整个星期，我们每个人都有最喜欢的剧集Game of Thrones.要阅读整个系列，其他所有内容都有内容，请访问GOT主页here.

What we discovered when we all started making our picks for our favourite episodes was that our choices say more about us than the actual show – just like gossip. So what does my selection, “First of His Name” (Season 4 Episode 5), say about me? Let’s start with what it doesn’t say about me. Duana thought for sure I’d go for the episode where Jon Snow shows us he knows something about eating pussy. This is not that episode. I thought for sure that I would go for an episode that doesn’t involve Jorah f-cking Mormont, I hate him so much. This is not that episode – but if we can go on a brief Jorah Mormont tangent for minute, WHYYYYYY are so many people into him, WHYYYYY can’t you see how gross he is? I’m not alone here either. Kathleen sent this to me yesterday and it is ONLY THE TRUTH AND NOTHING ELSE:

If you split a room down the middle dividing people into two teams, one pro-Jorah and the other anti-Jorah, what do you think the observation would be? I have some theories, but that’s for another time.

Anyway, Jorah, unfortunately, shows up in this episode with his dick in his hand, as usual, while pining over Khaleesi. This is insignificant and we won’t speak of him again.

Because what they’re doing in “First of His Name” is what Duana and I just talked about on the最新一集的Show Your Work当我们讨论该系列的结论以及它们如何构建时。杜娜（Duana）称其为“支持”，她的观点是从这里开始，在这个即将到来的赛季中，应该很容易。很容易，因为他们一直在“支持”，铺设轨道，在前几个赛季中设置全部 - 这项工作已经完成。“他的名字的第一个”是其中的一集，也许是情节，这就是关于那些工作的种子，这将使我们在结局季节充满盛开。或者，您可能会说，已经种植的炸弹最终会繁荣。

The biggest bomb, of course, is That Reveal – this is the episode where we find out that it was Littlefinger Petyr Baelish who engineered all of this to begin with. He was the one who told Lysa to kill her husband and blame it on the Lannisters. He’s the reason we’re all here, why families were torn apart, why fragile peace became all-out war, why Winter is Coming. Literally, as “Winter is Coming” is the title of the first episode of this entire series, when King Robert Baratheon comes to Winterfell after the death of his Hand, Jon Arryn, to ask Ned Stark to fill the position. Backing in, see? Layers and layers of backing in and the payoffs.

但是,虽然大炸弹是冲突的起源,it’s the smaller bombs sown in this episode that bring us to where we are today. “First of His Name” is a misdirect, a title about a boy/man who becomes king for an episode that is about women (and directed by a woman, Michelle MacLaren) as they secure their positions on the board. We open at Tommen’s coronation where Cersei Lannister and Margaery Tyrell are warily eyeing each other, chess-matching another uneasy alliance. Later on, we see Sansa Stark reunited with her aunt, Lysa Arryn, after fleeing King’s Landing with Littlefinger. Sansa has been tormented by Cersei, her mother has been killed, she thinks she’s lost her sister, and at the Eyrie she falls into the arms of a woman she thinks she can finally trust who, later on, plies her with lemon cake before accusing her of seducing her boyfriend. Every time Sansa gets lemon cakes from a woman on this show it’s accompanied by a betrayal, a metaphor for how women have related to each other in this story: sweet and sour, intermittent solidarity mixed with suspicion and rivalry. Cersei and Margaery will go on to battle for years, Lysa clearly resented her own sister and now her sister’s daughter – does history repeat itself with Sansa and Arya, who have finally started working together as a pack but may find their alliances and loyalties tested when Jon Snow comes home to Winterfell with a possible new sister-in-law/secret aunt? This is the set-up, the backing in, that we now know was being prepared for us in "First of His Name".

Preparation, though, is another key to the episode. These are all women who’ve been prepared by and therefore trained by men. We see Tywin mansplaining to Cersei about their family’s money troubles, about the power of the Iron Bank, about the marriages that have to be arranged for financial security. He may have not intended to but Tywin here is teaching Cersei about the relationship between accounting and power, lessons that she will put to full use when she sits on the Iron Throne, arranging marriages for herself for an alliance with Euron Greyjoy and sending him to enlist the services of the Golden Company. Despite the fact that Tywin used his only daughter as a pawn her whole life, Cersei worships him, her mentor and idol, and every move she’s made since he died she learned from him.

