Cleaned, many errors corrected, missing dialog dashes added and re-synced by Tronar
Welcome to Westeros where the fight for the kingdom is on.
Anyone can die.
Where great families live and die for the Iron Throne.
- Dracarys! - Your heart is in your mouth.
Those scenes are breathtaking.
- Some are noble. - Jon Snow's everybody's hero.
- Some are not. - Aarrgghh!
Aw, he's so bad!
- I have her! - So many kings and queens
- but only one can rule. - You cannot deny her strength.
Run!
The Wall is down and the dead are coming.
You can't have a cliffhanger greater than that.
Oof! When's it start?
This is what Game Of Thrones does, it sucks you in.
So let's fly through the saga to date
and get you ready for season eight.
As season one opens, it's the calm before the storm.
King Robert Baratheon rules from the capital King's Landing
- but his days are numbered. - To be king or queen in Westeros,
you sit on the Iron Throne and you rule over
the Seven Kingdoms from King's Landing.
Start the damn joust before I piss myself!
He's locked in a loveless marriage and
only chose his queen for her family's name to hold his kingdom together.
On Robert's part, there's no love involved.
Don't you get tired?
Every day.
It could've been anybody and it happens to be Cersei.
I felt something for you once you know.
- I'm very sympathetic to Cersei. - I know.
She was completely in love with him. She... she was in awe of him almost
and he turned into this semi-abusive drunk.
Was it ever possible for us? Was there ever a time,
ever a moment?
No.
You may think, initially, 'Oh, that poor
'lady married to that terrible man.' But don't underestimate her.
This unhappy couple have three golden-haired children to their name
but Cersei keeps a deadly secret from Robert.
The children are not his.
The truth will be discovered on a royal trip north
and it's here that our story really begins.
The king has asked his old ally Ned Stark to help him rule.
Ned and his wife Catelyn govern the North,
fiercely loyal to the crown.
The Starks stand for loyalty, integrity, bravery.
They are really the moral compass of the show.
They're the good guys and they're the ones
that you find yourself rooting for from the start.
The couple have five children,
three sons and two daughters.
And the decimation of this happy family
will reverberate throughout our tale.
They're almost too innocent for that world.
King Robert arrives with his queen Cersei
and with them is the whole Lannister clan.
That's Jaime Lannister, the queen's twin brother.
Oh, the Lannisters. They're blond,
they're beautiful, they're arrogant, so fuck them.
It's the Lannisters who are going to introduce
a lot of trouble into the lives of the Starks from this point.
King Robert has decided to ask Ned to be the hand of the king.
Nine years I haven't seen you,
where have you been? Guarding the North for you.
Robert realises that he... too late, that he's surrounded himself
by enemies, really.
The only person he can trust is Ned.
I need you, Ned, down at King's Landing
not up here where you're no damn use to anybody.
More importantly, during the visit, Bran Stark goes climbing
one day, gets to the top of the tower and
discovers the Lannisters' deep dark secret.
The secret is that Cersei the queen
is actually sleeping with her brother Jaime.
The Lannisters, oh, God!
Ugh! Oh!
Pffff! They are...
I have never seen a family...
I mean, talk about dysfunctional.
Oh!
Stop! Stop.
It's incest, which, even in Westeros,
is generally frowned upon. It also means that King Robert's children
are not actually his children. It's all right.
He saw us! I heard you the first time.
He knows what it means too and he knows that if the incest
is discovered, not only will he and his sister be put to death
but their three children may very well too.
And so for Jaime Lannister, the greatest swordsman in Westeros,
there's only one solution.
The things I do for love.
Here's a convenient way. The kid will die,
it'll look like he fell and our kids will be safe.
First in a coma, Bran will later awake
with no memory of how he fell or what he saw.
The royal secret is safe for now and only the viewer
has seen what the Lannisters will do to keep it.
Everything went pear-shaped after that
and really that's the whole chain of events starting.
King Robert still wants Ned down in the capital,
so this will be the last ever time we see the Stark family
all together, a family which includes Ned's son out of wedlock,
the bastard Jon Snow. Ned must now leave his family
and follow King Robert south,
taking his daughters Sansa and Arya with him.
The reason I think the first season of Game Of Thrones works
is it's essentially about this good family that just wants to
essentially be left alone and serve their king and their country.
The family is ripped apart and thrown into situations they never anticipated.
They are bound for the capital King's Landing,
where Ned's new task will be to protect King Robert
from those who would unseat him.
And in season one, viewers learned
the greatest enemies live in exile overseas.
The Targaryens.
They were dethroned by King Robert in the last war.
The only surviving members of the family
are a brother and sister called Viserys and Daenerys.
The siblings are the children of the Mad King who was killed in war.
Viserys dominates his younger sister.
Viserys has more than a touch of the Targaryen madness
and, you know, sometimes he's protecting her
but he's also trying to treat her as a... as a bargaining chip.
Come forward, my dear. In search of an army,
Viserys makes a pact with a savage tribe, the Dothraki.
Offering his beautiful young sister in marriage to their leader,
Khal Drogo. She's the only bargaining chip he has,
he doesn't have any wealth any more, he doesn't have any armies
but he has her who he can trade to this horse lord.
I would let his whole tribe fuck you,
all 40,000 men and their horses too, if that's what it took.
He's power hungry but to a nasty degree.
He doesn't really care how or by what means,
he just wants to be important and looked up to.
But his plans backfire.
Daenerys and Khal Drogo fall in love and become quite the power couple.
Suddenly, she finds herself, with Khal Drogo, empowered. People are obeying her.
Tell him I want what was bargained for or I'm taking you back.
He completely underestimates not only Dany but Khal Drogo.
What's he saying?
He says yes.
You shall have a golden crown.
It's a real coming-of-age story throughout the first season.
She really grows into herself.
Look away, Khaleesi. No.
This is one of the turning points for Daenerys.
I think this is when you realise that she's prepared
to sacrifice anything for the greater good.
A crown for a king.
Aarrgghh!
Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!
Argh! Ugh! Ugh!
He was revolting.
He was utterly, utterly revolting.
And that was the moment that she escaped from her shell.
When she became the woman and not the kowtowed girl.
And as the Targaryens grow in power,
we learn that King Robert faces another challenge
to his northernmost borders.
Threats which led past rulers to build
this giant wall of ice to keep out wild things beyond.
It's protected by the legendary Night's Watch.
The Night's Watch are a small army
who guard the northern border of the country.
In season one, there's lots of fighting for the throne
but actually, in the background, there are these creatures appearing
north of the Wall that nobody has seen for thousands of years
and no-one wants to believe they're there but they certainly are.
We hear the characters saying that this is all folklore,
that this is all made up but, for the viewer,
we see that, basically, these characters do exist.
They are there. Ugh!
The White Walkers are terrifying mostly because
you're not 100% sure you know what they're capable of doing
or what their motives are.
They are a serious threat.
In season one, in search of a purpose,
Jon Snow ventures to the Wall and joins the Night's Watch,
a leader in the making.
Jon Snow's everybody's hero.
Jon Snow's one of my favourite characters. He's the dude.
He's also in search of answers.
The question of Jon... Jon Snow's parentage
has been one of the burning topics amongst,
not only the show's fans, but book fans for many decades.
Jon Snow is Ned Stark's bastard son. He brought him back from a war
and we never really learned who the mother is.
Um, understandably, Catelyn, Ned's wife,
isn't too fond of Jon for that reason.
Try as she may, um, she could never make peace
with that, with the fact that Ned was unfaithful.
But down in the capital King's Landing,
Ned Stark has a much greater challenge to face.
His daughter has fallen for Prince Joffrey.
She's presented with marrying the future king,
live in a beautiful castle, go to banquets,
have beautiful dresses to wear. A fairy tale story.
Ned has discovered the queen and her brother are lovers
and this will be his family's undoing.
When the king returns from his hunt, I'll tell him the truth.
You must be gone by then, you and your children.
I will not have their blood on my hands.
