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Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5 brought us the most horrifying look at war yet. The Battle of King’s Landing was fiery, awful, and apocalyptic. Forget what the White Walkers can do, the living are far worse to one another.
Obviously, we knew that Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) was going to unleash Drogon on Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), but we maybe didn’t anticipate the cameo reappearance — if we can call it that? — of the deadly green fire, aka Wildfire, tearing through King’s Landing.
**Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5 Spoilers Ahead**
Even though tonight’s battle was hyped as some sort of equal playing field between Team Daenerys and Team Cersei. The grief of losing Missandei and the betrayal that Daenerys felt over Jon’s choice to reveal his parentage to his siblings warped our Dragon Queen into the worst version of herself. As she told Jon Snow (Kit Harington) earlier in the episode, she doesn’t have love in Westeros. Only fear. Consumed by that notion, she ignores the surrender bells and ravages the city of King’s Landing with Drogon’s fire.
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However, some viewers may have noticed some green fire exploding in the city’s landscape. That green fire is Wildfire.
Wildfire is a manufactured element created by pyromancers. It has had had three major moments in the Game of Thrones story.
- First, Daenerys’s father, the Mad King Aerys, hid caches of it all over the city of King’s Landing. When Robert Baratheon’s army was at his gates, rather than surrender, he wanted to burn the city down. Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) kills him to prevent this.
- Second, in Season 2, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) uses historic knowledge of these caches to weaponize Blackwater Bay. He sends a single ship of it out into Stannis Baratheon’s fleet and has Bronn (Jerome Flynn) light it up, destroying the enemy’s superior navy with one arrow.
- Finally, Cersei used the Wildfire at the end of Season 6 by transforming it into a weapon of mass destruction. She planted huge stores of it under the Sept of Baelor, and blew the building up while all of her political enemies were inside.
The green fire we saw was probably just old caches from King Aerys’s day that hadn’t been found. When Drogon’s fire reached them, they exploded.
Essentially, every horrific act we saw on tonight’s episode had popped up in a prior episode. This was just the first time every monstrous weapon and attack has been unleashed in one awful go.
The Game of Thrones Series Finale premieres Sunday, May 19, 2019 on HBO.
