in-progress, Lord of the Vale Robin Arryn behind, Lord Baelish promises to take Sansa “to a land so far from here even Cersei Lannister can’t get her hands on her”.

Could that be The Wall where Melisandre is now calling the shots over the bastard of Winterfell? Something steamy and sinister is all but brewing between the Red Priestess and Jon Snow, now that Ygritte is out of the way. Perhaps the most sensual moment of the episode is Melisandre grabbing Jon’s left hand and putting it on her right cheek and commanding: “Feel.” And then with a pregnant pause, asking: “Are you a virgin?”

The first episode of the fifth season of Game of Thrones does exactly what it needed to do — recap and reset. Fresh challenges, new relationships, unlikely alliances and that killer prophecy from Maggy the witch: “Gold will be their crowns... and gold their shrouds.”

No deaths in a season opener? Of course, there is one! A live barbecue, if you please. For someone who would rather burn than kneel. Someone you are not deeply invested in, emotionally. Someone who doesn’t die in the books. Because if there’s one thing this show has taken seriously, it is Valar Morghulis! Yes, all men must die.

 

SPOILER ALERT! wHAT WE SAW AND WHO WE MISSED IN THE FIRST EPISODE