Before he gets the chance to talk to King Robert, King Robert gets killed on a hunting trip.
Joffrey is now king and without Robert to protect him,
Ned is tried for treason. He confesses,
believing it will save his daughter but misjudges the new ruler.
He's been stuck up in the North too long
and has no idea how the real world operates,
how to really deal with the kind of... the politics of Westeros.
Bring me his head!
You will not!
That's when you realise nobody is safe in this world at all.
No! Stop them!
When I saw Sean Bean pushed down...
...that was the only scene that really has brought a tear to my eye.
It's cruel, it's heartbreaking,
but there's a point to the children witnessing this.
If they want to survive, they have to start to be resilient.
They have to learn from this.
It was at that moment, you realised what Game Of Thrones was really about.
It's here that the Stark family splinters.
Arya is whisked away by a Night's Watch brother loyal to Ned,
leaving Sansa at the mercy of Joffrey.
Robb Stark reacts with murderous rage
to the news that his father has been beheaded.
Robb's the heir and he's not only picking up his father's mantle
as Lord of Winterfell but he's picking up a much older mantle.
The crown that no-one has worn for 300 years, the Kingdom of the North.
It will lead to all-out war
between the Starks and the Lannisters
who are led by its patriarch Tywin Lannister.
Tywin Lannister is one of the great warriors
and battle strategists of the age.
His legacy is uppermost in his mind all of the time.
In these next few months, we could establish a dynasty
that will last a thousand years.
Or we could collapse into nothing like the Targaryens did.
All of his hopes are in Jaime.
As well as his twins, Cersei and Jaime,
he has a son he despises, Tyrion, known as the Imp.
You're wounded. Good of you to notice.
Tyrion doesn't look like a warrior. He doesn't look like a kingmaker,
there's no way that he can assume the position of Tywin.
I hear we won. I would say Tyrion is one of my favourite characters.
How he's managed to last this long is amazing to me.
As war rages in Westeros, over the Narrow Sea,
Daenerys loses a husband but gains astonishing new powers.
She walks into Khal Drogo's funeral pyre
with fossilised dragon's eggs.
Oh, what an epic scene.
Season one ends with the sight of Daenerys
emerging from a fire unscathed with her dragons hatched.
These creatures are extraordinary creatures,
the likes of which have not been seen in hundreds of years.
Blood of my blood.
You see these three dragons around her and you're, just, like,
they're gonna be awesome when they're grown.
The innocence is gone, she's it.
You know, she's the force now.
As the dragons are born, she comes more and more into her own
until the power becomes innate to her.
It's about a new era. The whole first season is essentially
the old era dying out and the new era beginning.
And by the end, she has a sense that she knows
that she's bound for greatness.
And after the break, watch those dragons grow in season two.
Welcome to Westeros where the fight for the kingdom is on.
Welcome back to Game Of Thrones, "The Story So Far", where season two
marks a new reign of tyranny in the capital King's Landing.
Joffrey is brutalising his subjects
as well as his bride-to-be, Sansa Stark.
You can't! What did you say?
Sansa has learned some painful lessons along the way.
The chivalrous knights and gallant princes that she dreamed of,
she got a gallant prince and he turned out to be Joffrey.
Killing you would send your brother a message.
She's a prisoner in the worst place imaginable, enduring all kinds
of psychological and sometimes physical abuse from these captors.
Leave her face.
I like her pretty.
He's a bully and we don't like bullies.
Joffrey is the character throughout the series
that the audience loves to hate.
I heard a disgusting lie about uncle Jaime. And you?
He's a despicable human being.
Cersei's smart enough to realise that Joffrey is perhaps
not what she might have hoped for
and he's getting out of her control now and he's a danger,
in part, even to her and even to other members of the family.
What you just did is punishable by death.
Joffrey's enemies are everywhere.
Chief amongst them, and just across the bay at Dragonstone,
is Stannis, brother of the late King Robert,
who believes the throne should be his.
Stannis has learned that Robert's children are Lannister bastards,
which means that it is Stannis who is next in line.
So Stannis Baratheon, who knows King Joffrey is the product of incest,
decides to send ravens out to all the corners of the Seven Kingdoms,
letting them know the Lannister secret.
In order to claim the throne, Stannis enlists
the Red Priestess, Melisandre,
who was on her own mission to find the right ruler for Westeros.
She believes Stannis is the saviour of the world, basically.
He's supposed to be on the Iron Throne.
And her magical powers have no limits, I think.
There's... There's so much that we don't know that she can do.
However, Stannis isn't the only one after the throne.
His younger brother, Renly, also believes he has a claim
and so war is inevitable.
The Iron Throne is mine by right.
All those that deny that are my foes.
The whole realm denies it, from Dorne to the Wall.
They both think they should be king but I'm on Stannis's side,
so screw Renly.
Rather than fight it out on the battlefield,
Stannis finds another way to kill his brother.
Family ties don't mean an awful lot in Westeros.
The powerful sorcery of the Red Priestess is revealed
when she gives birth to a sinister weapon.
Aarrgghh!
The shadow baby is basically just a way to kill Renly
and it comes out of me in a great way.
I think Melisandre, she's always lived by this religion.
If she's got something to do, she's gonna do it
and she's not gonna let other people stand in her way.
What I think is brilliant about Game Of Thrones,
it's a fantasy world but it's a completely realistic depiction of
how power works. What power does to people, what people do to get power,
what happens when they fall short, when they miss the mark. That's why it's so brilliant.
Ugh! Ugh-ugh!
When Renly is murdered, it leaves behind his widow,
Margaery Tyrell, who belongs to the Tyrell family,
who are very rich and powerful in their own right.
Calling yourself king doesn't make you one
and if Renly wasn't a king, I wasn't a queen.
She knows how to play the game. She really knows how to play the game.
Do you want to be a queen?
No.
I want to be THE queen.
As one would-be king is extinguished, another rises up
as season two sees a small but vicious family enter the fray.
A seafaring house that commands the greatest fleet of ships in Westeros.
It is led by Balon Greyjoy, whose son Theon,
a captive of the Starks since childhood,
has finally made it back home.
We take what is ours.
Your time with the wolves has made you weak.
Theon Greyjoy has grown up with the Stark family,
he was a sort of a prisoner from a war in the past.
He now returns to his motherland, which is the Iron Islands
and decides to betray the Starks.
You would have our father bow down to your other family?
I have no other family!
Theon's sister Yara, a battle-hardened warrior,
is now heir to the Iron Islands.
Yara is strong and fierce. When Theon comes back
and stakes his claim, she's worked too hard for this
and is not giving that up.
To prove his loyalty, Theon invades Winterfell.
The ravens are informing my father of my victory here.
This leaves the Stark family home in chaos
and he takes the younger Stark brothers captive.
Prince Theon. I yield to Prince Theon.
Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen is learning
valuable lessons in her quest to return
to Westeros and seize the throne.
She's desperate to be a good ruler.
That she can, you know, go to bed at night saying,
'I think I'm doing things the right way.'
As Daenerys's power grows so do her dragons
but as news of their existence spreads,
they become highly sought after.
When she's in Qarth, everybody kind of thinks, 'Who are you?
'We'll just take your dragons. and you're not powerful any more.'
Dracarys!
People have underestimated her the whole way.
And it is in season two that we finally see
the dragons kill for Daenerys.
Aarrgghh!
As Daenerys gets stronger in exile, Jon Snow and the Night's Watch
are on a mission beyond the Wall
where the true scale of the threat to the kingdom is revealed.
Blow the horn. Somebody come.
The army of the dead is on its way
and it's gonna kick off sooner or later and really, you know,
they've got to get out of there as fast as they possibly can.
One blast for friends, two for foes.
And three for White Walkers.
The threat of winter coming is very much
a myth to the people of the south.
They're not really taking it seriously.
They don't know about the undead
and all the horrors that are coming towards them.
Three blasts. Come on!
So what we learn in season two is that
the White Walkers are very much real.
