Hello and welcome back to yet another season of Game of Thrones!! As with every season previous to season six, I will be recapping each episode with my comrade-in-arms, the lovely and talented Christopher Lockett, who will be posting it over on his blog simultaneously (but with different pictures). Until this season, Christopher has been the guy who knows the books inside and out and has commented on how each episode worked as an adaptation, whereas I just talked about the episodes in and of themselves. Now that we're officially off-book, both of us will be analyzing and discussing the new season in how it fits in the pantheon of what came before, and where we see it going.
So without further ado, here's Christopher to start us off!
Christopher: Well, we begin precisely where we left off last season, with the
lifeless body of Jon Snow in the courtyard of Castle Black. We’re treated to an
artful overhead shot skimming the edge of the Wall and craning down into the
yard, coming in close on Jon’s lifeless face. Wolves howl in the distance, and
the silent emptiness of the yard is broken by the rattling of a locked door.
And then we see Ghost: locked in a room, in answer to your question, Nikki, in
our last post of season five. Where was Jon’s direwolf as he was stabbed to
death? Safely imprisoned, apparently.
As openings go, this was pretty deftly
done: not least because every single fan of this show ended last season in a
state of either trauma, denial, or rage (or all of the above) at the thought
that Jon Snow was to be added to Game of
Thrones’ butcher’s bill. If they’d been cute and started this episode
anywhere else, I have to imagine that rage would have been volcanic. But no …
we close in on Jon, deserted by his assassins who, we will shortly glean, have
scarpered to the mess hall in order to justify their mutiny to their fellows.
Leaving poor Jon to be discovered by …
Davos. There, the Onion Knight is joined by Jon’s friends, and together they
carry the body indoors. That it is Davos who first finds him and takes command
in short order is significant. Here is a man who has quite literally lost
everything: his sons killed at the Battle of Blackwater, himself sidelined by
his king to stay at Castle Black, and subsequently left without a king or an
army after Stannis’ calamitous defeat at the hands of the Boltons. Yet here he
is, siding with a small handful of Jon Snow loyalists. I have had many
occasions to praise the casting on this show, and I can think of few actors who
have better inhabited GRRM’s characters than Liam Cunningham as Davos Seaworth.
He radiates gravitas, and so beautifully and subtly communicates the pathos of
a man whose loyalty and service were undeserved by the object of his devotion,
Stannis Baratheon.
All of which is at least a little beside
the question that everyone waiting breathlessly since last year has been
asking: is Jon Snow really dead? Well, yes. Quite dead. But will he remain
dead? Will he become a wight? Had he thrown his consciousness into Ghost? Will
Melissandre resurrect him? This last question will rebound on us when we
discuss this episode’s final moments, but for now we can safely say: Jon Snow
is dead. At least for the entirety of this episode.
What’s interesting is the possible battle
lines that have been drawn: Dolorous Edd Tollett has been dispatched, presumably,
to recruit the wildlings to the cause of Jon Snow’s friends. Davos makes it
clear that he has no truck with Jon’s assassins. Ghost is seriously pissed. Meanwhile,
Alliser Thorne and his co-conspirators paraphrase Brutus’ post-assassination
speech from Julius Caesar in the mess
hall, apparently successfully. The stage has been set for some serious shit to
go down at the Wall, with or without a live Jon Snow.
What did you think of this season’s opening
salvo, Nikki?
Nikki: I loved it (all except that part where Jon Snow didn’t magically
come back to life, of course). But I’m also glad they’ve kept it a secret.
Season 5 ended with the death of Jon Snow; perhaps season 6 will end with him
coming back to life. It would be really interesting if they draw it out, either
to keep our hopes up or to divert our attention elsewhere. The thought of
Tollett returning with a band of wildlings is exciting — as Davos says, “You’re
not the only ones who owe your lives to Jon Snow” — and I wonder if this might
be where Bran could re-enter the picture this season.
Meanwhile, over in the Super Happy Fun
Times Castle, Ramsay strokes the face of his dead lover before declaring that
she’s “good meat” that should be fed to the hounds (we all, um, grieve in our
own way, I suppose?) before Roose takes him out into the hallway to chastise
him for the way he handled his ragtag battle. He’s lost Sansa and Theon, and he
says the North will never back them if they don’t have Sansa Stark, and they’ve
lost the heir to the Iron Islands. And then he hints that perhaps the newest
Lady Bolton is carrying a son, which once again reminds Ramsay that he’ll be
once again relegated to bastard status: heir of nothing.
