It's easy to reduce "The Door" down to its big reveal. For all of the mysteries and unanswered questions floating around Game of Thrones, sometimes the most interesting, and most moving discoveries are the ones that fill in the gaps you didn't even realize you wanted to know about in surprising and unexpected ways.
But Hodor's tragic origin story, which is far closer and more connected to the events of the present than we ever might have imagined, is part and parcel with a larger theme that weaves through every story told in "The Door." As Mrs. Bloom pointed out, the episode is chiefly concerned with the idea of being a faithful servant, of whether it's right to question, right to advise, right to disobey, and right to expect sacrifice. Hodor is simply the most extreme example of these ideas, that fealty can come with a cost, and like many power structures in Westeros, the price paid by those on the weaker side of things becomes questionable when brought into the light.
It comes through in Arya's story, where she is slowly but surely realizing that the Faceless Men may not be the noble devotees of the right path that she thought, but instead, that they're assassins for hire, who kill people for the simple fact that they're required to do so. Or so it would seem. It's hard to know whether, like anything with the doublespeak that comes from the House of Black and White, this is just another test for Arya to pass. Yet, it seems like Jaqen H'ghar does not simply want Arya to forget who she was; he wants her to forget what she believes in, in the idea that she make wreak vengeance, but it's vengeance with a purpose, to people who deserve it, not just for bad actresses who want meatier parts.
And at the same time, the play itself shows the Game of Thrones audience what being a good servant gets you. Both Ned Stark and Tyrion Lannister served as hand to the king, and while they pushed their respective kings in directions that the ruler didn't always like, they tried to be good servants, to do what was in their king's best interests, even if it meant making some difficult choices. Where did it lead them? Ned is dead; it's implied that Joffrey plotted to have Tyrion killed during the Battle of Blackwater Bay. And they don't even have a legacy. History is written by the victors, and with the Lannisters in power, their rival Stark is potrayed as a dim-witted, power-hungry swine and Tyrion is depicted as a sniveling lecherous villain. Good servants are not necessarily rewarded.
But sometimes they get away scott free. One of the most striking scenes in "The Door" apart from the fireworks of the finale is when Sansa confronts Littlefinger about his pretensions to being her humble servant, while at the same time knowingly leading her to harm. It's a blunt, appropriately accusatory exchange, where she makes Littlefinger own up to his actions. But Sansa has a good advisor, the noble Brienne, who serves by her side and seeks to genuinely protect the lady she serves, rather than pretends to for her own ends. This is an incredibly harsh version of "goofus and gallant" where Littlefinger knowingly permitted unspeakable acts of horror to be visited upon the woman he pretended to be looking out for, while Brienne helped rescue her from those horrors. In the harsh world of Westeros, a true servant, a true protector, can help drive away the terrors of the false prophets.
Dany has a moment with her own loyal servant. Ser Jorah admits his love to her, that his devotion is not simply the professional devotion worthy of a queen, but that he has a true depth of feeling for her in her heart. There is a sense that Dany remains stoic at this news, that she initially gives no indication of returning his cares or affections. Even as she enjoys a dalliance with Daario, there has always been a sense that Dany is above romance after the death of Khal Drogo, that her mission is to rule, and that any flirtations are mere blowing off steam or means to an end.
But when Jorah reveals his affliction, her true feelings betray her. I don't mean to suggest that Dany returns Jorah's romantic love. There's multiple ways to read their scenes together, but I don't take her to feel the same way about him as he does for her. And yet, she cares deeply for Jorah, and the news that he is doomed to die from the greyscale shows her struggling to maintain her regal composure. One of the signs that Dany is meant to rule, meant to become the leader Westeros needs, is that she uses the power she has over Jorah for good. She orders him to find a cure. She is clearly gobsmacked by his revelation, and wants and needs her friend to be well. He has proven his devotion time and time again, and she uses it for his benefit rather than for hers.
That same idea is present in the other brief but still momentous revelation in the episode -- that the Children of the Forest, the same ones who seek to help Bran defeat the White Walkers, are the ones who created the very monsters that he and Jon and the rest of the rightly-worried people of Westeros are trying to fight against. The Children meant to create the White Walkers as servants, as someone meant to protect them from the men who were cutting down their trees and driving them to extinction, but clearly these snow demons lost their will to obey, whether because they were mistreated or simply chose their own path, and it led to a problem that grew and grew and threatens to consume the world.
