Daenerys looks over the harbor as her ship sails into Slaver’s Bay.
“The Dothraki follow strength above all, khaleesi. You’ll have a true khalasar when you prove yourself strong, and not before.”
— Jorah Mormont
Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen is gathering an army to take back the Iron Throne from the Lannisters and all the would-be imposter kings of Westeros. Having escaped imprisonment and worse in the city of Qarth, Daenerys sails across Slaver’s Bay to Astapor, where she plans to purchase an unstoppable army of the Unsullied. Although Dany finds the idea of slavery repugnant, this slave legion is hard to resist, for its members are trained brutally from childhood to be the ultimate soldiers.
Astapor is ruled by a guild of slavers known as the Good Masters, whose golden harpy sigil is seen all over the city. as she deals with the slave master Kraznys mo Nakloz and his slave Missandei, Daenerys learns how the Unsullied gained their merciless reputation and, further, what her own limits might be.
“They will stand until they drop. Such is their obedience.”
—Missandei
The Unsullied lines disappear in the valley.
taken from their mothers at the age of five, the unsullied are drilled as long as the sun is in the sky each day. They must master all the skills of a short sword, a shield, and three spears. Three of every four boys die during training, leaving the surviving boys with an unquestioning loyalty and no fear of what may happen to them. Made into eunuchs, they are meant to have no desires of their own. They are said to have no life outside their duty; their lives are to be used to fulfill the desires of their masters. Indeed, they are no longer men. To win his shield, each Unsullied must go to the market and kill a newborn child.
When Daenerys lands in Astapor to buy the entire force of eight thousand warriors, they have yet to be tested in battle, nor have they yet killed the required children. She is advised to blood them early . . . which she does, to their former masters’ despair.
The Unsullied forces follow their new queen from the city.
The costume designs for Dany show the running theme of color and shape specific to her character.
MICHELE CLAPTON (COSTUME DESIGNER): The inspiration for Dany’s costumes and their evolution is very much her story. The color choice was dictated by the fact that the Dothraki precious color is blue, so that’s really been the basis of her palette. The change in her clothing style is partly about her journey of becoming a woman and a leader, but also the practicality of it. She has been leading a nomadic life and with the riding she has to wear boots and she has to wear leather trousers. The fact that they lend such strength to her look is great, but I wanted the shape to create a sense of her femininity. We looked at so many elements, and we played with dragon scaling embroidery and the sleeves seem almost like the hood on a snake. I wanted to draw in the dragons, but also create a sense of armor, something protective about the choices she makes. After Qarth, where it was designed so that it felt like she had made a mistake in style choice, Dany starts to take on more elements from the male style of dress—because that’s where she feels the power is—and then make them her own.
It’s a very organic process, so when she gets to Meereen, you start to see similarities between Missandei and Dany. She is still a young woman and she would want to dress like the woman she perceives as her friend, someone who has proved herself as they have traveled together. Dany wants to erase the idea of slave and the separation it causes and that is part of it as well.
EMILIA CLARKE (DAENERYS TARGARYEN): Every season I am completely blown away by not only the beauty and detailing of Dany’s costumes, but also the standard. I’ve been lucky enough to experience couture now and I’m telling you, I look at the costumes and I think—we’re better. For me though, my favorite item will always be her boots. It’s a love/hate thing: they may be difficult to put on, but they have been everywhere Dany has. They have been filled with blood, they have been filled with snow, they have been filled with sand and mud—they have had it all. They are my favorite bit of Dany. At drama school, it’s one of the first things they tell you—if you can’t find a character, walk in their shoes—now, those boots, they just make you feel strong.
Daenerys takes control and leads her newly acquired Unsullied army.
“A dragon is not a slave.”
—Daenerys Targaryen
The Slaver’s whip with the molded harpy handle.
At the end of episode 304, Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) demonstrates her growing strength and determination as a leader. In a spectacular and surprising strategic move, she double-crosses the Astapor slave masters who sell her the Unsullied in exchange for her largest dragon. She simultaneously frees the slaves from their masters, claims her army, and recovers her dragon in a way no one, especially her stunned advisors Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) and Barristan Selmy (Ian McElhinney), will forget.
ALEX GRAVES (DIRECTOR): Dany’s final sequence in the episode was such a massively technical undertaking. It was undoable, unaffordable, and being shot in Morocco on an incredibly tight time scale. I knew from Alan Taylor’s season one finale that Emilia was really great. I basically built the whole scene with the idea that she would arrive and then expand every single moment I gave her. I also knew I was going to have fun with Iain [Glen] and Emilia because I had watched the dailies that Dan [Minahan] had shot on the first day, and they were like Hepburn and Tracy.
What I wasn’t expecting was for Iain to follow me around for the whole day. I discovered he loves directing and the process. I’d go down to the plaza to talk to Emilia, and I turned round and he was sitting right there. He wanted to know what I was saying that changed her performance. We had a lot of fun. I’m still really proud of that scene because I feel it looks great as the smallest version of what I could have done if budget was no object. One of the biggest challenges was, how do you film eight thousand guys around one girl when you have only a few hundred extras? I can’t even tell you the planning that went into it. I took letter paper representing eight-by-five columns of Unsullied and laid them all over my living room floor with a shot glass as Dany on her horse. I shot them from every possible angle. Then we got to Morocco and some extras didn’t show up—so I lost a column and a wide shot. I still think about it.
