@turtle-paced just finished recapping season 7, which reminded me that I needed to post the next of these.
Last time I left off noting I would need more time to come up with a solution for the pointlessness of Sam and Jorah's "arcs," so here's what I've worked out:
Issue 1: The knowledge Sam uncovers at Oldtown is pretty redundant
Answer: Redistribute that knowledge to more sensible places.
Rather than Sam re-learning that Dragonstone has a lot of dragonglass (which was previously established), have Davos remind Jon of this as he's considering whether he should work with Daenerys. Their need for the island she occupies will be an extra incentive to acceding to her demand to meet face-to-face.
As for the reveal about Jon's parentage...look, I hate what they did with the complicated Rhaegar/Lyanna relationship of the book. So instead of having Sam discover that Jon was legitimate the whole time (in spite of how little sense it makes for Rhaegar to annul his marriage/bastardize his two children) and then travel all the way to Winterfell to compare notes with Bran (more teleporation!) let's leave all of this reveal with Bran.
When Bran gets to Winterfell, instead of him being a robot, he can be more emotionally dull, trying to hide the pain that being near-omniscient is causing him. And some of that pain comes from carrying the knowledge of Jon"s real parentage. There can be some hints - when Sansa gets word that Daenerys wants to marry Jon, she can say something about how this is the first time the Targaryens and Starks have had a marriage alliance, and Bran can go "Not the first..." all mysterious. And at the very end of the story, when they get word that Jon is coming back to Winterfell, you can have a scene more like this:
Arya: Aren't you excited to see Jon again?
Bran Yes, but...if I do, I'll have to tell him the truth.
Sansa: What do you mean?
Bran: That he’s not our brother.
(the two sisters change confused looks)
Sansa: Well, of course, he’s our half brother--
Bran: No, I mean he’s not our brother at all. (begin flashbacks) When Rhaegar Targaryen realized his wife could no longer bear children (shot of Rhaegar and Elia looking sad together), he took our aunt Lyanna as his second wife according to the traditions of the dragon lords (shot of their Valyrian wedding, with a beaming Lyanna). She loved him, but before they could explain what had happened, Aerys murdered our grandfather (reuse a scene of mad Aerys laughing, superimposed with flames), Rhaegar went to his defense, and everything ended in tragedy. (shots of Rhaegar being stuck and falling to the ground, Elia cowering with her children as Gregor walks into the room, and ending on Lyanna in the tower) Jon won't want to hear this, but he must. He has to know the sacrifice our father - his uncle - made to keep him safe (reuse image of Ned taking the baby)...and the truth of the blood that flows in his veins. (Final shot of Jon with Dany...with dragons prominently in the background)
My idea here is to (1) bring things closer to the book, (2) not ignore the consequences of Rhaegar's decisions, (3) keep the focus on Jon and his relationship to his family and (4) make his Targaryen connection be all about the dragons not who gets the throne (because who cares when White Walkers, isn't that the entire point of this series???).
This is already getting too long, so for my ideas about an actual Oldtown plot, see below the jump.
Issue 2: What is even the point of going to Oldtown when these reveals could be better placed elsewhere?
Answer: Let's plunder the books again to give Sam something to do! or, the Dragon Poisoning Plot
Okay, major book spoilers here, but -- in the books, the maesters were quite likely responsible for killing off the Targaryen dragons in the first place, after seeing the devastation they caused in the Dance of the Dragons. Why not keep that?
Sam goes to Oldtown and takes up the drudgery of apprenticeship, as in the show. It would be nice if casting gave us a few characters to be fellow rookies for Sam to have chats with and complain about cleaning out chamber pots. At some point, as Sam is frustrated getting the maesters to believe his stories about the white walkers, one of his friends says he should go chat with Maester Marwyn, who Jim Broadbent can play nicely. He seems like an eccentric kook, but he believes Sam, and explains to him that the maesters are being deliberately obstinate because they distrust magic due to how dangerous it is, and that they helped hasten the end of dragons a hundred years ago. Eventually, as Dany’s plot progresses, Sam and Marwyn learn that they are planning to send someone to poison Dany's dragons this time around again. The plot resolves itself with Marwyn, Sam, and Sam's friends staging a coup by exposing the plot and saving Dany’s dragons, whereupon she forces a leadership transition at the Citadel and Marwyn begins training maesters in magic to use against the white walkers.
Speaking of Marwyn and magic, though...
Issue 3: Jorah’s grayscale is healed like magic and he learns nothing and does not change.
Answer: Have his grayscale be healed by actual magic and let him learn something from Sam
In the books, grayscale is a magically-caused illness arising from water magic. Since the show has cut all of that (to its detriment; I would love to have seen their special effects for what Euron is going to do to Oldtown), but it did associate grayscale with Valyria. So we can have grayscale be part of the Doom, a curse that spread from the ruins. This can be Marwyn's hypothesis that he's bent on proving, and he’s recruited an imprisoned Jorah Mormont into his experiments. When Sam first meets him, he'll be covered in sigils and surrounded by candles and looking very uncomfortable.