They're nothing like we've ever seen before in television.
They're not just zombies, they're not just statues,
they're walking ice cubes, basically.
Um, they're, they're really bad and they're really scary
and it's literally... I think it's got to be a fight of ice and fire.
We have all these kingdoms wanting to fight for the throne
and they think that that is what ultimately the battle is about.
But really, at the end of the day,
they're not looking at what's the real problem here
and it's the White Walkers.
And it's in season two, in King's Landing,
where we see that Tyrion may just be an asset
to the war when Stannis launches an attack on the city.
I'll leave you dead.
The battle of Blackwater was his moment.
He was the best person to speak to the people of King's Landing
and to get them to protect their, their... their... their city
because he knows what it's like to fight,
he knows what it's like to have your back up against the wall.
We like an underdog. And when they...
When the underdog manages to come out on top,
it's a cause for celebration.
Those are brave men knocking at our door.
Let's go kill them!
Tyrion manages to get the troops fired up by giving
a good speech and then heads out with them to fight
Stannis on the bay. He doesn't last very long,
he gets knocked out after a couple of minutes.
Tyrion is upstaged by his father Tywin,
who arrives with his own massive army.
He's been bolstered by the Tyrells, who firmly joined the cause
and they crush the Stannis attack.
Certain people have luck on their side.
Other people don't. Possibly Stannis is one of those...
...very, very unlucky characters who are destined not to achieve
- their goals. - Let's fight!
Tywin's pretty lucky.
Fortune tends to smile on him
- when it should damn him. - Father.
And yet, against all the odds, that battle is won.
The battle is over. We have won.
Season three begins, Daenerys has set sail on a mission.
She and her dragons may have grown in power and stature
but securing an army still eludes her.
So she ventures to a place where she can buy one.
She knows she needs an army, a powerful army,
if she ever wants to reclaim the Westerosi throne
and the best bet for that are the Unsullied.
I have dragons.
I'll give you one.
She appears to want to trade the dragon for slaves.
She seems to have made this daft agreement
to give away her best dragon.
She hands over the dragon. Next thing you know,
once she has control of the Unsullied...
...then it's very easy to say to the dragon
who still will listen to her and not to him, 'Burn him.'
Dracarys!
No! No! No!
Because you would take power if you have the force of a dragon,
they're pretty impressive creatures.
She's been the mother of dragons and knew she was destined
for greatness but now she really is a queen with an army.
To then see that she has thousands of people
on her team and then you get, like, this swoop past.
She's got these, like, fire-breathing mythical creatures
that they're just gonna tear shit up.
As this young Targaryen gains followers,
in King's Landing, a young Tyrell is gaining influence.
Margaery has replaced Sansa in Joffrey's affections,
a reward for her family's military support at Blackwater.
I imagine it must be so exciting to squeeze your finger here
and watch something die over there.
Margaery is a woman who's on top of her game,
she's controlling where she's going, she's a proper feminist icon.
But the Tyrells' ambitions are not going down well
with Cersei Lannister. Alana is the matriarch of the family
and she advises her granddaughter on how best to play the political game,
so that she might take power in King's Landing.
To make matters worse, her soulmate Jaime is a prisoner of war.
He is held first by Brienne of Tarth
then both are captured by a northern faction.
Looks like your woman's getting the better of you.
This is all bundled up in when Jaime starts thinking about other people.
- You're only making it worse. - Argh!
His efforts to stop Brienne being raped are the beginning of that.
You know who she is, don't you?
Argh! It's good when those little bits of goodness
come in those characters that are so devilish as well.
Just give you a little light in there.
Lord Selwyn would pay his daughter's weight
in sapphires if she's returned to him.
It being Game Of Thrones, it doesn't get him anywhere.
Argh! Argh! Aarrgghh!
Another one of those Game Of Thrones moments which has so much more
going on in it than just him losing his hand. He's the greatest
swordsman in Westeros we're told, so he can't do that any more.
He's now made a good friend in her and he's seen a lot of things
and I'm sure he's questioning what being a Lannister is about as well.
Yet, without his hand, we see Jaime Lannister at his most heroic.
The heartless knight who pushed Bran Stark from the tower
finds new honour in season three.
He's left, he's left her behind, he's abandoned her
and he's on his way to King's Landing
and then his captors mention what's gonna happen to her.
Not fair? And then he decides to return and save her.
And it is in season three that we witness the fearsome work
of another powerful family, the Boltons,
who are scheming to take control of the North.
I think the Boltons want what everyone else seems to want,
it's power and status.
Kill me!
You're no good to me dead. We need you.
Ramsay, a bastard son of the family,
enjoys torturing his enemies, including Theon Greyjoy,
who he took prisoner when sacking Winterfell after Ned's demise.
Historically, the Boltons have always been just under the Starks,
kind of the Starks have always been on top of them,
so I think they feel that now is their time to rise.
You don't look like Theon Greyjoy any more.
It's unbelievable what Ramsay is capable of doing to people.
Freak! He's just all about the mind.
He's all about making you doubt yourself.
He's all about getting in there and making you insecure
and making you feel like you can't go up against him.
Another hostage at large in season three is Arya Stark
kidnapped by the Hound. The disgraced knight
plans to find Arya's family and trade her for cash.
Remember what happens to children who run.
One of the great double acts of Game Of Thrones is the Hound and Arya.
Don't! Don't kill him.
There's something so perversely magical about that pairing,
sort of warped mentor-protege relationship that develops.
In his desire to claim a ransom, the Hound heads for the Twins
where he knows Arya's mother and brother, Catelyn and Robb Stark,
are attending a wedding.
The Twins is a strategic river crossing controlled by the Frey family
and the Starks need them on side for their war effort.
Walder Frey is a very bitter nasty old man
who controls a small but significant area in the kingdom.
I was pledged to marry one of you and I broke that vow.
If he's been let down by Robb Stark after this promise,
if he shows any kind of forgiveness or, 'Just let it go.
'He didn't want to marry my daughter, he married someone else.'
He would lose face in that world,
it's a vicious world he's operating in.
The Stark family offer Robb's uncle to make amends,
they're here for that wedding, a terrible mistake.
Also at the wedding is Roose, head of House Bolton.
Traditionally loyal to the Starks but not for much longer.
Robb's decision not to marry Walder Frey's daughter,
he knows he's alienating and going to upset a very powerful house
and a very, very powerful man. So he changes his allegiance.
Catelyn, in her heart,
knew that you do not break a promise if you are the king of the North
and you certainly don't break it to Walder Frey. Your grace...
He's probably laid awake for nights just planning it and timing it
and working out just how it's gonna work out.
The moment where Cat sees that Roose Bolton
is wearing chain mail is a powerful moment.
Why would you wear chain mail to a wedding?
What is the purpose of chain mail? It's to prevent you getting killed.
Robb!
Catelyn and Robb and his wife
and all the others, nobody saw it coming.
The Red Wedding is the event that pretty much decimates
an entire generation of the Stark family.
Within the Game Of Thrones, Walder Frey's not playing
the Game Of Thrones. He's not attempting to be the king.
He's actually perfectly happy with what he's got.
He has his own little fiefdom
and he's sitting in the chair watching terrible things.
Robb is such an amazing character, I think
you kind of want him to be the king...
Mother... ..and to win.
The Lannisters send their regards.
It's brutal. 'I'm going to let you know this information just before I kill you.'
It's another illustration of what Tywin Lannister is prepared to do.
Aarrgghh!
And in that case, he's got somebody else to do his dirty work.
It's the cruelty of it and it's the relishing of it.
Everything goes to hell at the Red Wedding.
Arya Stark arrives at the Twins to witness
her brother's desecrated body and loses any last shred of innocence.
She's there. She's at the Red Wedding,
she's outside and she was so close, you know,
she was so close to seeing them again, she was so close.
The path that she goes on, she learns to become stronger
and fight and also she was after revenge.
And when she comes across her family's killers later...