I set it up so you are seeing her from many different narratives. You see Dany from the Unsullied, you see her standing alone, you see her from the point of view of the masters and Jorah. The audience is left with a feeling of victory, but it’s not that straightforward.
There is a subtle moment at the end that I think is important, too—Jorah doesn’t fully understand what’s going on and warns Dany against her actions. It’s a moment where he realizes he’s useless to her now. She’s just pulled off the greatest military victory in twenty years and Barristan got it. Jorah didn’t and that’s not good for him.
Daenerys makes a deal with Kraznys for the Unsullied army.
DAVID BENIOFF AND D. B. WEISS (CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS AND WRITERS): From the moment we read the scene in the books, we knew this would be a crowd pleaser. The world of the show is so often grim, but this is a place where someone we love triumphs over someone horrible, and does so in a way she completely earns. It’s a perfect showcase for her intelligence, her refusal to be backed into false dichotomies, and her ability to find novel (if brutal) solutions to the problems that face her. Emilia was so convincing, by the end of that speech, we really thought she was going to start a revolution.
We were very excited by the possibility of our first real glimpse of the dragons as weapons of war, and director Alex Graves shared our enthusiasm. He even tossed in a freebie shot—which happened to be the plume of dragon-charred guards rising up behind a bad-ass Dany that was one of the key images for the entire third season. The explosion was pretty damn loud, but it was well worth it.
EMILIA CLARKE (DAENERYS TARGARYEN): Season two was quite a frustrating season for Daenerys, because she didn’t really get anywhere and her naivety had her coming up against some brick walls. Before we started on season three, David and Dan had talked to me about how there were scenes coming up for Dany that they had been excited about since the very beginning of the whole show so I knew something great was going to be happening. In episode four you get to see Dany take things into her own hands and surprise herself, her advisors, and everyone else around her. The fact it all comes together seems like a sign of things to come. She had started out by asking for advice before making any decisions, although she had proven in season one that she is capable of making bold moves like this by walking into the fire. She’s ready to take the risks when that needs to happen. She’s also beginning to put the barriers up and beginning to not trust anyone but herself. If she’s going to do that, then she really needs to trust in her own instincts.
Daenarys is surrounded as the former slaves call to their new Mhysa.
An Unsullied extra poses for VFX modeling.
Under the heat of the Moroccan sun, with about five hundred extras marching in formation, the VFX department’s task was to somehow create the vast Unsullied army in the epic numbers we see on screen.
JOE BAUER (VFX SUPERVISOR): The original intent was to set up the camera at the desired height, which was dictated by the biggest crane available, or 150 feet, and then march everyone through it to capture every possible element.
One advantage of building Astapor in CG was that the main wall was real. Phenomenally, one of the sets from a Ridley Scott movie [Kingdom of Heaven] is still standing and formed part of our shooting location. The wall itself is approximately eighty feet high and five hundred feet long. To extend that, we used our crane to take plates of two entirely different locations in Morocco and made them fit together. We shot our shoreline in Essaouira and then the wall in Ouarzazate. In Ouarzazate, we marched the columns of extras, using their movements and positions as starting points to turn the five hundred into eight thousand using replication.
Then the nature of the shot changed quite a bit from what was suggested in the storyboards to what we had the opportunity to create with effects. That was quite marvelous. Once we opened it up to CG-land, we weren’t just panning but could open up the camera and helicopter across. At that point, the march out of the city became an almost entirely CG shot, except for the shoreline.
It’s always the goal to be photorealistic, but if you don’t have something to look at and match, it’s almost impossible to achieve. A photo catches details you might not think of, and if those details aren’t there, it doesn’t look real—like the backlit dust rising from under the Unsullied’s feet, or how the light is hitting the armor inconsistently, or how they walk slightly out of step because, despite their training, they are still human. To be totally in sync would not look right.
[(top)] The creation of the unit in 3-D. [(bottom)] The Unsullied army before replication.
“Men who fight for gold have no honor or loyalty. They cannot be trusted.”
—Barristan Selmy
Daenerys plans her campaign with her military advisors.
the second sons are a mercenary force of approximately two thousand men who fight for the highest bidder. Their name comes from the fact that a good number of their fighters are “second sons” who will not inherit and must therefore make their own way in the world. The standard of the Second Sons is a broken blade, signifying their ruthless pursuit of victory for their employers and is recognizable across the land.
When Daenerys approaches Yunkai, another slaver city, with her new Unsullied army, she finds Yunkai is protected by the mercenary Second Sons, who are led by three men: Mero, Prendahl na Ghezn, and Daario Naharis. Dany offers an alliance with the Second Sons if they will break their contract with the Yunkai, and she gives them two days in which to decide. Although the captains plan to assassinate Daenerys, Daario Naharis silently decides he prefers to fight for beauty—and so he brings the other captains’ heads and the Second Sons numbers to her.
The Second Sons’ camp below the Yunkai city walls.
