Game of Thrones: All Men Must Serve

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.

Spencer Kornhaber: “Hold the door” are the words that will render this one of the most memorable episodes in Thrones history. But a more telling phrase might be “A servant does not ask questions,” Jaqen H’ghar’s dictum to Arya.

Hodor, the ultimate servant, was denied a lot more than the ability to ask questions. Pressed into decades of thralldom thanks to the psychic wanderings of the boy of a boy he knew back in Winterfell, the stablehand Wylis now ranks as one of the mosts poignant characters in Thrones history. It’s tempting to say his sacrifice at the intensely dramatic end of this episode was a noble one. But for that to be true, wouldn’t he have had to have had some choice in the matter? While the realm has people who want to serve—the Briennes and Jorahs, the Crows and the Maesters—it is also full of people denied self-determination because of larger forces.

Those forces, whether magical or manmade, can have consequences ripple across time. The revelation that “Hodor” is really “Hold-the-door” was the last of the episode’s many examples of how the past can boomerang into into the present. Some of these examples were small: Sansa confronting Littlefinger for his recklessness as yenta; Tyrion summoning a sorceress based on what he saw in Volantis; Arya watching a warped version of her family tragedy on a stage.

But there were also glimpses of much larger and more overdue reckonings. Long-festering resentments against the rest of Westeros may steer the Ironborn toward Essos. The history of the North may determine the loyalties in the coming war between Starks and Boltons. And mankind’s ancient aggressions, it turns out, caused the invention of the superweapon that is the White Walkers—a neat allegory for any number of potentially apocalyptic problems facing the real world today.

All this stitching together of past and present resulted in an unusually satisfying episode, one that offered crucial context and invited viewers to game out the story’s future. The siblings Greyjoy are on the lam while the rest of the Iron Islanders work toward becoming one of the pinchers that may eventually clamp down on King’s Landing. Brienne was sent to do what she does best—move across the map—so as to bring the Tullys back into the mix. And while the outcome of Arya’s assassination homework is unknown, watching her get smacked up by her young Faceless rival was weirdly heartening because it hinted that she, too, will be soon be more than proficient in the exquisite art of karate.

Also heartening: Dany, when bidding farewell to her scaly Ser Jorah, reaffirmed her intention to pursue the Iron Throne. But how long is it going to take for her to get there? On one level, it’s fun to see the Lord of Light’s minion show up in Meereen because it makes for another intersection of far-flung storylines. But everything else about this new Red Lady screams plot drag. Why exactly does Tyrion need sorceresses for a propaganda campaign? We’ve seen the dangers of trying to harness religion for political means, both with Stannis’s disastrous campaign and with Cersei’s. This time, Varys’s distaste for magic may be the crucial power check needed, but then again, the priestess seemed to enchant him pretty easily with details of his childhood trauma.

The most tantalizing plotline is Sansa and Jon’s efforts to unite the North to take Winterfell, which promises the kind of politicking the show excels at and the good ole’ good-vs.-evil conflict it rarely offers. In other words... be very, very worried. The last storyline like this was Robb marching against the Lannisters. The North and everyone else remembers what happened next.

It shouldn’t go unmentioned that the battle at the great tree felled a number of strong and frequently silent servants in addition to Hodor: Summer the Direwolf, Leaf the Child, and Max von Sydow’s unnamed character, who was dispatched in much the same slashing motion as his unnamed character in The Force Awakens was. Lenika, Chris, let me know whether you thought these characters got proper sendoffs—and whether you felt sparks from this bona fide ice-and-fire event.

Entries from Lenika Cruz and Christopher Orr to come.