- You little shit. - ...she matches their brutality.
She's had to go over to the dark side,
that's what makes her interesting.
In order to survive in that world, you have to match what is given you.
And so, by the end of season three,
all the elder Starks have gone from the Game Of Thrones.
Only the children remain, orphaned and scattered across Westeros,
including Bran Stark, still paralysed from his fall.
He's fled Winterfell with a loyal band of followers heading north.
So, Hodor we know as a very loyal character.
- All right, Hodor? - Hodor.
He lost the use of his legs and Hodor's the person that carries him
around and takes him everywhere,
um, being the big giant of a man that he is.
It's all right, the wolves will protect him.
Him and his brother Rickon are the two last male heirs
to the Stark household.
Um, and, yeah, it's fast depleting, we're running out of Starks.
I think it's all about Rickon and Bran kind of sticking together
and, you know, seeing how their adventures and journeys play out
to kind of find this lost happiness
and this lost family that they're searching for.
Bran Stark is very much on his own journey to discover
the roots of this ancient magic that's reappearing
in the kingdom throughout the season.
And yet, amid this loss, comes a small victory.
Unlikely hero Samwell Tarly stumbles on a weakness of the White Walkers.
Samwell reaches for all he has to hand,
an old dragonglass spear he once found in the ground.
Ugh!
To his astonishment it... it works.
The spells are shattered and it's melting before him.
And stay with us to see wedded bliss vanish after the break. He's choking!
Welcome to Westeros where the fight for the kingdom is on.
Welcome back to Game Of Thrones, "The Story So Far".
We're in season four, a royal wedding in King's Landing
unites two great houses of Westeros,
the Tyrells and the Lannisters.
Season four begins with the wedding between
King Joffrey and Margaery Tyrell,
And as we know from experience in Westeros,
weddings are not happy occasions.
It's full of injured parties with scores to settle.
Chief among them is Oberyn Martell and his lover Ellaria Sand.
In that first meeting with Cersei and Tywin...
Ellaria Sand. My lord, my lady.
...they see Ellaria as being sort of scum.
Ha! I can't say I've ever met a Sand before.
Oberyn has a zest for life and all the beautiful things that the world
has to offer. None of it is as beautiful
as his own rage and taste for revenge.
Oberyn is seeking vengeance for his sister's brutal death
at the hands of the Lannisters.
The rape and murder of women and children is considered distasteful.
Oberyn has a massive grudge against the Lannisters
and he's sort of coming to the wedding to just sniff out
what's going on and to get justice.
There's been too much amusement...
Joffrey really uses the wedding as an excuse
to be as horrible as he can.
Uncle, you can be my cup bearer.
And the way he treats Tyrion and everybody at that table,
he's just hideous.
You're watching him being a total arse.
And so when an unseen hand poisons the newly wed king...
Idiots! Help your king! Move away!
...it's the moment of retribution the whole of the Seven Kingdoms have been waiting for.
I think everybody who watches Game Of Thrones
was hoping this day would come.
Ugh!
I wanted to kill him in such a way that the viewers
were reminded that here's a 13-year-old boy who's dying.
Though it is actually the Tyrells that have poisoned Joffrey,
it is Tyrion who is blamed.
This is really the point where Tyrion's fragile bonds
with his family begin to unravel.
Take him! Take him!
Take him!
In plot terms, the death of Joffrey is another shaking of the board
where the pieces are scattered.
And also it's one of those things that elevate the whole series
from merely a story into a saga.
As the royal family grows weaker, news from Westeros
reaches Meereen where Daenerys has conquered the city
but she is not yet ready to capitalise on her enemy's weakness.
King Joffrey Baratheon is dead.
Murdered at his own wedding.
This would appear to be a really good time
for her to finally make her play for the Iron Throne.
She has the dragons and she has the army
and she has the strength of character.
But actually she has new responsibilities now
and she has unfinished business where she is
and she's still trying to learn how to rule.
And to compound matters, her dragons have grown so big
that Daenerys has started to lose control of them.
Ugh!
They get bigger as her power increases, the harder it is for her to manage.
And that's where the story then has to go.
All they're going to bring is complexity.
And when one of the dragons kills a child and abandons her,
Daenerys is left with no other choice but to chain the other two.
She's just locked up her dragons, so can she unleash them again
and will they forgive her?
Without the mighty force of her dragons,
Daenerys is faced with a dilemma as to what to do next.
She's definitely going through a sort of a dark night of the soul,
I think, where she's trying to determine, have I got what it takes?
And so, in season four,
as Daenerys remains in exile across the Narrow Sea,
Sansa Stark has fled the capital and taken refuge with her aunt Lysa,
who has been seduced by an arch schemer.
Littlefinger is playing a very chaotic game and he thrives on that.
Oh, my sweet wife.
For Littlefinger, it's all about getting power, I think,
and using Lysa as a pawn along the way.
Argh!
Sansa has witnessed Lysa's murder
and covers for Littlefinger.
Sansa's one of these poor characters who's been
mistreated all through the series.
She's seen a lot of horrible, horrible things happen
and she's never been able to take control and this is the first time.
Actually, she's got nothing else to lose.
He tried to reason with her, promised her
she was the only woman he'd ever loved.
But she stepped through those doors...
What you discover is that she's been learning this entire time.
She's been listening, she's been watching.
She's been taking Littlefinger's lessons to heart.
So, from one Stark protege to another.
Sansa's sister Arya is still the Hound's hostage
but they're now on an equal footing.
Who would pass the Bloody Gate?
The bloody Hound, Sandor Clegane.
He's her captor but he's also her protector
and, you know, she's seen his own pain and his own fear at times
and they've shared some dangerous situations.
But when the Hound is gravely injured in battle,
Arya is forced to strike out on her own.
Fuck it! I'm ready.
Now he's wounded and he's dying and she's remembering
all he said about mercy and he's asking for mercy
and by mercy he means, you know, a quick thrust to kill him.
And she doesn't give it to him.
Kill me.
She won't put him out of his misery,
she won't give him the easy way out,
she's going to leave him there to suffer.
Another wandering Stark is Arya's crippled brother Bran,
who has made it north of the Wall in search of a Three-Eyed Raven
who he believes will help him walk again.
All the time, aided by his loyal travelling companion Hodor.
I think Hodor's more than just Bran's legs.
I mean, I think he means a lot to Bran, you know, someone to...
He's always been there through absolutely everything, you know.
Even though he can't speak, he can only say one word,
he's always someone that's looking after him.
You know, in a world of evil, he's probably one of the only good ones.
Clearly, Bran is very important because
he's trekked all the way up north to a cave where this raven
has been summoning him for the past couple of seasons
and now he's in this cave with the Three-Eyed Raven,
we're gonna find out what the grand scheme of things is for Bran.
You'll never walk again.
But you will fly.
His powers, he's getting stronger
and there's gonna be some really exciting things happening, I think.
We're gonna find out more and more about him.
At the Wall, the Night's Watch suffers a huge Wildling attack
at Castle Black but in season four they get a powerful new ally.
Stannis Baratheon, who's been away licking his wounds
after the Blackwater defeat joins them with his vast army.
The Battle of the Blackwater was a huge and crushing defeat
at the end of season two and it's taken them basically two seasons
to sort of rebuild from that. And his arrival means that Jon Snow
could have a new ally in the battle against the White Walkers
beyond the Wall. If my father had seen the things that I've seen,
he'd also tell you to burn the dead before nightfall.
All of them.
Season four draws to a mighty climax in King's Landing
when the ultimate father-and-son showdown comes to a head.
Tyrion is tried for murder.
I'm guilty of being a dwarf.
- You're not on trial for being a dwarf. - Oh, yes, I am.
I've been on trial for that my entire life.
Finally, Tyrion just says, 'You know what this is about.
'It's because I'm a dwarf.'
You know.
And he's absolutely right, that is what it's about.
He's put on trial for a murder he doesn't commit.
His father deserts him and betrays him.
I demand a trial by combat!
