Going into Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5, the odds look stacked against Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke). She’s lost yet another dragon, watched her best friend murdered before her eyes, and faces down all of King’s Landing with only a scant amount of her Unsullied forces. The good news is Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and Ser Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham) are en route with more Northern, Unsullied, and Dothraki forces. The even better news? Uh, depending on your stomach for carnage? We’ve never actually seen the Unsullied unleashed.
Ever since the Unsullied were introduced in Season 3, they’ve been framed as a hyper-disciplined and incredibly loyal military force. Represented by Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson), they’ve been imbued with a sort of nobility, and thanks to his relationship with Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), a tinge of romance. We think of the Unsullied as utterly heroic, but that’s not how they were literally sold to Daenerys.
We first met both the Unsullied and Missandei back in Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 1, “Valar Dohaeris.” After their run-in with the House of the Undying in Qarth, Ser Jorah and Daenerys have sailed to the city of Astapor in Slaver’s Bay with the intention of buying a slave army. Missandei is introduced as the masters’ favorite translator, explaining to Dany and Ser Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) that “My master says the Unsullied are not men. Death means nothing to them.”
When Ser Jorah questions the veracity of this — saying all men fear death — Missandei translates an explanation that further elaborates on how “inhuman” the Unsullied are. She says, “To win his shield, an Unsullied must go to the slave marts with a silver mark, find a newborn and kill it before its mother’s eyes. This way, my master says, we make certain there is no weakness left in them.”
Daenerys’s response is pretty normal. Shocked, she says, “You take a babe from its mother’s arms, kill it as she watches, and pay for her pain with a silver coin?”
It’s revealed that the coin isn’t for the mother, but the mother and baby’s owner. Daenerys is also informed that there are at least 8,000 Unsullied soldiers available for purchase, meaning at least 8,000 babies have been murdered, not to mention the 24,000 potential Unsullied who died and failed in training. (It’s said only one in four boys survives.)
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As Daenerys contemplates the morality of taking the Unsullied on, even Ser Jorah tries to reassure her that “They’re not men. Not anymore.”
Daenerys challenges this notion as she purchases the Unsullied via a deft con. She buys them in exchange for Drogon, and only reveals after the deal is done and the Unsullied are foresworn to her, that you can’t tame dragons. Then she instructs the Unsullied to kill their former masters. The fiery scene ends with Dany granting these slave soldiers their freedom and asking if they will fight for her as freed men. They oblige.
This leads us to the curious case of Grey Worm and what’s going on in his head after the horrific events of Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 4, “The Last of the Starks.” A lot of focus has been placed on Daenerys’s potential slip into sadism, but what about Grey Worm?
We first met Grey Worm in Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 5, “Kissed By Fire.” He has been chosen by the newly freed Unsullied to be their leader. Daenerys is taken aback that his name is Grey Worm, and Missandei has to explain that all Unsullied are given new names when they are cut that are meant to remind them “they are vermin.” Daenerys implores the Unsullied to choose their own names as freedmen, but Grey Worm says his name is “lucky” because “Grey Worm is the name [he] had the day Daenerys Stormborn set him free.”
In The Game Revealed: The Last of the Starks, Jacob Anderson unpacks what Grey Worm felt seeing Missandei beheaded. “For Grey Worm, losing her, is just like…there’s nothing left. There’s nothing. He has nothing left now,” he says.
“She has taught him how to be a human being. Like her, and Dany, have nurtured him into being human, and then it’s just taken away.”
Since Anderson himself has drawn a line to Grey Worm’s humanity being nurtured and taken away, it stands to reason that maybe we might see a more ruthless side to Daenerys’s main general in the next episode. What atrocities are the Unsullied capable of if they stop caring about their moral compasses? What happens if Daenerys commands them to give the Golden Company all they’ve got?
Just remember that the Unsullied are all baby killers, which means they’ve committed horrors before, and they could very well do it again.