That culminates in Hodor's last stand. The sequences leading up to it are some of the most vivid and visually impressive in the show. The eerie stillness as Bran wanders through a horde of Wights before being grabbed by the Night's King is unsettling and scary. The unnerving, stop-motion like movements of the Wights, the servants of the Night King and his horsemen, has a Jason and the Argonauts-like disquieting quality given the herky jerky way they surround the tree, descend through the ceiling, and swarm like spiders around the tunnels beneath.
And then there's poor Hodor. I've often been hesitant about unbounded magic and time travel in stories, because it can often lead to a game-breaking arms race, where the good guys can only use their overpowering spells or change the past when it suits the narrative, not when it would make sense. But this is different. When Bran, who is in in the process of absorbing the Three-Eyed Ravens' last bits of wisdom, wargs into Hodor in the past, in order to save himself in the future, he causes his companion to break into a horrific seizure in the past. Hodor's single-worded simplicity is not the product of some unfortunate accident or genetic inevitability. It is the result of a choice made by the man he serves, that turned him into a living sacrifice, without any say in the matter.
There is a price to Bran's choice, to his inexperience, to how he uses these abilities that give him the power to change the shape of events to come. He is not simply a wizard with the talents to cast the right spell at the right time. He is a conduit of forces he cannot control, and which did not only lead sweet Hodor to his death as he stood letting Meera and Bran escape from the horde of Wights who threatened to end their effort before it began, but it took Hodor's life away in the interim. Maybe Hodor was not destined for greatness as a cheerful stable boy in Winterfell. Maybe he's even a happier and more useful as an erstwhile caretaker, someone who can look after Bran and Rickon and be a force for good.
But Bran has a responsibility to him. Hodor was as good and loyal a servant as there could be, he gave his life--twice--to protect Bran, and he's tirelessly protected and ferried his young ward hither and yon in the interim. But Hodor didn't choose this. Bran turned him into a tool, into a means to an end, into another life sacrificed at the feet of a nobleman, albeit one with the potential to save the whole world. And that, I hope, is a bulwark to Bran's new magic, that he recognizes what he extracts from others when he uses these abilities, and that it mediates his ability to simply shape the past or the future.
Much of Game of Thrones is a deconstruction, and "The Door" shows the darker side of blind devotion. Many people have died in the show. Many people have died thoughtlessly, cruelly, or tragically. But few carried the pathos of Hodor, a piece of collateral damage in war in which he was a bystander. The reason that Hodor was a simple and loyal as he was is that Bran, intentionally or not, violated him, and left him as something lesser than he was or might have been.
That feels necessary when there was Wights at the door and White Walkers at The Wall. Someone has to hold the door. But there's something that feels wrong, or at least tragic about it being this stable boy who never had the chance to decide if that's what he wanted, what he believed in. He had his entire being stolen from him and then had what was left of his life given over to a ravenous fleet of demons. That is a sad, uncomfortable fate for a quiet, happy stable boy, impressed into service to the very nobleman who made him into the diminished creature he became . Sometimes sacrifices must be made. Sometimes people have to give their lives for the greater good. But when those people don't have any autonomy in those choices, when they don't even understand that the choices that are being made for them, the ways in which a master uses a servant seem all the more troubling, all the more questionable, and all the more concerning in a world where those in power extract their price from those without it, be they slaves, assassins, or simple, sweet giants.
"HOLD THE DOOR?!?!?!"
https://i.imgur.com/PCEKxwF.jpg
You're god damn right, brothah. You're god damn right... ಥ_ಥ
"I fought. I lost. Now I rest...You'll be fighting their battles forever." Stories both eschew and crave finality. A good journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but when we're truly invested in it, we don't want the ride to stop. We crave the spills, chills, and surprises. So heroes come back from the dead, siblings thought long lost reappear, and like the white walkers headed toward the gate, the story marches on.
Thorne's last words are one of the few little quotations that echo through the episode. Throne dies with his head held high, a man who knew what he was and what he did, and lays out his actions in firm but understandable terms. I never particularly cared for Throne--he always seemed to hate Jon almost irrationally--but in his bravery against the Wildling attack on Castle Black and his honest defense of his principles, he showed himself to be a man who made a choice and accepted his fate. He takes comfort in the certainty of that.