Meanwhile, Sansa and Reek have been running
from Ramsay Bolton’s castle and forge an icy stream (where Sansa, for some
reason, doesn’t remove the 100-pound cloak from her back and hold it over her
head so they can use it later as a blanket) before finding solace under a
felled tree. I LOVED the scene where we saw another glimmer of Theon, where
Sansa is both so physically and emotionally numb she can’t move, and he
embraces her, rubbing her back to keep her warm, but also to let her know that
her “brother” is back. And when Ramsay’s hunters catch up to them, Theon throws
himself in their path as a sacrifice, trying to save the girl who was raised as
his sister and right all the wrongs he’s done to the Starks. It doesn’t work,
however, and juuuuuust when you think
oh NO, they have to head back to that bastard’s
castle... along comes Brienne and Pod.
You know a show is great when you’re
cheering for joy on the couch and it’s less than 15 minutes into the premiere
episode. The fight scene was fantastic, where Brienne holds her own, but not
without some trouble. She’s large, she’s strong, and she’s an excellent
fighter, but these men have horses, and — not to put too fine a point on it —
they’re men. And she still manages to
better them, with the help of Podrick and Theon, who guts one of them. She
ignores their cries for mercy because she has one goal and one goal only: to
save Lady Stark, whose life she has pledged to keep safe. And when she kneels
before Sansa and once again gives her that pledge — and I was half expecting
her to say, “NOW will you come with me, you jerk?!” — and Sansa accepts it
(with some help from Podrick when she can’t remember the formal language), it’s
a joyous moment.
And to be honest, I couldn’t help but think to myself, I would
love a Brienne:
“See that woman over there, Brienne? She
told me off at the PTA meeting, and is one of those moms who volunteers for
everything and makes me feel bad that I don't. And her daughter’s a bully who
made my daughter cry last week. Deal with her.”
“Yes, m’lady!”
Sssshhhhhink!!
Ah.
OK, back to reality.
From here we move to King’s Landing and the
Lannisters. What did you think of the reunion of Jamie and Cersei, Chris?
Christopher:
On a purely emotional level, it was my favourite
scene of the episode. I too was fist-pumping as Brienne rode to the rescue, was
aghast at the events in Dorne, loved the buddy comedies unfolding in and
adjacent to Meereen, and was gobsmacked by the episode’s final moments … but in
this reunion I think we got some of the finest acting we’ve seen from Lena
Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau yet—which is saying a lot, as neither of them
have exactly been slouches in the previous five seasons.
If there’s something this show does well,
it’s making us sympathize with otherwise hateful characters, and making us
cringe when the supposedly likable characters do hateful things (the obvious
exceptions being the requisite sociopaths like Joffrey and Ramsay, whom we just
loathe unreservedly and with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns). We
know what’s coming—we know as soon as Cersei receives word that her twin has
returned that her joy at the prospect of seeing him and her daughter will turn
to ash. And while she’s a character for whom we would be well justified for
indulging in some schadenfreude, the
scene is instead heartbreaking, for reasons Cersei herself identifies. “She was
good,” she weeps. “From her first breath, she was so sweet. I don’t know where
she came from. She was nothing like me. No meanness, no jealousy. Just good … I
thought if I could make something so good, so pure … maybe I’m not a monster.”
Her grief in this moment is wildly different from her grief for Joffrey, which
was almost feral in its rage and fear. We might interpret that as Cersei
valuing her male child over the female, but I think not—it was, I’m inclined to
believe, her unspoken recognition of her son’s monstrosity, seeing herself
reflected in it, and her visceral reaction to being attacked.
Her grief for Myrcella is quieter, more
fatalistic, the shock at the death of innocence. It is a moment of rare
self-reflection on Cersei’s part, in which she sees her own machinations and
ruthlessness rebound upon her. Except that we know her well enough to know she
would not be surprised to have the revenge of her numerous enemies visited upon
her: Myrcella’s death at the hands of the Sand Snakes is yet one more innocent lost
in the larger war, and we soon see her erstwhile fiancée similarly dispatched
back in Dorne—dead for the sin of having the wrong parents. It was a moment
that called to mind the murder of all Robert Baratheon’s bastards in season
one.
