Game of Thrones' Battle of Winterfell revealed the brilliance of Cersei Lannister

The Concourse

"Not only is Cersei Lannister smarter than everybody else in Westeros, she has definitively proven that you can know all you need to know about the world from its safest and most rarefied cloisters," says Albert Burneko. He adds: "From the beginning the show has portrayed Cersei as a cruel, ruthless, and heavy-handed wielder of power within the royal court, but one defined, continually undermined, and eventually made monstrous by her own shortsightedness, her disinterest in and inability to conceive of the world beyond the most narrow definition of her and her family’s immediate interests." Yet Cersei's plan to chose her own immediate sense of security over everything else was the right call. "Cersei was right; her take on the fight against the embodiment of death itself, which amounted to, 'I dunno, call me when it gets to Harrenhal,' was the right one," says Burneko. "More important, though, is how her rightness upends what many, and perhaps most, viewers took to be one of the core observations of the show to this point: That the courtiers at the top of Westeros’s power structure may have profound capacity to inflict bloodshed and ruin upon the world, but they are largely uninformed and clueless about the hard realities out in it—that exposure to the outer world has the power to enlighten these soft silver-spooners, or to destroy them. That’s totally wrong! Cersei knew—and was the only person who knew!—what was required to defeat the Army of the Dead, and how seriously to take that challenge, despite never having ventured farther north than on her sole visit to Winterfell eight years ago, not once having left King’s Landing since then, and only having beheld a single captive wight."

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