Jon is thrown into the most uncertain waters from the getgo. He arises from the dead, knowing that it shouldn't be, feeling the scars where the knives entered his body and knowing that something unnatural has happened. He has been drafted into this war, at some points making conscious actions because of what he believes in, but at others simply swept along by the current of what was required of him. Thorne tried to do what he thought was right and is hanged for it. Jon did the same and yet gets to return from the land of the dead, left to wonder if it's all worth it, if he can stand fighting these same battles over and over again, if he can suffer the betrayal, the knives piercing his flesh that seem to come in one form or another whatever he tries to do.
When he swings a blade of his own, slicing the rope keeping his betrayers in place on the makeshift gallows, it's a visual echo of deserter from Castle Black that Ned Stark executed in the beginning of the show. That opening scene, about the responsibilities of being a leader and accepting the uglier parts of the job, and of "honor" has come back in several forms over the course of the show. From Rob executing Lord Carstark, to Theon's botched execution during his reign of terror, to Jon himself having to execute a former member of the King's Guard. It's the burden of command.
But this time, Jon has to look into the eyes of a child. He has to cut that rope and see the very sort of innocent he was trying to save, resenting him to his very last breath. This is his reward for all his service and commitment. This is his reward for making the tough decisions. This is his reward for effectively giving his life in order to save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives. It's ugly and harsh and compounded by a hatred from people like Ollly who will never understand, no matter how many warm embraces from his brothers he may receive.
It's particularly harsh because, as Varys puts it, children are innocent. The Spider works his magic on a sympathizer for the sons of the harpy, and he's a presence of Machiavellian perfection. The arch manner in which he probes his resistant witness, his iron fist in the velvet glove that gets him the information he wants, is another boon from one of the show's most entertaining characters. But the futility of it all comes through in what he learns as well.
The lands that Dany liberated, the ones that made her the "breaker of chains," have not only returned to slavery, but have been funding the sons of the harpy and setting the whole of Slaver's Bay against her. Preceded, though it may be, by a hilarious seen where Tyrion tries to make conversation with his much more subdued companions, it's a dispiriting revelation. Dany too tried to do the right thing, to live by her principles and make herself worthy of being called a queen, but parts of the old system are as resilient as they are malignant, and it's exhausting to have to constantly fight to keep whatever meager gains you've managed to make.
And Dany herself is once more reduce to something less than she ought to be. She's accomplished a great deal, and yet she is just the latest victim of this cycle. She stands surrounded by women who, as the one who speaks for them all explained, once imagined that their great Khals would rule the world with their distaff counterparts at their sides. Instead, they are each left to play out the string as something lesser and compartmentalized, with Dany potentially being punished for having dared to do anything but submit. Maybe when she speaks to the council that decides her fate, she will convince them to free her, or at least to let her help them lead a horde of Dothraki to Slaver's Bay as an antidote to the Sons of the Harpy. But one could easily forgive her for, like her raven-haired counterpart at the wall, growing tired of this neverending battle, that seems to leave you back where you started no matter what you've tried to do.
They're not the only ones who end up back where they started. In a surprise reveal, we see Osha and Rickon back in Winterfell for the first time since they departed from Bran & Co. While I fear that their reappearance will be another excuse to give Ramsay a new pair of torture toys for a while, there's a similar theme running through the preceding exchange between him and the rebel bannerman who delivers the youngest Stark. He refuses to swear oaths or kneel or pledge fealty. He's seen what oaths are worth: the Boltons turning on the Starks, Ramsay turning on his father, the Carstarks joining Ramsay even though their share blood with Ned's brood. What good is an oath, whether it be a bannerman's to Ramsay or Jon Snow's to the watch, if people break them so easily. Maybe they're just a way to keep people in line, to keep them from looking out for themselves or upsettng the usual order, and those lines can only be crossed so often before people begin to wonder if they were illusory in the first place.