I mean, trial by combat, you can get someone to fight for your honour,
so whether you're wrong or not,
as long as they win the fight, that's what matters.
He names Oberyn Martell as his champion.
You're going to fight that?
I'm going to kill that.
I think Ellaria has total faith
in the Red Viper, her lover's powers as a fighter.
But the minute she sees the Mountain, she doubts it.
The one thing that he's ever lived for is to avenge his sister's death
and he knows that now that the opportunity is presenting itself,
there is no question that he will get what he wants.
You killed my sister!
And he does get what he wants by forcing a confession out of him.
It's not exactly how he expected it.
Aarrgghh! I killed her children.
He still technically got what he wanted.
Aarrgghh! Then I raped her. Aarrgghh!
Then I smashed her head in like this.
Argh!
She's lost the man who was her protector, who was her champion,
who was everything that she believed in in her world.
Tyrion Lannister...
With his champion defeated, Tyrion's life now hangs in the balance.
...you are hereby sentenced to death.
In Westeros, the pursuit of justice is as futile as anything else.
Oh, get on with it, you son of a whore.
Is that any way to speak about our mother?
Tyrion is released from jail by his brother Jaime
and told to go and board a ship and run away.
Instead, he decides to check in on his father.
Mmm!
But it's his former lover Shae that he discovers in Tywin's bed.
Tyrion then kills Shae in a sort of fit of jealousy
and then takes a crossbow and goes to find his father.
Tyrion.
Put down the crossbow.
Tywin really has had it coming to him.
Ugh!
I don't know how much more Tywin could have got away with, really.
Especially after what he's put Tyrion through.
- You're no son of mine. - I am your son.
This is someone who spent his whole life trying to win his approbation,
as much as he hated him, he really wanted that, you know.
Obviously that's never gonna happen now
because he put a crossbow bolt in his groin.
Ugh! What it means, is when a big character like that goes,
there's gonna be a power vacuum and there's gonna be hustling
and jostling to get into his place.
I am the queen! I am the queen! I'm not...
Join us after the break where, in season five,
a new power rises in King's Landing.
Welcome to Westeros where the fight for the kingdom is on.
Welcome back to "The Story So Far". Where, in season five,
a royal wedding unsettles Cersei.
Her son Tommen is now king and has fallen under the spell
of his new queen Margaery, much to Cersei's dismay.
When Margaery'd come in his life,
I think he was just enjoying life so much.
Judging from the king's enthusiasm, the Queen Mother
- will be a queen grandmother soon. - Wouldn't that be a lovely day?
Him being king was just a whole new excitement, a whole new life.
Cersei empowers religious fanatics
to help her topple her rival, Queen Margaery.
I can't hear it. I am the queen!
Cersei brings back the Faith Militant
because, in her mind, this is her wiping the slate clean,
this is her taking an opportunity to claw back a little bit of power.
But Cersei's engineered her own downfall.
Royalty is no longer above the law and fanatics come for her next.
It's hard to see how anybody would be able to get the power back
from the High Sparrow and Septa Unella.
Move. There's another contender to power in Westeros
and it's religion. It's the power of the faith.
They want to remove all the excesses.
To strip Cersei of all her finery
and encourage her, in inverted commas, to become clean.
It's such a sexualised form of humiliation.
A sinner comes before you.
Watching Cersei do the walk of atonement,
something happened that I thought would never happen
and that is I felt compassion.
No matter what she'd done previously, she didn't deserve this.
And so season five sees her left naked before her subjects
to atone for her infidelities.
Who would've thought we would've felt sorry for Cersei
- until the walk of shame? - It was very, very tough for her.
Very few women could have done what she did, complete that walk.
People love to hate her, so you see her
trying to maintain this regal presence
but she can't.
Stripped down to her, literally, physically and emotionally
and psychologically, stripped down to her most vulnerable
and then swept up into the arms of the beast that she...
that she invited into the world.
The strange creation that is her new knight.
It's just a brilliant twist.
When Cersei's picked up by the Mountain
and Qyburn tells her what's happened,
the brilliant look across Cersei's eyes
of, 'Whatever happens, I will get these people.'
Also getting a new ally in season five is Daenerys,
in the form of Tyrion. After killing his father,
he's fled across the Narrow Sea, a fugitive on the run.
He was a Lannister and he had all the money in the world
and a noble name and a big bag of gold
can buy you a lot. All that's gone now.
He's totally at the mercy of the people he's travelling with.
Who are you?
- And then the unthinkable happens. - I am the gift.
He's captured and handed over to his family's greatest enemy,
the Targaryen queen in waiting, Daenerys.
My name is Tyrion Lannister.
And between them, they are an extraordinary force.
Protect your queen!
She appoints him as her political adviser.
But when a civil rebellion begins, Tyrion gets to witness Daenerys
transform into a true Targaryen.
The symbol of the Targaryens coming to claim their power
is on the back of a dragon because, I mean, there's not much you can do
when you're standing on the ground and a dragon's coming at you.
Daenerys has had the dragons now for quite some time now
but that moment she gets on Drogon and rides him for the first time,
that is her claiming her birthright.
The dragon riders are what the Targaryens are all about.
That is how they wielded their power.
Everybody painted that picture of Daenerys
flying her dragon, it never really happened.
And they've waited so many years to see that and she finally does
and she does it in a wicked way where she's escaping death.
Daenerys, she's got the greatest name ever.
Stormborn, Mother of Dragons.
Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen, I love that name.
She's got these dragons as back-up and then she's got Tyrion,
who knows King's Landing,
who knows the political side of things
and he's been through battles as well.
Yet, as season five ends,
Daenerys's dragon delivers her to an uncertain fate.
The last thing we see of her in season five,
surrounded by Dothraki, back where she started.
And season five is one of vengeance for Arya.
The young Stark follows her mentor to Braavos to become an assassin.
To serve well, a girl must become no-one.
Arya's relationship with Jaqen is fascinating.
He is utterly mysterious
and she is seduced by his power.
I didn't come here to sweep floors.
No? Why come then?
You said I could be your apprentice.
The power of death, the power to choose who dies.
And Arya uses her new skills to slaughter Meryn Trant,
a name on her kill list of people who have destroyed her world.
- Argh! - Arya's just a wee assassin.
Argh! Argh!
She made him suffer in the best way possible
and she thoroughly enjoyed it.
But you must remember what Arya has been through.
There is a sense of vengeance rather than a sense of justice.
As Arya explores vengeance,
back home, the battle is on for the Stark family home.
Stannis Baratheon is marching on Winterfell,
now held by the Boltons.
But sometimes sacrifices must be made to ensure victory.
He's going after something and it is... it's increasingly futile.
In a desperate move, Stannis follows the advice
of a red priestess who promises him victory
if he makes an unspeakable offering to the Lord of Light.
She managed to convince him to burn his own daughter.
That's one of the most chilling scenes, I think, of season five,
when... when he burns his child.
She's believed in this god for so many years, I think that
if it's not to do with the god, she kind of just blocks everything out
and I think that's what happened as she blocked out the fact
that she was going to be sacrificing a child.
She was sacrificing the king's blood.
Melisandre really did believe that Stannis was going to be the one
who would bring everything together and he was going to be the ruler
of the Seven Kingdoms and she put a lot of her heart and soul
- into helping him. - But it proves to be his undoing.
His men desert him and Melisandre, realising all is lost,
- flees to Castle Black... - Your grace.
...leaving Stannis to advance to Winterfell on his own.
Speak up. It can't be worse than mutiny.
He's had a rough old time, Stannis, hasn't he?
Because really he should be the king from after Robert Baratheon dies
but every battle, he loses he becomes further and further
involved with this kind of fantasy.
And awaiting Stannis at Winterfell are the Boltons,
who tried to cement their position in the North
with a tactical marriage to Sansa Stark,
orchestrated by master manipulator Petyr Baelish.
She shouldn't trust Littlefinger, I mean,
why are you gonna trust Littlefinger, I mean, jeez!