As I’ve mentioned many times in the past
five years, Lena Headey as Cersei was always one of the few bits of casting
that never entirely sat right with me—not because she’s not a good actor, but
because her portrayal is dramatically at odds with how Cersei is described in
the novels, and for that reason she’s had more of an uphill battle in this role
than almost everyone else in the show. But I must say, she has come to own this
role, and in moments like this brings more nuance to the character than GRRM
gives her in the books.
And she’s well matched in this scene by
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, whose impassioned “Fuck prophecy! Fuck fate, fuck
everyone who isn’t us!” is one of the more eloquent employments of the f-bomb
I’ve seen since Deadwood ended. A
point I raised several times last season is the way in which this show depicts
radicalization: the way in which circumstances drive certain characters and
groups of characters to extremes. The rise of the sparrows is the most obvious
example, but we see it also in the scenes in Mereen, where the red priests look
to be getting traction with the disenfranchised ex-slaves. Jaime’s “fuck
everyone who isn’t us!” mirrors such sentiments on a smaller and more intimate
scale, a reactionary clenching in the face of fear and loss.
Speaking of the sparrows, we segue from
Cersei and Jaime to where Margaery remains imprisoned, subjected to the shaming
of a septa who seems to take a little too much pleasure in her duties. What
think you of the fortunes of House Tyrell, Nikki?
Nikki: Oh, Margaery. Just as you said with Cersei, there’s a part of me
that wants to see her suffer for everything she’s done to the people around
her. But then you see her on the ground being badgered by a nun, and...
actually, yeah, I’m still OK with her suffering at this point. When the High
Sparrow enters the room after Sister Ratchet has been ordering her to confess,
Margaery once again tells him that she has nothing to confess. “You believe you
are pure, perfect, wholly without sin?” he says to her. “None of us are,” she
replies, and despite the cringe-worthy grammatical error in that line (move on,
Nikki, MOVE ON) it’s one that sums up every person on this show. Everyone is
seeking revenge on someone else for harms that person has done to them, all the
while harming other people. Margaery was justified in the actions she took
against the House of Lannister, but she’s been so awful and bitchy that I just couldn’t stand her anymore.
Meanwhile, Cersei and Jaime in the previous scene are lamenting what’s been
done to them by everyone, and yet Cersei is the one who brought the High
Sparrow to King’s Landing in the first place, and she’s also the one who had
Oberyn killed, which led to the murder of her daughter.
And the Sand Snakes aren’t stopping there.
Now that they’ve gotten to Cersei through her daughter, they turn their sights
to the House Martell. Prince Oberyn’s brother Doran, the ruler of Dorne, is a
quiet, pensive leader who is a lot calmer and more calculating than his younger
brother, whose head was smooshed like a cantaloupe when he got too cocky in the
midst of battling the Mountain. When Ellaria Sand raced to Dorne to tell Doran
what had happened to her lover, Doran did not rush to exact revenge on the
House of Lannister — he knew doing so would simply start a war that he wanted
to avoid. And so he said no, let’s wait, come up with a plan, and find a way to
fix all of this. The problem is, this isn’t the first time the Lannisters —
and, specifically, the Mountain — had torn their family apart. Remember that
before the events of the series, Rhaegar Targaryen — Daenerys’s beloved
older brother — had been married to Elia Dorne, and when Robert Baratheon’s
army moved on Rhaegar, with Baratheon himself killing the Targaryen, Tywin
Lannister then moved his army into Rhaegar’s castle, and the Mountain not only
killed Elia’s older child, followed by her infant son, before her very eyes,
but then raped her violently before killing her, too.
The effect this would have had on Oberyn
was immense, as he was very close to his sister, and Ellaria vowed revenge on
that day, but Prince Doran refused to move against the Lannisters. Now that
they’ve killed both his brother and his sister and he still refuses to move, Ellaria can no longer wait for something to
happen. “Your son is weak, just like you, and weak men will never rule Dorne
again.” And as Doran lies on the ground, gasping for breath after Ellaria has
stabbed him through the lung, his last thought is that his son is next.
And he is. In one of the gorier moments on Game of Thrones — and one most viewers
probably saw coming, since A) no one turns their back on Obara and gets away
with it, and B) Obara would like nothing more than to take a satisfying kill
away from Nymeria — Obara pushes her spear diagonally through Trystane’s back
and up through his face. Thus endeth the House of Martell.