The High Sparrow figures out how to keep Tommen in line, another innocent child tainted by the movements of the larger forces at work, through his mother, who is facing challenges of her own with the small council. The soft machinations of the High Sparrow, seeming to constantly yield and yet simply redirecting forces like anger to his own ends, allow him to use Tommen's connections to his family to help keep him cowed. Arya is kept in line by trying to break those very connections, but trying to teach her to sever her ties with her siblings, with the names on her list, with the relationships that kept her a part of her old life. As I've said before, the montage that shows her developing her skills as an assassin is a bit too Karate Kid for my tastes, but by drinking the bowl full of poison, Arya follows her brother in accepting a dividing line between an old life and a new one and changing her manner and methods accordingly.
But those sorts of connections are the one warm thing for Jon as he returns to the living. The joking embrace of Toramund, the similar ribbing welcome of Edd, make it feel as though there was at least something for Jon to come back to. And then there's the one connection that's absent -- Sam, who is bringing Gilly and Sam Jr. back to where he started, a likely unwelcome homecoming he undertakes for the good of the people he loves and who, as Gilly conveys by calling him the father of her child, love him back. He set off on this journey to help Jon and to protect his loved ones from the rapists and criminals at Castle Black, and though his pleasant moments are punctuated by unhappy (if amusing) bouts of nausea, he knows what he has to do, and is buoyed by the affection of those he feels that familial connection to.
The same familial connection drives a young Ned Stark in the show's flashback to the Tower of Joy seen through Bran's eyes. He intends to rescue his sister, but the methods used fail to live up to the man Bran imagined his father to be. This too, is a broken oath, of sorts. Bran has heard this story a thousand times -- he knows how it's supposed to end. But instead, even honorable Ned, covers up the fact that his bannerman, Mera's father, stabbed the opposing swordsman in the back to win the day. Again, honor is shown to be a fairytale in Westeros, one where the show's only paragon of virtue this side of Brienne will invent lies in service of a more important truth. We don't get to see all the details of that truth just yet, but Bran, and the audience, are learning that there's more to the story.
And there's more to Jon's story as well. After seasons that left Jon concerned with the affairs of The Wall, whether at Castle Black or in the Wildlings' territory, he is headed elsewhere. But he remains stung by the futility of his actions, that he cannot try to serve the greater good, cannot try to live up to his father's honor, cannot even die without being pulled back into what he was trying to move on from.
Only Alliser Thorne could make it sound like a failing to have the temerity to come back from the dead, but he's right. Jon will continue the struggle; he will continue to suffer losses, and he may never have the chance to rest. He has fought these battles, many other people's battles, for so long. Who can blame him for seeing someone like Olly kicking in mid-air and deciding that he's had enough? Once, Jon pledged, like all of the Brothers, that his watch would "not end until my death." Well, he died, and now his watch has ended, and the closest thing to a traditional hero left on Game of Thrones has earned the right to go fight his own battle, to go fail again, or perhaps not even fight at all.
I’ve hated soooo many countless characters over the years, among so many shows I have watched. And I’ve been happy with the death of these hateful characters before. But I think that none of these scenes gives me as much satisfaction as Joffrey Baratheon’s death, no matter how many times I watch it, the reaction is always the same: the most genuine happiness. GO TO HELL, JOFFREY BARATHEON!
This episode is another milestone for Game of Thrones. Perfect in every detail and with one of the best and most exciting twists ever seen.
What a powerful episode! Tyrion goes through a lot here. What a shit day he must've have had. The wedding scenes were phenomenal! There are a lot of subtleties; a lot of characters are in frame for just a few seconds, yet these few seconds define them so well. And of course, that tension between Joffrey and Tyrion (and Sansa to some extend) was insane. All this, completed by the ending, make this one of my favorite episodes so far!
If you watched TBBT this was an episode that foreshadows family affairs that we already know happened. We know that a young Sheldon of 13 years discovered his father had relations with another woman and that he died when Sheldon was 14. Perhaps the time has come to know how young Sheldon will lead his life knowing this and it seems that the end of this season is hinting at problems that will begin to unfold next season. We know what the plot is coming from but I don't know if we want it to happen. I hope the series continues until Sheldon finishes college!
I love the dad. I hope he never dies on the show itself. It wouldn’t be the same without him.
George Sr is SUCH a great dad :heart:
"My mother is on Vulcan."
"My mother is on Valium."
I love that Sheldon wears a different costume in the opening credits of each episode now.
