HodorHodorHodorHodorHodorHodorHodorHodorSummer
We went from the happiest episode ofGame of Thronesever last week, to easily one of the saddest.
Plus, oh yes, the Starks lost another damn direwolf.
We get Sansa’s long-awaited face-off with Littlefinger.
Credit: HBO
She rightly rips him for selling her to a sadist.
“Would you like to hear about my wedding night?”
she asks, and plenty of viewers yell, “No!”
Littlefinger is smart enough to not argue.
He looks uncharacteristically shamefaced and uncertain.
“I made a mistake a horrible mistake,” he says.
Yet Littlefinger isn’t the only one who’s uncomfortable here.
Sansa almost looks as if she’s addressing the audience.
She’s confronting us with the rawness of her ordeal.
This means she could be able to wrangle a Tully army in her fight against the Boltons.
Actually, two bits.
He can’t resist calling Jon Snow her “half-brother.”
So he plants that tiny seed on the way out the door.
Braavos:Arya and the Waif are practicing staff fighting.
The Faceless Man enters and says he’s ready to give Arya another shot.
Her task should be exceedingly simple: Kill an actress named Lady Crane.
She’s warned not to mess it up.
Arya goes to check out her target’s play.
But nothe troupe is putting on the stage version ofGame of Thrones.
The actors tell the story of the rise and fall of King Joffrey.
At first Arya is amused, but then the play’s hillbilly version of Ned Stark comes along.
Except now Joffrey is sympathetic, Cersei is caring, Ned is ambitious, and Tyrion is sinister.
Arya notices Lady Crane drinks rum and nobody else does.
So that will be her killing technique.
Haircut, armor, the man looks like Theon again.
Theon keeps his word and firmly supports his sister Yara’s claim to the throne.
The lords appear to on the verge of electing their first female leader.
Suddenly Theon’s evil uncle Euron enters.
You’ll recall he secretly killed King Balon on that rainy bridge a couple episodes back.
Euron says his plan is to take his ships to Meereen and lure Dany to his side.
We would like to see him try that.
Euron sways the voters and is elected king.
He then has to participate in a baptism-like ceremony to honor the Iron Islands god, the Drowned God.
It would certainly make the swearing-in ceremony more compelling.
Once he realizes they escaped, he orders men to start building ships to go after them.
So basically the slowest chase scene ever has just begun.
Vaes Dothrak-Adjacent:A proper reunion now for Dany, Daario, and Ser Jorah.
Well, mainly Dany and Ser Jorah, as Daario just stands there slightly uncomfortable.
Jorah decides to reveal his greyscale to Dany, who outright weeps at his condition.
I can’t remember if we’ve actually seen Dany cry since season 1.
“Tyrion Lannister was right,” Ser Jorah declares.
“I love you.
I’ll always love you.”
Our hearts melt at that.
It’s a deeply touching exchange.
I really want them to hug, but that’s probably not a good idea.
She commands him to go hunt for a cure to his advancing disease.
In other words, he’s now forgiven, finally.
And as usual, Dany is doing exactly the right thing.
She’s given him a purpose and hope.
NEXT: Dolorous Eddis doomed
Meereen:The insurgency has paused.
Tyrion is still in the spin zone and looking for a way for Dany to get the credit.
So he summons a Red Priestess named Kinvara to help spread the word of the Dragon Queen’s greatness.
Kinvara could be Melisandre’s cousin.
She’s even wearing one of those black chokers and we wonder how old she really is.
She declares Dany is “the one who was promised.”
With Jon resurrected, Melisandre’s now thinking Jon is the Chosen One.
But now here comes along this other cocky Red Priestess who says it’s Dany.
Personally I’d bet on the girl with the dragons.
She warns him that as long as he’s Dany’s friend he has nothing to worry about.
So great, now there’s two of them.
Castle Black:Strategy meeting.
It’s like King Jon Snow’s small council meeting.
Or is it Queen Sansa Stark’s small council meeting?
The idea is to lobby various houses to try and rally them to Team Stark vs. We have an interview with Gwendoline Christie about this whole Brienne-Tormund thread we’ll post Monday morning.
Sansa sends Brienne to go to Riverrun to get the Tully’s army.
Brienne hesitates, not wanting to leave her with so many rape-y types.
Brienne smartly asks if she trusts Jon, why she lied to him.
Sansa looks like perhaps she’s not sure herself.
The place is all yours, Edd!
There’s several Bran sequences tonight and we’re going to hit all of them now.
The first has Bran warging-with-permission back in time.
Way, way back to the creation of the Night’s King.
The Children of the Forest were battling with the First Men.
But the experiment apparently misfired when the Night’s King rebelled and created his own army of dead wights.
Pulled out of his vision, Bran is annoyed at Leafit’s their fault for creating these monsters.
But Leaf points out that humans shouldn’t have attacked them in the first place.
Later, it’s the middle of the night, the Raven is asleep and Bran is bored.
He reaches over to the tree.
He takes an unauthorized trip and discovers the army of the dead.
He’s there with hundreds of thousands of wights.
He walks through them.
He should stop, but he doesn’t.
It’s like he’s playing a video game and is just about to kill a level Boss.
He reaches the Night’s King, who looks straight at him.
Bran turns and sees all the undead are looking at him, too.
It’s an extremely creepy shot.
Suddenly the Night’s King grabs him.
Run Bran, the phone call is coming from inside the house!
Bran wakes with a scream, the King left his mark on his arm.
Meera and Hodor are excited at potential post-cave breakfast options when Meera’s breath turns coldthey’re here.
Meera needs Bran to warg into Hodor and get him to carry him out.
Summer attacks wights and gets killed too.
We’ll come back to that.
The Raven gets killed in the cave and turns into a fragmented black cloud in Bran’s vision.
Leaf uses a grenade to take out a bunch of swarming wights, and herself, like Vasquez inAliens.
Meera springs into action, grabs a dragonglass tip spear, and kills a White Walker.
Meanwhile Bran and the Raven are still in his vision and about to seriously mess with the space-time continuum.
Meera and Bran get to The Door… yes… Hodor shuts it just in time to keep the wights in.
Meera screams that he’s got to hold the door.
The Raven tells Bran he should listen to his friend.
Bran locks eyes with young Hodor, a.k.a.
Wylis, who can suddenly see him, too.
Wylis has a seizure as Bran commands him to hold the door.
What happens next is awful, and thrilling, and revelatory, and so very tragic.
Wylis in the past starts repeating “hold the door.”
His screaming gradually becomes …
Which is horrible enough.
But then what happens next makes it so much worse.
The wights start stabbing Hodor to death with their skeletal fingers.
Hodor is being killed.
How much did the Raven know, exactly?
Or is “fault” the wrong word to use here?
So is this a tragedy?
And now Bran is being pulled by Meera through the snow.
What will they do next?
As for Summer … there’s a theory out there that all the direwolf names are prophetic.
I never put much stock in that, but it’s edging closer to being convincing.
Summer was killed by the demons of winter (winter is coming, and so goes Summer).
Jon was brought back to life (he’s like a Ghost).
Robb and his army blew down south, or blew out (like a Grey Wind).
Welcome to the party, Jack.
MORE:Gwendoline Christie discusses thatTormund crush.
And now a trivia question for a Hodor T-shirt from the HBO Store.
(Previous winners ineligible, send your guess to gotpodcast@ew.com).
