We’re only two episodes into this season of Game of Thrones, but one of its overarching themes is already crystal clear: The human body can produce an astonishing variety of revolting liquids, and sooner or later Samwell Tarly is going to have to clean all of them up. This is a surprising development, because at the end of the last season, Sam, the would-be Maester played by John Bradley-West, had finally found a place where his bookish intelligence would be an asset: the giant library of the Citadel. It seemed likely he’d spend the next couple of episodes with his nose buried in ancient tomes, researching the fascinating question of whether or not there was any connection between Dragonstone and dragonglass before helping to save the world in the final season. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Instead, Sam has now spent two episodes in a Cronenbergian nightmare of vile fluids, decaying tissue, and so, so, so much retching. In the season premiere, director Jeremy Podeswa and editor Crispin Green turned what could have been a run-of-the-mill “I hate my job” montage into something utterly revolting: After opening with Sam doing the menial but not particularly nauseating work of reshelving books, they slowly introduce the information that his other duties include emptying and washing the bedpans at what’s gotta be Westeros’ Center for the Study of Extremely Vile Cases of Dysentery, plus ladling out a nearly identical -ooking soup to the patients. There’s also a Pink Floyd–style audio collage of the associated sound effects, which is really impressive if you haven’t eaten recently.
In the second episode, the gross-out baton was passed to director Mark Mylod, who was more than up to the challenge. In what is easily the most vomit-inducing scene in the entire series so far—and outrunning the fast-moving diarrhea montage is no small feat—Sam attempted to cure Jorah Mormont’s case of the leprosylike disease greyscale by slicing the infected tissue and skin away. You know what that means: pus and plenty of it. And the audience just has to watch and listen to this stuff: Samwell Tarly can smell it. Game of Thrones has never shied away from blood and gore, of course, but this is something different: less Saving Private Ryan, more “Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts.”
It’s not really clear why Sam’s life has suddenly turned into a sadistic gross-out contest—maybe some kind of escalating dare between the showrunners?—but we are here for it. So what does the future hold for Samwell Tarly? Well, there are five episodes left in the season, and Wikipedia lists 37 bodily fluids, of which Sam has encountered only two. While it’s true that there are some obvious places for producers to save time, space, and money—do we really need separate Samwell Tarly gross-out montages about chyle and chyme?—simple math suggests that if the Game of Thrones filmmakers want Sam to learn about all the horrible things burbling and gurgling around inside the human body, they’re going to have to speed things up somehow. Maybe some of that soup from the season premiere would help.