And from there we move to Meereen, where
Tyrion and Varys return (and there was much rejoicing... yaay...) and Varys
stops Tyrion from a potentially embarrassing baby-eating incident. What did you
think of the return of our favourite twosome, and the rumblings of rebellion in
Meereen?
Christopher:
I would be happy with a Game of Thrones spin-off that was just Tyrion and Varys on a road
trip. To say that these two actors have amazing chemistry might suggest that
they don’t have great chemistry with everyone else in the cast, which they do;
but there’s a particularly good match between these characters that the series
has exploited to much greater effect than the novels. They are both
marginalized figures who more than compensate for their outsider status with
their shrewd intellects; and both work for a greater good in spite of the fact
that they receive no gratitude for it. I’m reminded of the moment in season two’s
final episode, after the Battle of the Blackwater, when Varys sits beside the
gravely wounded Tyrion’s bed and informs him that he cannot expect any
commendations for his valiant defense of the city. “There are many who know
that, without you, the city would have faced certain defeat,” Varys says sadly.
“The king won’t give you any honours, the histories won’t mention you … but we
will not forget.” That “we” is vague, but suggestive, hinting at a silent
majority—the people themselves, the forgotten, who are so often crushed by the
great wheel Daenerys spoke about last season.
This little scene is one of the subtler
bits of writing we’ve seen: one of the things this show is good at is depicting
the monumental difficulty of ruling in a just and equitable manner. Nothing is
easy, and this in a genre that has so frequently figured the difference between
bloody war and utopian peace as merely a matter of sitting the right arse on
the throne: whether it’s Aragorn’s coronation at the end of Lord of the Rings, the Pevensie children
ascending to Cair Paravel in The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or young Arthur pulling the sword from the
stone, ruling is a matter of destiny rather than statesmanship and diplomacy. Game of Thrones dispenses with this
trope almost entirely.
Almost—there is still the vague sense of destiny floating in the air,
especially in terms of Daenerys’ ostensibly inevitable return to Westeros, but
the sojourn in Meereen has proved such a catastrophe so far that the mere rightness (or what seems like rightness)
of Daenerys’ motives falls far short of what is needed to actually run a
kingdom.
Tyrion’s first line in this scene—“We’re
never going to fix what’s wrong with this city from the top of an eight hundred
foot pyramid”—sums this point up rather pithily. Daenerys arrived in Meereen
with noble intentions, but ruled in a literally top-down fashion that ignored
nuance. Tyrion brings Varys down to ground level, but his drab merchant’s garb
can’t efface his privileged background: “You walk like a rich person,” Varys
says, skeptical. “You walk as though the paving stones were your personal
property.” Tyrion may have excommunicated himself from his family and fortune
and been subjected last season to a host of indignities, but he is still a
Lannister. The bit of comic business in which Tyrion inadvertently offers to
eat the destitute woman’s baby is emblematic of the serial miscommunications
that marred Daenerys’ reign, and as he and Varys continue through the city,
there is a palpable sense of imminent danger. The red priest urges the people
to take things in their own hands rather than wait for the queen’s return;
graffiti highlights Daenerys’ own conflicted status, and the disillusionment of
the people she sought to save; and as Tyrion and Varys enter what appears to be
a deserted part of the city, the apparent absence of people is belied by their
unseen watcher lurking in the shadows. The sense of a city holding its breath
is broken by tolling bells and the screams and cries of people in flight, and
we see what appears to be the Sons of the Harpy’s next attack: the burning of
the fleet in the harbor. “We won’t be sailing to Westeros anytime soon,” Tyrion
grimly observes. Given that Daenerys’ absence and the city’s chaos mean that
her return to the Seven Kingdoms was a ways off in the future, the burning of
the ships is more significant for the fact that it obviates the possibility for
escape.
Which brings us to a somewhat more awkward
buddy narrative as Jorah and Daario find the site of Daenerys’ capture, and
Jorah finds the ring she left behind. Of course, we also get a requisite glance
at Jorah’s forearm to remind us of his creeping greyscale, whose progress says tempus fugit—his days are numbered, and
the time he has to find Dany is limited.
