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'Game of Thrones' Season 7 Premiere: 'Shall We Begin?'

'Dragonstone' saw the disparate plot threads of HBO's hit series pulling together as Daenerys Targaryan returned to Westeros to claim the Iron Throne.
<em>"Pinot Noir!/Lann-is-star!/Have-I per-haps gone too-far?"</em>: Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) takes a sip or twelve of wine in the premiere episode of <em>Game of Thrones'</em> seventh season.

We'll be recapping Season 7 of HBO's Game of Thrones here on Monkey See. We'll try to turn them around overnight, so look for them first thing on Mondays. And of course: Spoilers abound

After a deck-clearing, barn-burner (Sept-burner, technically) of a season finale like "The Winds of Winter" — a towering achievement by any metric, not least of which, you know: body count — you'd be forgiven for expecting a season premiere that would concern itself with placing Game of Thrones' scattered, wildfire-singed gamepieces back on the board, methodically and meticulously.

And yet: Things are ostensibly speeding up, right? This seventh season is an abbreviated one — 7 episodes, not the usual 10 — and we've got only a total of thirteen episodes to go. Granted, some of those later episodes will reportedly clock in with runtimes that'll seem positively Apatowian, but the point is: Now is not the time for shilly-shallying.

No, now is

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