Man - episode 3 really soured some folks.
And to be fair, I hated episode 3 as well - hated it more and more as I thought on it. But episode 1 was fine. Episodes 2 and 4 I thought were quite good and this episode was the best of the season so far, IMO.
The Dany thing has been a long-time coming. And yeah, maybe that's more 'book insight' bleeding into show viewing, but Dany has always been an entitled, impulsive, violent trainwreck and a wholly unfit leader. I've said this for literally years - she's a spoiled tween with an air force when nobody else has one. She's narrow-minded and overly emotional. Her losing her shit and burning a bunch of stuff to the ground is easy to call and surely nobody would've argued with it had she torched the massed Lannister army and then burned down the red keep.
The only real curious event here is that she torched
everything. But there are several historical analogues for it. And frankly, for all the shit B&W have (justifiably) taken for making character motivations non-existent, they
did give you some insight here when they mentioned the contrast between Kings Landing and Mereen. When she was upset that they didn't rise up in support of her, she clearly put 'torch 'em all' on the table. The historical example that springs immediately to mind for me is the Armenian Genocide. The Ottomans decided that the Armenians didn't do enough to defend the region from the Christian invaders and if they weren't going to rise up against the enemy, then clearly they're no better than the enemy. The Turks then went on to effectively wholesale slaughter people who were ostensibly part of their own empire.
In the end I'm not sure Dany actively hoped to slaughter innocents - I think she simply didn't care much if she did, especially as she saw them as quasi-enemies anyway.
Apart from that, the Jaime/Tyrion meeting was fantastic. Euron v. Jaime was unnecessary but entertaining. Cleganebowl was everything we could've hoped it to be.
And in the end I think so much of this show has been demonstrating how little the rank and file care or benefit from these power struggles. They'll take peace under a bad ruler over a war to install a good ruler every time. Because in the end, the definition of a 'good' ruler is pretty damn fluid. I mean heck, in the recent history of Westoros it appears Robert Baratheon was actually pretty damn good at it by simply staying out of the way. And from a commoners perspective, Dany and her army is simply a foreign invasion. Which again makes what happened more 'to type'. Dany has no ties to King's Landing - she never knew the place. The Unsullied just see it as someplace else to conquer and the Dothraki just do what they do. Even the northmen are historically antagonistic towards anything south of the Riverlands (if they'll even tolerate that far).
I just don't understand the rage here. The soldiers acted as damn near every invading force in the history of warfare has acted (look at what the Germans did in Leningrad and the staggering barbarism from the Russians in Berlin that came about as a result). Most of the characters acted as you'd expect them to - even Jaime the Cersei Junkie.
This all comes down to just how much of Kings Landing Dany would've reasonably set ablaze. And I think the writers, over the course of several seasons and in her final conversation with Tyrion specifically, gave ample indication that she may just snap. When the Bells were ringing, it wasn't the bells that set her off. It was sitting there having wrecked creation but lost every person close to her on account of Cersei simply not capitulating when it was clearly the smart decision the first time they met, and thinking "wait...NOW you surrender? Get ****ed with that shit!" It was petulant, frustrated rage from a person who'd demonstrated a pretty decent track record of being petulant and wrathful.
I just don't see the problem here. I thought the episode was very good