He is the dodgy car salesman in Game Of Thrones,
offers you everything and gives you nothing.
May I introduce my son, Ramsay Bolton.
Now the Boltons have established themselves at Winterfell,
bringing in a Stark will solidify their position in the North.
But it's a huge miscalculation
that traps her in another brutal relationship.
Ramsay is a horrible, cruel, evil, power-hungry man.
He took psychotic nature to another level.
I mean, he went there, and he went some.
Oh, no, no, no.
You stay here, Reek.
You watch.
Fellow prisoner Theon Greyjoy, aka Reek, is too terrified to help.
I think we all thought he should have stepped in on the wedding night, let's be frank.
- With Ramsay distracted by battle... - You're leaving it to me?
...Sansa is caught attempting to escape
and it's only then that Reek finds the courage to become Theon again.
- Ugh! - Stop! Ugh!
That was a moment we all needed to see. Theon again
had been so much at the mercy of Ramsey
that finally he had a moment where he could do good.
And so, by the end of season five,
Sansa has jumped either to her death or to her freedom.
It's someone being pushed in every way
to the absolute limit of their will to live
and having come through that,
she's obviously gonna be quite a different person.
As Sansa and Theon leap from the walls of Winterfell,
nearby, Stannis is facing defeat by the vast Bolton army.
I think Stannis had given up. I think even before
they'd gone into battle, I think he was going there to die.
Fate finally catches up with Stannis when he comes face to face
with Brienne of Tarth who's sought vengeance
for Renly's death since season two.
She is probably the toughest person going about... about Westeros.
Argh!
But as Stannis bows out,
Jon Snow comes up against a greater foe when he ventures to Hardhome
to make peace with the Wildlings.
This alliance is sacrilege but when the White Walkers
launch a full attack, Jon sees his hunch is right.
All humans must unite to fight them.
What's so great about the whole White Walker mythology
is the way it has been building throughout the series.
Who knows what they want?
They would bring death and destruction
to absolutely everything.
Up until this point, they've been semi-mythical characters.
It's been the White Walkers in those cold lands
that no-one ever goes to
and here they are in front of the heroes and they're very real
and it's a very real danger.
I don't think the White Walkers are afraid of anything.
I think fear is just not in their vocabulary.
And then Jon and the viewers see the Night King reveal
that he has a greater power.
He can raise and recruit the dead.
It's a challenge to Jon and, 'Look what I can do.'
Forget all the other battles that are going on,
you know, battles for castles and kingship, you know.
He's got to focus his army.
But on Jon's return to Castle Black,
in the final minutes of season five,
viewers witness the cruellest blow of all
in a gut-churning finale.
When I saw the cross with traitor written on it, I thought, 'Oh, no,
'they're not gonna kill him.'
And then they did!
For the Watch.
You root for him but the great thing about Game Of Thrones is
your heroes can die at any second.
For the Watch.
They're all members of the Night's Watch
and no matter what one of their brothers has done,
what they did was worse than what he did.
And so season five ends on betrayal and death.
Is this really the end for Jon Snow?
Season six begins at the scene of a crime.
Jon Snow lies slain at Castle Black
and all hopes are pinned on the red priestess
and her magic to bring him back.
Game Of Thrones needs Jon Snow.
We do, we need him to finish what he started.
As viewers hope for Jon's resurrection,
we learn that Melisandre harbours a great secret.
The reveal of ancient Melisandre was definitely one of the most
stunning surprises in season six of Game Of Thrones.
It shows how much older she actually is
and how much longer she's been believing in this god for.
Then we see her use this power for Jon.
She tries to bring him back to us, to resurrect him, it doesn't work.
When the wolf started to sort of make some noise,
that's when I thought... I think everyone thought Jon Snow's alive.
And then it's just that moment of...
Jon Snow has returned and all of Westeros rejoices.
And after the miracle of Jon's rebirth
comes a partial reunion of scattered Starks
when Sansa arrives at Castle Black
and together they'll gather forces in a bid to retake the North.
Sansa's become majestic but she's also become savvy.
She's lost that naivety.
A monster has taken our home and our brother.
We have to go back to Winterfell and save them both.
She's a queen, really.
In terms of being from a powerful family
and being able to make decisions and tell other people to do stuff,
I think she's gonna tell other people to do stuff.
As one former Bolton captive looks for revenge,
another looks for redemption.
I am Theon Greyjoy.
Last living son of Balon Greyjoy.
Theon returns again to the Iron Islands.
But, following his father's mysterious death,
renounces his claim.
- And she is your rightful ruler. - Aye!
Theon, by backing Yara, shows that he's learnt
from his massive fall and humiliation and castration
and he's learnt who is the more powerful person.
Yara! Yara! Yara! Yara!
I'm Euron Greyjoy.
I claim the Salt Throne.
But it's not all plain sailing for Yara. Her uncle Euron arrives
and immediately scuppers her plan to rule.
Euron comes in and we know he's killed the father
and Yara announces that he's killed the father
and you think that's gonna be the end of him.
He led us into two wars we couldn't win.
I apologise to you all for not killing him years ago.
He is just the most insane creation.
He's cocky, he's arrogant.
He could start a fight in an empty room.
I wasn't born to be king.
I paid the iron price and here I stand.
Euron! Euron!
All the men will still side with a another man
because he's shown such ruthlessness and cunning.
With Euron crowned king,
Theon and Yara flee, taking part of the fleet with them.
They stole our best ships.
They are headed across the Narrow Sea to join Daenerys
who's been a hostage of the Dothraki.
But now burns their leaders and converts the tribe.
The huge Dothraki horde.
We're gonna finally get a lot of different power factions
coming together in a very scary explosive way.
And she bags herself a navy
by forging an alliance with Yara who pledges her fleet of ships.
But as Great Houses unite for war,
beyond the Wall, we learn more about the deathly foe
which threatens them all.
While time training with a Three-Eyed Raven,
Bran Stark uncovers a great secret.
White Walkers were created from the First Men.
The Children Of The Forest invented the White Walkers
to help protect their own race.
It was an innocent defence to do that.
But clearly it has gone out of control.
And when the White Walkers come for Bran,
- there are terrible casualties. - Hodor is a goner.
- Hold the door! - A completely pure act of protection.
There was nothing... There was no greater goal
to what he did other than protect Bran.
Everyone who's basically just given in order to give way for Bran
and there must be a reason, right?
We know he's become the Three-Eyed Raven.
But how's he going to use those powers.
And as the Three-Eyed Raven,
Bran resolves a great Stark secret
when he sees Jon Snow's mother is Ned's sister Lyanna.
You understand what Ned's been going through the whole time.
He made out that it was his son, his bastard son,
but it was really his nephew.
But it confirms Jon Snow is still half Stark
and, in season six, he and Sansa march
on their family seat of Winterfell to fight Ramsay Bolton
in what goes down in history as the Battle of the Bastards.
Ramsay's now top dog, having murdered his father and newborn brother.
If you want to say... You're going to die tomorrow, Lord Bolton.
When you play the Game Of Thrones, you either win or you die, you know,
and she knows it's about winning now,
she's had enough of all the rest, it's time to win.
She offers her insight.
You think he's going to fall into your trap, he won't. He's the one who lays traps.
She's lived with this man for a long time and she knows
that... that he is cruel to the core.
Sansa's words go unheeded.
Ramsay baits Jon with his hostage Rickon.
Run to your brother.
It shows a lot about how Ramsay's mind works.
He's calculating, he's always thinking about the next move.
You know, it's very interesting how Machiavellian he can be as well.
I think everybody who was watching that episode for the first time,
I think they all thought he was probably likely going to make it.
Ugh! Argh!
It was just kind of cut so short and I think
that's kind of what Game Of Thrones is always about.
Ramsay Bolton's, like, 'Yes I've got you now, boy,
'just in the middle of no-man's land.'
That's what Game Of Thrones does so brilliantly,
it's constantly pitting good moral forces against bad ones
and you don't just win because you're good.