But eventually the cure will work, proving that Marwyn isn't a kook, and giving Jorah the cure he was searching for. In the meantime, though, he'll talk with Sam about why he's doing this, his relationship with Dany, how he was exiled by Ned, etc. And Sam can point out how sad it is that he’s mooning over a woman who isn't interested in him, that's exactly what he used to do and isn't it embarrassing? Also Sam can talk up Ned Stark, and how he knows his son, and what a good man Jon is. All the while we can see this having an effect on Jorah as, stuck until he gets his cure, he has nothing better to do than consider his situation.
Thus when the Dragon Poisoning Plot goes forward, Jorah will be the one sent to warn Dany. When he gets there, she will have already married...and he'll find out that it’s to Jon Snow, the man Sam so admires. Jorah will ask Dany if she's happy, or if this is just a political marriage, and she'll say that it started out for politics, but...yes, she's falling in love with him. And we'll see a moment where Jorah accepts this, realizes he can let go and just be her ally. We have a moment of him talking with Jon, telling him about Sam, confessing his crime and receiving a stay of punishment.
Of course this means Jorah isn't on his way north of the Wall for a wight hunt. the wight hunt is one of those ideas that isn’t completely insane - Jon does have a wight on ice in the books, after all, and the idea that they should capture one to study/show to others works. Without the Horn of Joruman, an undead dragon is also a dramatic way of bringing down the Wall. But the team who goes on the mission needs to make sense, and I keep coming back to Brienne, Pod, Tormund, Beric, and Thoros.
As I’ve been thinking about @turtle-paced‘s fine-toothed comb reviews of season 6 and all the issues they raise, I can’t help but have the “fix-it” bug in full swing. So let me hack out a few ways to fix the issues in season 6 (even though I feel that to really fix the series you’d have to go even further):
Issue 1: Cersei being queen makes no sense.
Answer: Cersei isn’t queen of much.
Basically, after Jaime arrives, the city quickly falls into riots. Cersei still believes she can crush them all, using more wildfire if necessary. Jaime is torn between his horror at what Cersei is turning into, but also his desire to keep her alive - he still loves the memory of what she was. So he convinces her to abandon the city (”This was always Robert’s city, not ours”) and retreat to the well-defended Casterly Rock. Cersei even agrees, on the condition that Jaime consent to be her consort, which he reluctantly agrees to.
Issue 2: Cersei’s unbelievable ability to resist Dany and her dragons
Answer: Change the setting and change the challenges
First, Dany’s main concern becomes not defeating Cersei but trying to restore order in King’s Landing and winning the trust of the people, maybe making vows to rebuild the Sept, appointing a new High Septon, and suchlike. Meanwhile she figures that the combined forces of the Tyrells by land and the Dornish, and Yara’s Iron Islanders by sea can finish off the Lannisters by putting Casterly Rock under siege.
But unlike in the show, the fact that the Tyrells, the Dornish, and the Iron Islanders are all separate cultures with long-held enmity means that they are disorganized and not communicating well, which means they are taken surprise as they near Lannisport when Euron shows up. Turns out he made an agreement to support Cersei in exchange for harvesting trees to rebuild his navy. He deals them a heavy blow that dashes their hopes of a proper siege.
Meanwhile Tyrion gets word from Jaime, via Bronn, that his brother is ready to surrender if they can just arrange for exile for Cersei. Dany is against this, knowing how she rose to power in exile, and decides to deal with this on dragonback, only to discover that everyone in Casterly Rock has retreated into the mines; she’d have to melt down the entire mountain to get to them. Basically they settle that the best they can do for right now is contain Cersei to her limited reach while they make allies elsewhere.
Issue 3: Jon shouldn’t be the one to go see Daenerys
Answer: She specifically asks for him, citing the precedent of the King Who Knelt
I don’t have much to add to this. Jon basically feels he has to go, and appoints Sansa as his regent. Maybe he can agree to meet her halfway in White Harbor to make things less ridiculous in terms of travel.
Issue 4: Why doesn’t anybody mention a marriage alliance?
Answer: Everybody mentions a marriage alliance immediately
I don’t care if it’s Tyrion, Varys, or Davos, but “why don’t we have both a King and a Queen?” is a solution on the table from the start. Dany can agree to it right away, since we saw last season she was preparing for that possibility. Jon might hem and haw because he hadn’t really thought about that part of being king yet, but eventually he agrees. Maybe he communicates with Sansa (unlike in the show) and she tells him “Duh, jump on that, you idiot!” He and Dany’s romance becomes an arranged marriage that blossoms into love.
...and that’s it for now, I need to come up with fixes for Sam and Jorah’s awful non-arcs before I can do much else. Still thinking about a way to make the wight hunt workable too, though I doubt I can come up with one that involves Jon, it’s more likely to be composed of Tormund, Brienne, Pod, Thoros, and Beric.