Speaking of the erstwhile Mother of
Dragons, she is back in the familiar context of a khalasar, except this time as a captive and slave. What did you
think of Daenerys’ scenes in this episode, Nikki?
Nikki: Agreed on that scene being one to rush over. I like Daario, but I
like him more when he’s in Clone Club.
The scenes with Daenerys were fantastic.
First, as she’s being pulled along in the dust and desert while the two riders
speak Dothraki in front of her, assuming she can’t understand a word (all the
while with her face showing the “as soon as I get the upper hand again, you two
asshats will be the first to be flame-broiled by my dragon” look), and then
when we get to the tent where Khal Moro unwittingly enters a Spanish
Inquisition sketch.
Moro: The absolute BEST thing in life is
seeing a naked woman for the first time. Seeing a naked woman and killing
another Khal okay the TWO best things in life are seeing a naked woman for the
first time... and killing another Khal.
Moron #1: And conquering a city and taking
people as slaves.
Moron #2: And removing the idols back to
Vaes Dothrak...
Moro: OK THE FOUR, FOUR best things in life are seeing a naked woman for the first
time, killing another Khal, conquering a city and taking the people as slaves,
AND taking her idols back to Vaes Dothrak. And breaking a wild horse and
forcing it to submit to your will OK AMONG THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE... is seeing
a naked woman for the first time.
Actor Joe Naufahu is brilliant in this
scene, simply by tilting his head and looking off into the distance while his
yahoos try to outwit him and prevent him from making a very brief and
terrifying point to his prisoner, and it’s hilarious.
And completely unexpected in the midst of a Dothraki scene. Meanwhile Daenerys
has this “are... you... kidding... me...” look on her face the entire time that
makes the scene even better.
But on a more serious note, throughout this
scene we can’t help but move back in our memories to a very similar scene in
season one, when she was first trotted out to Khal Drogo, who similarly looked
at her like another possession, was taunted by his fellow riders and women
sitting nearby, and was terrified. Her brother Viserys had put her up to it
back then, but this is a very
different Daenerys who is facing them this time. This one is a queen, a mother
of dragons, a woman who not only conquered Viserys, but made Khal Drogo worship
her, who has loved and lost and risen above everything, who commands armies and
who has a very serious shot at taking back the throne of Westeros. This isn’t
the young girl from season one (only 13 years old in the books when it
happens). This is a powerful woman. And it’s no surprise when he suddenly steps
back, cuts her bonds, asks her forgiveness, and acquiesces to the power of
Daenerys...
...except that’s not exactly what happens.
Instead of being let go, she’s told that as a widow, she will be forced to live
out her days in the Temple of Dosh Khaleen, a place where widowed khaleesis go
to live out the rest of their days. (And... apparently as he was dying a
horrible, painful death, Khal Drogo didn’t think to mention this to his wife?
Yeesh. Men.)
Things are about to get interesting.
Meanwhile, as the show continues in its
quite anti–Happily Ever After vein, Arya is now blind and begging for coins on
the streets when she’s met with her old roomie from the House of Black and
White, who beats the utter living snot out of her with a staff in what appears
to be the beginning of a truly violent series of lessons that will teach Arya
to see in a very different way (think blindfolded Luke in lightsaber training
as he tried to block the shots coming from the Marksman-H... only imagine it if
Luke missed every shot and came away half-dead). Just as Daenerys’s scene
reminded us of how far she’s come since season one, this scene reminds us of a
young Arya as she had her “dancing” lessons with Syrio Forel... all these years
later, the training is far more vicious, and Arya is no longer the little girl
she was back then.
What did you think of the “training” scene
with Arya, Chris?
Christopher:
I think one of the best lines of this episode was
when Daario says he hopes to live a long life, because he wants to see what the
world looks like when Daenerys is done conquering it. That’s a sentiment that
resonates on a host of levels with this series, both the macro and the micro.
What will Westeros look like after it
gets the Daenerys treatment? But on the micro level, what will survival of
these tempestuous, indeed catastrophic times mean for all of these characters?