Argh! Argh!
They were surrounded by the entire army,
they were being driven into the mud.
Ramsay should have won, he was much more conniving and cunning
and if it hadn't have been for Sansa coming in
at the last minute, then he probably would have won.
She's a strong independent woman. She's really powerful
and she saves the day and I think that's brilliant.
This was probably their first major victory in six years.
They're suddenly inside the castle. Winterfell.
It seems Jon will kill Ramsay.
But he then leaves Sansa to take the scalp.
There was only one way to kill him and Sansa found the right way to do it.
She knows what she's gonna do and she knows he deserves it.
All memory of you will disappear.
If you were face to face with your nemesis
and you had the opportunity, you'd take it.
Aarrgghh! Argh!
She's hardcore.
She has the makings of a Cersei.
The king is born! The king is born!
But it's Jon Snow who becomes king as the season ends,
with the Starks controlling the North and Sansa is by his side.
She's a character that will surprise people
because she's not what she seems.
And neither is Sansa's sister Arya.
Blinded and stabbed in her training as a faceless man,
she's now back in Westeros to deal with Walder Frey.
She's gone on this mad journey.
Arya comes in disguise, having chopped up Walder's sons.
They weren't easy to carve.
She wanted him to see who she was.
The face comes off, there's a knife. The last thing you'll ever see
is a Stark smiling down at you as you die.
She's been caught up in it so young
that she's turning into this child soldier.
Ugh! Ugh!
Revenge is a dish best taken cold.
I literally cannot wait now for her and Cersei to face off.
In fact, Cersei elevates revenge to an art form
in season six as the Lannisters fight for their family's very survival.
These royal lovers are united in grief
after the Sand Snakes killed their daughter.
The Lannisters are all about power. They're all about revenge.
We're the only ones who matter, the only ones in this world
and everything they've taken from us
we're going to take back and more.
It doesn't matter how long it takes, they will get you back.
With Jaime sent away to fight revolt,
Cersei is left alone to face judgment by the Faith Militant.
We are told that Cersei is going to turn up for a trial
but we know perfectly well she's not going to.
But it's now she plays a game-changing hand.
She was always going to have a dastardly plan.
The man who was sent by Cersei to hold Tommen in that room...
There's something wrong. Margaery knows what's up in an instant.
The High Sept is packed with those who've wronged Cersei.
The Tyrells, High Sparrow and Faith Militant.
The amazing thing is the spectacle is incredible and you never know it's coming.
This isn't gonna end well.
Cersei has, of course, unleashed wildfire.
She's wiped out this fantastic building,
she's destroyed all her enemies.
That's what makes Cersei so brilliant,
she's been to the absolute lowest place
that you could possibly go
and she still comes out on top.
In the moment where she gets her revenge on everyone else,
she loses the only thing that she has left that matters to her.
Knowing that his mum's the one that's
pretty much murdered his wife...
- ...what has he got to live for? - Tommen's death
leaves the Iron Throne empty, so a new reign begins.
A witch told her that she was cursed
and that all of her children would die.
It didn't stop her from loving her kids and trying to protect them
at any cost but she accepts
very swiftly her fate.
And so Jaime returns to a new world order, courtesy of his sister.
She's devastated the Tyrells.
Now the Lannisters are once more a force to be reckoned with.
Queen Cersei sitting on the Iron Throne.
The fact that a woman has managed to achieve that position
and get that much power, Tywin, he would probably have been
reluctantly proud.
Then you go, 'OK, well, what are you going to do with this Iron Throne?'
Jaime, he knows, not a lot of good.
He's wondering who she's going to become now that she has the power.
As one queen takes the throne,
another sets sail to challenge her for it.
Finally Daenerys, the Targaryen queen,
is on her way to Westeros with a vast alliance
she spent six seasons amassing.
We're now getting to crunch time. The dragons flying overhead,
everybody on the boats, 'We're coming.'
Join us after the break for the Targaryen invasion.
Welcome to Westeros where the fight for the kingdom is on.
Welcome back to "The Story So Far"
where, in season seven, Daenerys finally lands on home soil,
her birthplace Dragonstone...
...along with her huge alliance of power players.
To see this female character rise to power and get to the point
where she's commanded thousands of men, it's so magical.
Her allies want immediate invasion.
We have an army, a fleet and three dragons.
We could hit King's Landing now, hard, with everything we have.
The city will fall within a day.
Ellaria wants to take Cersei out and all the Lannisters.
That's what she wants and she feels now that her
and the Tyrells and the Greyjoys,
they're all there together, just go and rip them out.
Tens of thousands will die in the firestorm.
It's called war.
Who can win against these dragons?
But to avoid being seen as foreign invaders,
Daenerys's hand Tyrion has a more cunning plan.
You can't have everybody hating you.
You've got to have some people inside.
I think that's what Tyrion is there for.
Then comes a fateful meeting.
In need of more allies, Daenerys summons the king in the North,
Jon Snow. He comes but with his own agenda.
He's learned there is dragonglass there.
Jon's biggest goal is to prove
to the southern part of Westeros
that the Night King is real and that this threat's coming.
- The dead are the enemy. - The dead?
The overall battle for humanity itself is the greater battle.
Daenerys allows Jon to search for this natural treasure.
Beneath dragonstone is more dragonglass
than they'll ever need to defeat the White Walkers
and it is key, in fact, to defeating the White Walkers.
And they find ancient cave paintings.
- The enemy is real. - Proof of White Walkers.
It's always been real.
He's taking the first steps towards convincing Daenerys
that that threat is real and looking for the ally he needs to fight it.
I will fight for the North.
When you bend the knee.
Aware of the impending invasion,
in the capital Queen Cersei is more than up for a fight,
amassing weapons and allies to face down the enemy.
Cersei is ruthless but she's incredibly canny and clever
and that's why she's lasted so long.
To think I listened to father for 40 years and know nothing.
Cersei is very much a chip off the old block.
We must stand together if we hope to stop her.
The powerful Tarlys reluctantly join them.
Randyll is the most successful general in Westeros
and considered invincible.
She has three full-grown dragons, Your Grace.
The same as Aegon when he conquered the Seven Kingdoms.
How do you propose to stop them?
He acknowledges their power.
It's like saying, 'They've got nuclear weapons, we don't.'
In fact, Cersei has two secret new weapons.
A giant anti-dragon machine
and an approaching wildcard with his very own fleet.
I love Euron Greyjoy.
He's set his heart on Cersei.
You invited the Greyjoys to King's Landing.
- Not all of them. - Well, it looks like all of them.
He wants power, he wants to marry Cersei Lannister.
So here I am
with a thousand ships
and two good hands.
So, he says, 'OK, I'll bring you a present.'
I won't return to King's Landing until I have that for you.
So he goes off with his fleet.
Euron... He delivers a victory for Team Cersei,
knocking out her enemy's armada.
They get invaded by Euron and his madness.
Aarrgghh!
So swashbuckley. I mean, properly swashbuckley.
He manages to encircle Theon and Yara's much smaller fleet.
And he takes Yara prisoner.
I have her. Come and get her.
Theon escapes in a really embarrassing and cowardly way.
Poor Theon. I mean, he abandons his sister.
Jumps overboard early on in season seven. Theon's scared of everyone.
Euron also captures Ellaria Sand and her daughter.
And that is the gift Euron presents to Cersei
because, of course, Ellaria murdered Cersei's daughter Myrcella.
I'm the prize to take back to Cersei
so she can get her revenge on me, which I don't want.
I give you what no other man could give.
Justice.
He's pushing and pushing and pushing...
There's only one reward I want.
...a wedge between, you know, these kind of star-crossed lovers.
You shall have what your heart desires...
...when the war is won.
In a double bluff, Cersei lets her enemies
capture her family's ancestral home.
So, they're able to take Casterly Rock surprisingly easily.
And, of course, that puts them a little bit on edge.
In fact, it's a strategic distraction...
