Game of Thrones: And All the Nights to Come

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts in installments.

Lenika Cruz: Jon Snow’s back ... and now he’s gone. “My watch is ended” may have had the delivery and feel of a mic drop, but it was a oddly triumph-free way to punctuate Jon’s departure from The Wall. There was a mixture of defeat, sadness, and disillusionment in Jon’s face as he strode out of Castle Black, leaving the wildlings and his remaining sworn brothers in his wake. I couldn’t help but think back to Maester Aemon’s words to him: “Kill the boy, and let the man be born.” At the time, “kill the boy” just seemed like a poetic way of saying “make the difficult, but right choice.” But, in a more prophetic sense, is “the boy” in Jon Snow officially dead? Could the newly reborn Jon, released from his vows and that fluffy fur cape, finally be the “man”—the prince that was promised, the one Melisandre saw in the flames fighting at Winterfell?

We don’t know—all we know now is that he’s visibly and profoundly traumatized by what he’s been through. (“I did what I thought was right, and I got murdered for it, and now I’m back. Why?”) It doesn’t help that he’s glimpsed the other side, only to see “nothing at all.” No surprise, then, that Ser Davos’s sincere but lackluster pep talk failed to jolt him out of his existential crisis. The most immediate consequence of his departure is his impending missed connection with Sansa, but I also wonder how the wildling-friendly Night’s Watch will do under the presumed leadership of Edd. Winter’s still coming, after all.

With “Oathbreaker,” the show slouched ever so slowly toward confirming a theory that might as well be canon for many fans at this point. Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven’s greensight took them a couple decades back to Dorne and the so-called Tower of Joy, bringing to life an infamous fight that book readers only witnessed in the form of a Ned Stark fever dream back in the first Song of Ice and Fire novel. It was perhaps too much to expect Game of Thrones to unravel the entire mystery of what happened in the tower that day (I’m willing to bet a collective groan resounded the moment it became clear Bran wouldn’t be following his father up the stairs this episode). It’s also hard to complain too much about getting a second Ned Stark appearance in two weeks, plus a look at the famed knight Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning and awesome-wielder-of-double-blades.

Next came Daenerys’s entry into Vaes Dothrak, which it appears will be far more complicated than her simply pottering about with the dosh khaleen until Jorah and Daario get around to rescuing her. If she’s lucky, she joins the crones and wears a dusty sack and glowers knowingly in darkened tents for the rest of her life—but it’ll be up to a council of khals to decide her fate. (I don’t even want to think about the worst-case scenario. Again, here’s a society where drinking a horse-heart smoothie is considered a real treat.)

In Meereen, Varys has taken the reins, relegating Tyrion to suffer through small talk with an Unsullied and a reserved handmaiden. (I wanted the scene to land better than it did, but all it did was make me wish Dany was around to fill the conversational vacuum.) Varys learned from a Sons of the Harpy conspirator that the masters of Astapor and Yunkai, along with some support from slavers in Volantis, are fueling unrest in the city—a problem whose only solution appears to be a great show of force by Meereen’s new leaders. With a weakened fighting force and no ships, I can only imagine (hope?) we’ll be seeing more of Viserion and Rhaegal, unless Daenerys and Drogon make it back very soon.

Could the newly reborn Jon, released from his vows and that fluffy fur cape, finally be the prince that was promised?

In King’s Landing, Maester Qyburn is repurposing Varys’s flock of little birds of his own (presumably) dastardly ends, while the sadly ineffectual trio of Jaime, Cersei, and Ser Robert Strong can’t even crash a small council meeting without clearing the entire room. Meanwhile, Tommen’s chat with the High Sparrow (weird Mother’s Day subtext aside) suggested he won’t be switching into full Lannister-revenge mode quite yet, though I find his conversion into a Lancel-like true believer unlikely.

Across the Narrow Sea, a girl finally got the training montage that allowed us to skip through several more weeks of scenes of her getting thwacked bloody—gods be good! The further she advances in her quest to serve the Many-Faced God, the greater the tension grows between what is expected of her and her reasons for entering the House of Black and White in the first place. I think the common sentiment, which I share, is that as long as Needle remains hidden in the rocks outside, there’s still hope for Arya Stark to return.

The evening’s worst storyline turned out to be the one with the most to say about the state of the bigger story thus far. Season one began with the apparent coronation of Ned Stark as the Good Guy at the heart of Game of Thrones, a man who cautioned his sons not to look away when doing their duty, however ugly—values that Jon Snow years later still clings to. Fast-forward five seasons, and now the North is being run by a man who murdered his father only to ask “Why would I trust a man who won’t honor tradition?” And by another man who can carelessly spit, “Fuck kneeling and fuck oaths.” The Eddard Stark mythology—a narrative where courage and doing the right thing are what ultimately prevail—is an old and familiar one, echoed in Bran’s words to the Three-Eyed Raven before learning of his father’s dishonesty: “I heard the story a thousand times.” But tradition and oaths and loyalty have not been the primary currency of Game of Thrones for some time now. It’s precisely why it was so nice to see Brienne and Sansa swear vows to each other in the season opener.

When Lord Umber ripped the masks off the heads of Osha and Rickon and tossed the severed head of Shaggydog onto the table, I wondered how much further still Game of Thrones would be willing to go in the coming weeks to subvert tropes it has already subverted several times, often in brutal fashion. While I still find some kind of faint hope in the south-bound travels of Sam, Gilly, and little Sam to warmer and safer climes, I’m anxious about the fact that in this season, we’ve seen more of Ramsay Bolton than we have of Daenerys (who didn’t even appear in last week’s “Home”), or Sansa, or Margaery, or Theon. Because the story of unmitigated cruelty is also one that has been told a thousand times—I trust the show to know when viewers grow tired of hearing it.

Chris, last week you and Megan discussed the show’s ever-growing fascination with excessive violence that serves no larger purpose—do you see Winterfell’s endless cycle of torture beginning once again now that Osha and Rickon are in Ramsay’s clutches? And did you feel as underwhelmed as I did by the muted reaction of the wildlings and the Night’s Watch to the resurrected Jon Snow? (Seeing your good friend risen from the dead seems like a weird time to be making penis-size jokes, but maybe that’s just me.)

We will be updating this post with entries from Christopher Orr and Spencer Kornhaber.