It’s a question I find myself asking at
each stage in Arya’s evolution—from tomboy daughter of a noble house, to a
fugitive cutpurse, to a girl suddenly faced with the fact of her family’s
destruction, to an assassin-in-training required to surrender her sense of self
in the name of becoming Faceless. What is being required of her in the House of
Black and White is nothing less than the dissolution of her selfhood, to truly
become “no one” in order that she can assume myriad identities. That loss of
self is chilling enough a prospect to consider in the abstract, but even more
so when it is a character so compelling and complex as Arya. I don’t want her to become no one! I always want
her to be Arya Stark in all of her stubborn idiosyncrasies.
And it is difficult to watch her broken
down and humiliated in this way. On one hand, it is reminiscent of every kung
fu movie ever made in which an apprentice suffers at the hands of a master, and
perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that entry into the most elite society of
assassins is slightly more brutal than becoming a Navy SEAL. On the other hand,
a man wonders what will be left of Arya when all is said and done (assuming she
survives).
One way or another, the writers aren’t
really giving us any room to sympathize with “the waif” (which is apparently
what we’re calling that tween girl version of R. Lee Ermey).
But speaking of loathsome characters, we
haven’t yet talked at any length about Ser Alliser Thorne doing his very best
Brutus-addressing-the-mob impersonation back at the Wall. A quick note of
correction: you suggested that perhaps Edd Tollett’s mission to go bring the
wildlings back might bring Bran back into the picture, but the point is that
the wildlings are now south of the
Wall—that was the mutineers’ main quarrel with Jon, that he let the Night
Watch’s traditional enemy through to settle the lands that they had always
raped and pillaged in the past.
“He forced a choice on us, and we made it,”
thunders Thorne, at once acknowledging that he broke his oath in killing Jon,
and justifying that act as Jon’s own fault. Here as elsewhere in this world,
there is a tension between tradition and revolution, between the way things
have been and what they have to be. Jon Snow recognized that the enmity between
the Watch and the wildlings was small beer compared to the imminent war between
the living and the dead, but Thorne and his ilk are too stuck in old hatreds to
remember that the Wall was not built to keep wildlings out, but to defend
against a far more profound threat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it takes an
outsider to recognize as much. Davos sees what Jon Snow saw, and what Alliser
Thorne cannot. But the battle lines have been drawn, with Davos and his fellow
loyalists given an ultimatum that they all recognize as false: “In my learned
opinion, if we open that door,” Davos begins, and one of Jon’s friends
finishes, “And they’ll slaughter us all.” Their only hope is with the
wildlings—or is it? “There’s always the red woman,” Davos counters, and is met
with skepticism. But, “You haven’t see her do what I’ve seen her do.”
Cut to a despondent Melissandre in her
chamber: all the bets she’s staked seemed to have failed. Stannis is dead; Jon,
whom she saw in the flames “fighting at Winterfell,” is dead. She stands before
her stained mirror and—surprise!—opens her dress. My friend with whom I watched
this episode snarked with mock surprise that it had taken them a whole fifty
minutes to get to their first boob flash of the season.
But then … well, I’ll leave it to you,
Nikki, to play us out with this episode’s closing shocker.
Nikki: Ha!! Sounds like your friends and I were on exactly the same page.
As Melisandre stood looking at her mirror, completely bereft, I said out loud,
“Undo the dress, Melisandre... there’s no way HBO would have greenlit this
episode without at least one boob.”
And she complied. To which I said to my husband, “Man, no matter how many
seasons this show is on, that woman’s breasts are spectacular and perky.”
And then she removed her necklace.
And I immediately said, “Ohmygod I take
that back.” Because, turns out, Melisandre is old. Like, beyond elderly... we’re talking fairy tale witch old. That gorgeous ubiquitous ruby
necklace has actually had a purpose in keeping Melisandre looking young, but in
fact, she looks like she could be quite ancient, give or take a century or two.
And of course the mind begins to run back
to her seduction of Stannis and Jon Snow, of the fact that her way of speaking
is always slow and measured, wise and mature. She speaks like someone who not
only believes in the Lord of Light, but knew the guy personally at one time. And
now that we see her remove the necklace to go to bed, I wonder if she has to do
this every night? What magic beyond the necklace creates the illusion that
Melisandre is indeed a young, beautiful woman? Does it take an enormous amount
of strength? Where did she get the necklace? Who created it for her? How many
years has she been doing this, and why?
Regardless, this episode left me with only
one really major thought: please tell me there’s some sort of WesterEtsy shop
where I can buy one for myself...
Thanks for reading, everyone, and please
join us again next week!