New Plan Same As The Old Bad Plan?
Remember when Tyrion Lannister was one of the most prescient and thoughtful strategic minds in Westeros (those days appear to be long gone)?
So far this season, Tyrion has suggested two plans so let us look at them both in some depth.
Oh, and if you haven’t read my recap this week yet, here it is:
Plan One: Win the War of the Two Queens (Daenerys and Cersei)
Nuts and Bolts: Tyrion suggested encircling King’s Landing utilizing the combined forces of Dorne and The Reach while he sent the Unsullied to take Casterly Rock.
Problems: Too many to count, but it appeared that the plan was constructed only assuming the most favorable response from the opposition and without good intelligence. It was based on fighting a war on multiple fronts (usually a terrible idea) and on the assumption of no resistance in the sea lanes of control. In addition, showrunners Benioff and Weiss seemed to assume we would forget that Tyrion knew the Gold mines in Casterly Rock were mined out and that Cersei could care less about Casterly Rock.
Unforeseeable Problem: Euron being able to build and crew 1000 Galleon navy despite having a populace who had always built longboats and nowhere near enough timber to build even a quarter of that fleet. In addition, how could Tyrion know that Euron could virtually teleport his gigantic fleet across the world nearly simultaneously (I suspect Tyrion is unaware of the often cruel and always capricious dictatorial Benioff and Weiss effect).
Result: Total Disaster. Euron crushed the combined forces of the original Iron Fleet and the entire army of Dorne during a battle at sea and then teleported to Casterly Rock to destroy the remaining naval forces of Daenerys and cut-off the ability of the Unsullied to return to Dragonstone. In addition, his allies in the Reach never even headed for King’s Landing getting trapped and defeated easily at Highgarden by the Lannister armies.
Plan Two: The Battle To Convince Cersei to Fight White Walkers
Nuts and Bolts: Confusing, Tyrion and Ser Davos go to Kings Landing to secretly meet with Jaime Lannister leveraging Tyrion’s leverage with Bronn (how he even contacted Bronn is beyond me). Assuming the secret meeting goes well with Jaime a commando mission will be sent beyond the Wall to capture a White Walker which will be delivered to King’s Landing to prove to Cersei that the White Walkers are real. Apparently, by doing this Cersei will join hands with Daenerys and they will all sing kumbaya. When Varys suggested that Tyrion needed to convince Daenerys to follow a different path, I sure never expected that this would be the path. If Anything, this sounds even stupider than the first plan.
Problems: Too many to count. Let’s start with the most obvious, if Daenerys had pressed her advantage right after she obliterated the Lannister armies and the Lannister plunder train (by the way, why did Daenerys have Drogon reduce enough food to feed her army for a year to dust?) the war would have ended and she could turn to the defense of the realm against the White Walkers. In addition, why wouldn’t Cersei just use the delay to reconstitute her forces while encouraging Daenerys to weaken her own forces fighting White Walkers? And what exactly have the White Walkers been doing since Hardhome? They were able to reach the tree of the three-eyed Raven about five minutes after Bran tried to greensee the Night King but they have moved about zero miles in the time other prominent characters have taken a world tour. Also, why would anyone allow Jon Snow to lead a Star Trek away mission to fight a massively superior force of undead bad-asses (what could possibly go wrong?).
Result: Unknown. No insanity is beyond the pale when it comes to Benioff and Weiss. If we were using any metric of military or strategic logic the result would be a total and disastrous fail but I guess it is theoretically possible that Cersei would join the fight against the White Walkers in earnest and call at least a temporary truce in the War of the Two Queens but does it sound like her?
Why Has Tyrion Lannister Been Reduced To Near Idiocy?
These are both monumentally stupid plans. The Varys of the books would never let Tyrion suggest them, The Tyrion of the books would never suggest them, and the Daenerys of the books would never accept them.
So why has Game of Thrones reduced Tyrion to near idiocy?
I can think of two possibilities.
First, Tyrion was great out of necessity when nobody believed in him (and most people wanted him dead) and when he had virtually no reliable allies. It is possible that being accepted, having allies, believing in someone, and being valued has totally eroded his edge and reduced him to a terrible strategist.
Second, Benioff and Weiss disease strikes again. As usual, in order to move the pieces around the board so that they end up where they want them to be, Tyrion has been reduced to a near moron. We just saw this same script play out with Arya too (trained to be a Master Assassin by the greatest house of Assassins in the history of Westeros she is led like a puppy by Littlefinger). I wrote a whole series about Benioff and Weiss disease during Season 6 (I called it George Lucas disease at the time). Basically, internal character logic is always sacrificed to the hubris of Benioff and Weiss because they have become convinced that they can do no wrong (they have mostly been proven right sadly, it helps to be in control of CGI Dragons I suspect).
If you have a different theory please feel free to share it, my whole goal this week is to spark increased community discussions since the departure of The Ringer from Medium and from allowing comments.
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