...allowing Jaime to take his army south to conquer House Tyrell
and steal its fortune.
The Lannisters, led by Jaime,
have very cleverly gone to Highgarden.
I remember when the Lannisters did go to pay their debts
by basically stealing a load of gold from Highgarden.
That is where the money is and, of course, they owe the Iron Bank
not an insignificant sum.
And Jaime goes to confront Olenna
who is, you know, kind of, like, the last Tyrell of any consequence.
She's almost sitting there waiting for him, she knows what's coming.
How will it happen?
It was almost like a business appointment, wasn't it?
It was like, 'Oh, hello. And now you need to die.'
As a viewer, you were just winded.
But in her very last breath, Olenna reveals she killed King Joffrey.
Tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me.
Boom! You know, it's, like,
Game Of Thrones just delivers, doesn't it?
When news of the Lannister victories reaches Daenerys,
she furiously abandons Tyrion's softly, softly strategy
and she finally invades Westeros.
She's just had enough, she is raining down her aggression
on top of them. They're coming!
She's tired of being, you know, bottled up
and being told that she shouldn't do this. This is who she knows she is.
As the Lannister and Tarly troops are eviscerated,
Jaime is confronted by the true scale of the Dragon Queen's army.
He has looked into the face of the future of war
and they're on the losing side of it.
They might have held against the charge of the Dothraki
but not when you've got a dragon flying towards you.
Jaime makes this absolutely ridiculous decision
to have one final choice and be the queen slayer,
forgetting there's a gigantic dragon just over his shoulder.
After Jaime escapes, Daenerys gives the survivors,
along with Randyll Tarly, a brutal ultimatum.
Join her or fry.
Randyll is captive at this point and resigned to his fate.
Step forward, my lord.
He's unimpressed by Daenerys co-opting a foreign army
of savages and laying waste to those that she encounters in battle.
- You will not kneel? - I already have a queen.
She needs to stake her ground here and she needs to make examples
of her enemies when they refuse to bend the knee,
so that she can do what she ultimately
needs to do politically in this country.
Dracarys.
What sort of leader will Daenerys be?
Will she be a fair ruler or will she be the Mad King?
Away from the fighting, the remaining Stark family
is reunited in season seven
as Bran and Arya finally make it home
to the delight of Sansa, the new Lady of Winterfell.
They're not the people that they were.
They're not the kids that had those
cute little wolf pups back in series one.
You came home.
But it's not as harmonious as one would hope.
They haven't been together for so long and they
viewed the past in entirely different ways.
I remember you standing on that platform with Joffrey and Cersei
when they dragged father to the block.
They are sisters but they could, in a blink, become sworn enemies.
You should be on your knees thanking me.
We're standing in Winterfell again because of me.
We were expecting sisterly love and tears and all of that.
It was quite the opposite of that, wasn't it?
And in the shadows, Littlefinger is stoking the tension between them.
What do you think she's after?
You think, 'Is this all going to implode from the inside?'
You stand accused of murder.
You stand accused of treason.
How do you answer these charges...
...Lord Baelish?
But it all backfires for the arch schemer
as he's finally outwitted and beaten at his own game.
The youngest wolves of the pack have found their way to unite
and use all their skills together.
None of you knows the truth. You've held a knife to his throat.
Bran has now been replaced by this Three-Eyed Raven...
You said, 'I did warn you not to trust me.'
...who is this all-seeing, all-knowing,
kind of slightly sinister power.
He just didn't see it. He is the puppeteer.
I was expecting him to be much more clever.
Turn family against family, turn sister against sister,
that's what you did to our mother and Aunt Lysa.
And that's what you tried to do to us.
He's got his comeuppance... ..at the hand of Ned's kids.
And even farther north, a vital quest has begun.
In order to unite the warring kingdoms of Westeros against
the true enemy heading their way, Jon Snow leads a mission
beyond the wall.
It's their plan to go north, capture a wight...
...and bring it down south and just show people
for once and for all that there is this threat.
After bagging a wight, they are surrounded.
And it falls on Daenerys and her dragons to fly to the rescue.
She's there to save Jon.
There's a mad battle raging on all sides
but the moment the Night King just very slowly picks up an ice spear...
Ugh!
This is a pretty massive moment.
Not only does he kill the dragon...
...the Night King has gained one of the most powerful weapons imaginable.
They escape with a captive wight in tow
but it comes at a great cost
as the Army of the Dead swarm in to claim their prize.
When he kills the dragon, you're devastated. You think that's it.
When he revives the dragon and it becomes one of them,
it's more than a turnaround, it's pretty devastating.
Which leads to a dramatic reveal
as Daenerys and Jon bring their deadly evidence down to the capital.
Against the odds, Jaime's persuaded Cersei to meet
her enemies at a peace summit. They plan to beg her for a truce
and to join the fight against the dead.
Cersei and Daenerys coming face to face for the first time
that's, you know, the clash of titans.
There are so many of them at play there.
You've got the Greyjoys, you've got the Lannisters.
And suddenly Euron is so volatile.
- We are all facing a unique... - Theon!
I have your sister. If you don't submit to me here now,
I'll kill her.
When there's that first face-off,
you've got Cersei and Daenerys over here.
- You have my word. - The word of a would-be usurper.
There is no conversation that will erase the last 50 years.
We have something to show you.
When the Hound releases the wight...
And the dead come out and go straight for Cersei.
...it is the visceral payoff that we've all been waiting for
and it is the theatrics that Jon and Tyrion intend.
This is the only thing I've ever seen that terrifies me.
It seems Euron Greyjoy is turning tail
and deserting his queen.
They call your bluff, they don't actually have anyone
get killed in that scene, it becomes something else entirely.
A darkness is coming for us all.
And Cersei appears to support a truce.
We'll face it together.
When she agrees, you just think, 'Oh,
'this is just going to go horribly wrong.'
In fact, nothing is as it seems.
We'll meet at Lord Harroway's Town and march together to Winterfell.
- Ser Jaime. - Your Grace.
He's organising the troops, saying, 'We're going to go north,
'we're going to help people out, let's get it together.'
And then she's, like, 'You're stupid. We're not doing that.'
Do you really think Euron Greyjoy will turn tail
and sail back to the Iron Islands?
You see Cersei not sending the Lannister troops
but instead sending Euron Greyjoy down to Essos for the mercenaries.
You plotted with Euron Greyjoy?
She will stop at nothing Cersei.
Even though Cersei has revealed she's pregnant
with a Lannister baby to bolster their dynasty, Jaime now leaves her.
Those Lannisters, man. They have a complicated relationship.
He's a man of honour and, in the end, he's going to be true to his word.
As one incestuous pairing hits the rocks,
another is setting sail.
Jon has now bent the knee to Daenerys
and they can no longer deny their love.
It's almost like seeing a god and a goddess.
You've been wanting them to become lovers
and you get the loving moment as you're totally given the information
that you're watching incest right now.
In fact, Jon's fallen for his own auntie.
In a vision, Bran sees that Jon's father is Dany's older brother
Rhaegar Targaryen.
Prince Rhaegar married Lyanna Stark in a secret ceremony,
which makes Jon Aegon Targaryen's true heir to the throne.
He's never been a bastard.
He's the heir to the Iron Throne.
Even if culturally Game Of Thrones can handle incest,
you know Jon and Daenerys probably won't be able to handle that.
But eclipsing all developments and personal struggles,
in the North, the season ends on a cataclysmic event
that changes the game for every living human being.
This is the moment that we were told
could never happen. The Wall can never come down.
You see the army kind of coming out of the forest.
And then you hear something.
Oh, that's just changed the whole ballgame here.
It didn't occur to me that we would have a dragon White Walker.
But when that happened, you thought, 'Oh, yes, this is inevitable.'
Now this takes us on a whole different journey.
That's when you know it's on for next season.
There's nothing to protect them in the south any more.
I mean, you can't have a cliffhanger greater than that.
I don't know what's going to happen but I can't wait.