Fire and Blood 7

 Being the future book-spoiler post. If you don't want future spoilers (or want the rest of the review), go here.

In which Aemond steals Vhagar so he can out-do Dear Uncle Daemon at war crimes later on. (I'm telling you, an AU fic where these two just run around Westeros war-criming the shit out of everything would be fun to read.)

They keep foreshadowing God's Eye, huh? Last time we had Caraxes and Vhagar flying together for the last time as allies. This time around, on Aemond's first flight on Vhagar, he doesn't buckle himself in and almost gets thrown off for his trouble. Betcha he'll always remember to fasten his seatbelt from here on out.

I alluded to it in the spoiler-free post, but I can talk about it more freely here: the book doesn't portray either the Greens or the Blacks in a very sympathetic light, but it is slightly more sympathetic to the Blacks. So props to Olivia Cooke (Alicent) for basically single-handedly winning back some sympathy for Team Green this week. 

Future predictions:

For the last two episodes it's unchanged (I know, I know they won't do a Rashomon for the finale, but I'm going to continue pretending that's what they're doing*), but last week I thought Episode 8 would be a flashback focusing on Corlys. I forgot that there are two whole paragraphs in Fire and Blood about him getting sick for a little bit and provoking a succession crisis because his grandkids are clearly not his grandkids. So it'll be an extrapolation of those two paragraphs.

Man, this season is weirdly paced.

*Okay it's not really a Rashomon, because there's no confusion over the underlying facts. But I can't think of a better term. I just really want Episode 9 to be "Viserys dies and the Greens conceal this until they're ready to crown Aegon," with the Blacks never showing up; and Episode 10 to be "Viserys dies and Rhaenyra eventually finds out about it and readies for war," with the Greens never showing up except maybe at the very end.