Sansa too has a mentor. In this episode, it’s Littlefinger who brings her to “safety” at the Eyrie, telling her upon arrival to,“Know your strengths, use them wisely. And one man can be worth ten thousand”.Over the next few seasons, Sansa will continue to study at Littlefinger Academy until, of course, the student becomes the master. Sansa was able to see through her mentor’s manipulation and beat him at his own game.

Arya, meanwhile, is training too – on the run with The Hound, she’s reciting her list, practising her swordplay, as taught to her by Syrio Forel. Think of all the men she’s learned from: during her time with Tywin, she learned the value of properly assessing her enemies; during her time with The Hound, which is explored in this episode, she learns the value of properly assessing her heroes – and how to strike a fatal blow; later on, during her time with Jaqen, she learns the value of properly assessing oneself, how to become No One before becoming the Someone who outsmarted all the men who underestimated her.

然后是布莱恩（Brienne），他一直在训练自己的一生来服务，现在必须学会如何作为Podrick试镜成为她的乡绅。布莱恩（Brienne）被她钦佩的男人反复失望，她在其中信仰。这是一个不是她平等或上级的人，她得知他是最忠实的人。

These are the seeds from the episode that we’ve been waiting for to grow. What will these women do with their training as they battle for survival? What are the lessons they have to un-learn, lessons inherited from men who have failed, as they attempt to do better, be better?

丹妮莉丝会更好？她誓言要变得更好，在这一集中，她在Meereen中，从顾问那里担任理事会，最终决定“我将做皇后区做的事：我会统治”。她会吗？她是一个好统治者吗？在莎拉的帖子中House Stark’s chances of winning the Iron Throne, she quite rightly pointed out that while Jon’s courageous and inspires courage, he’s not actually that good at leading, at managing. Same goes for Daenerys. Daenerys is great at conquering, there’s no doubt she can fight, but can she govern? She told Jorah in “First of His Name” that she would do what queens do and rule… but her version of “ruling” in Meereen was pretty much setting fire to the mess that she was trying to rule. Which is kinda the same sh-t that her forebears did, and she was supposed to be the one to break that wheel. Can she un-learn the lessons of the past to forge a new future?

这些是什么estions that “First of His Name” was laying down way back then that have to be answered as we move to the end. Can these women fix what the men have started?

And that, for me, has always been what this show has been about, why this episode stands out for me so much. Because this episode gives us what I consider to be the most important line of the entire series, the line that I hope everything else points to as we approach the finish, a line that could only have been delivered by Cersei Lannister:

“Everywhere in the world they hurt little girls.”

那不是F-Cking真相。这就是他们应该称之为这个节目 -Game of Thrones: Everywhere In The World They Hurt Little Girls.

This is an episode about hurt little girls and what happens to them, what they do with that hurt. This is an episode that “backs in” to how that hurt will manifest itself over time, and sets the question that must be answered in the final season: Will hurt little girls always hurt more little girls… or can hurt little girls be the ones who will eventually stop the hurting of little girls?

And so we end at Craster’s Keep, where hurt little girls demand that the place of their abuse be burned to the ground, and decide they’d rather be homeless than have to live under the protection of yet another group of men, the Night’s Watch this time. For these hurt little girls, a man will never be their hero. Think about that then on May 19, 2019, the night of the series finale: who’s going to be the hero that stops hurting little girls?

While we’re here though – one more question, because there’s one more bonus in this episode that makes it my favourite: Ghost! “Where in seven hells!”

I have watched this moment more times than I can count:

Jon Snow has smiled wide probably only 5 times this entire series. One of those times was for Ghost. Ghost did not show up at all last season because, as the producers keep telling us, they either don’t have the money for direwolves or they can’t figure out how to make them real. We did see Nymeria though in Season 7. Nymeria has her own pack now, the Alpha Wolf Leonardo DiCaprio only wishes he could be. Not sure if Nymeria’s ever coming back but Ghost for surewill return for Season 8. And that’s the last seed planted in “First of His Name” that makes this episode so special: what role will Ghost play in the war?

WILL GHOST SURVIVE?

If Jorah f-cking Mormont lives and Ghost dies….

I can’t even think about that possibility. Please, please, please, protect Ghost.

Attached - Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams promoting GoT in Belfast today.