The Dothraki Are Dead. Does Game of Thrones Care?

"The Dothraki are a people whose culture we spent seasons immersed in, alongside Daenerys. Their depiction may have flirted too strongly with noble savage tropes, and they haven’t been much of a real, felt presence for some time. But Dany spent years growing up with them. She underwent their rituals; she accepted their blood riders as her own. Yes, the show set her apart from the Dothraki in some crucial ways besides her Westerosi heritage — she dared to style herself a female khal, and later, by slaughtering all the khals at Vaes Dothrak, she showed that she was beyond the very notion of khals — but she was still deeply embedded in that society. And in Sunday’s episode, there wasn’t a single Dothraki we recognized. Only Jorah Mormont, who translated Melisandre’s martial command to lift their swords for the lighting and then rode out with them. The editing even suggests that it’s the threat to Jorah — whose horse we see limping back to the castle immediately before we cut to Daenerys — that spurs her to break away from Jon and fly out with Drogon, not the loss of tens of thousands of people who overcame their fear of “poison water” to follow her across the Narrow Sea."

READ ARTICLE BY NINA SHEN RASTOGI