'Game of Thrones' Season 5, Episode 5 - 'Kill the Boy' Recap

There was a lot less jumping around this week from location to location, as we didn't even check in once at King's Landing, Dorne or Braavos. Rather, all the action took place in just four spots.

Meereen

We begin the week where we left off: in Meereen, where Daenerys mourns the death of Ser Barristan. Daario suggests setting up a base of operations and clearing out the city of the Sons of the Harpy, but Dany has another, more extreme idea.

She rounds up the head of every major family in the city and brings them down into the vault where she locked up her dragons. She has them burn one of the masters alive, then they chow down on his corpse. Her gambit doesn't work yet, as nobody talks, but she plans on continuing the next day.

Later, Grey Worm wakes up and is saddened to hear of Barristan's death. "I failed him," he says. "I failed my men. I failed my queen." He and Missandei have a sweet moment, wherein he admits that he was afraid when he was wounded...afraid that he would never see her again.

Dany finally makes a decision that doesn't involve feeding people to dragons: she decides to re-open the fighting pits in order to help bring the people of the city together.

Winterfell

Brienne has arrived at Winterfell, and finds a servant who has been in Winterfell for decades. She tells him to get a message to Sansa, betting on his loyalty.

Meanwhile, Ramsay's girlfriend Miranda is understandably miffed that Ramsay is now going to marry Sansa, even though it's clear that Ramsay has no plans to stop having her as his mistress after he marries.

Speaking of Sansa, she gets a message from her chamber maid: if she's ever in trouble, she's to light a candle in the highest window of the broken tower (yep, the one that Bran got pushed out of). She goes to reminisce, when Miranda finds her and sends her to the kennels where she finds Theon...who still insists he's Reek.

Reek tells Ramsay that Sansa saw him, but surprisingly he goes unpunished...for now. Ramsay tells Sansa (during the most awkward dinner ever) that he did what he did to Theon because of what he did to Winterfell. He makes Reek apologize to Sansa for killing her brothers, then decides that Reek should give Sansa away at the wedding. His sadism knows no bounds.

Ramsay's joy over his games is quickly disrupted when Roose reveals that he'll be having a child, and he's quite sure it's a boy. Roose tells the awful, awful tale of his birth as some kind of comfort to Ramsay that his position will be the same.

Castle Black

Maester Aemon laments to Sam about how Dany must feel, cut off from everything she's ever known across the sea and dealing with political matters she may be ill-equipped for. He also counsels Jon Snow: "Kill the boy," he says, "and let the man be born."

Jon tries to get the Wildlings to settle south of the Wall and fight for him "when the time comes" by sitting down with Tormund and attempting to get him to take command of the Wildlings. Tormund is skeptical that the Wildlings will go along with this idea.

Things aren't much better with the rest of the Night's Watch when Jon reveals his plan. Olly voices his own issues with the idea of working with the Wildlings, considering his family (and the rest of his village) was slaughtered by them.

Stannis and Sam have a little heart to heart, where Stannis notes that he's the son of the only man to defeat Robert in battle. He also grills Sam on how he killed that White Walker, and encourages him to figure out why dragonstone works the way it does against them.

Stannis decides that it's time to march on Winterfell, and Jon appears to have had success in convincing the Wildlings to go with them into battle. Oddly, Stannis decides to take his wife and daughter in the march with him, as he doesn't trust the former criminals of the Night's Watch.

Expect a big battle a little later this season!

Valyria

Meanwhile, on the road to Meereen: "Long, sullen silences with the occasional punch in the face...the Mormont way," is how Tyrion describes his time with Jorah thus far. It's pretty accurate.

Jorah sails them through the ruins of Valyria, Dany's ancestral homeland and the source of that Valyrian steel everyone always talks about. The speak of The Doom, the force that destroyed the city, and according to legend so terribly that even dragons burned.

Speaking of, they see Dany's dragon fly above, right before being attacked by "stone men," people who have been infected with greyscale that has overtaken them. Tyrion is dragged down under the water before Jorah manages to save him.

Although Tyrion gets away clean, the last shot of the episode reveals that Jorah wasn't so lucky: he has a spot of grescale on his arm already.