GAME OF THRONES (S8E1) “Winterfell”: We Meet Again

After almost two years, Game of Thrones, the possible last TV show we may ever watch together is finally back. First impressions and last impressions are, more often than not, what matters most for the reputations of a television series. Game of Thrones solidified itself in Season 1 as a brutal and uncompromising vision of a dark medieval world with its opening season by killing of its central character (Ned Stark) and ripping our expectations of happy endings and character redemptions apart piece by piece by giving us something much more upsetting, and surprisingly in that sense, much more genuine and respectable.

Since the fourth season, however, the show has seemed content with splitting further and further away from the trajectories calculated through George R.R. Martin’s notes and trudged along towards a more conventional path. It makes sense in a way. Audiences can only bear so much heartbreak in a show that featured possibly even more deaths of beloved characters than the two shows it owes the most to, The Wire and The Sopranos.

Family Reuinions

The final season of the show is where Game of Thrones can solidify the expectations of high-budget television hereafter. Much like how The Sopranos invented the 21st-century “prestige TV show”, Game of Thrones has set the bar in storytelling and world-building for upcoming series’ like Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show and Disney+’s The Mandalorian. I somewhat expected the show, after an extended absence from American viewers’ lives, to come out with more of an explosion. Instead, the first episode of the final season, titled “Winterfell”, was content with merely laying the groundwork for possible things to come.

In a sense, “Winterfell” was a giant series of family reunions. Characters giving warm (Arya & Jon) and cold (Sansa & Daenerys) stare, reminding each other of the events of past seasons, and in the case of Sam Tarly, both receiving and delivering bombshells of information that will certainly cause ripple effects for the following episodes. The most underrated and sneakily best reunion was between Theon and Yara. It lasted less than a minute and was treated like a throwaway, but Theon’s completion of his character arc, as someone who finally regains his courage from being physically and psychologically shattered, and rescues his sister as he said he would, is perhaps the biggest comeback in the entire show’s history. In a year of great redemptions, I felt this one deserved a little more screentime.

Sometimes family reunions bring skeletons with them, as is the case with the Stark children. We have to understand this is a family which has gone through more devastation than any other in the show. Having their parents brutally murdered by the Lannisters and having been psychologically and physically tortured by their allies, the Starks are more suspicious and resentful of everyone than ever before. Yet, their regain of power has allowed them leverage to rebuild connections even as they keep their friends at arms distance. Sansa is especially careful. She spends the episode both brooding over Daenerys’s true intentions and condescending Tyrion for his mighty fall from grace.

“I used to think you were the most brilliant man I’d ever met”. – Sansa to Tyrion

Terrors and Truths

Aside from the chit-chat and verbal swordplay, there were three events in the episode of real consequence for the future. In a scene where I and many others I assume absolutely expected someone to horrifically die onscreen, Beric and Tormund sneak around Last Hearth, a stronghold of House Umber. After a few jumpscares where allies nearly mistake allies for the wights (Tormund delivers a hilarious “I’ve always had blue eyes!”), they come upon the most disturbing imagery in the show since House Bolton’s flayed enemies were set on display in the Winterfell courtyard in Season 6.

The young lord Ed Umber, who sheepishly asks Sansa for more horses at the beginning of the episode, is seen impaled in the center of a Death Swirl (the Whitewalker insignia) made up of the severed limbs of House Umber knights. The symbol is one of much discussions among fans. Mance remarks in Season 7 that the White Walkers were “always the artists”. Their creativity in using the dead to make large designs may be a metaphor for something, or it may simply be the Night King asserting that the world of Westeros is naught but a plaything for him. He is the artist, the dead his muses.

Death is perhaps the single biggest connection between characters in the show. They experience it together as the Starks do, or they cause it, as Danaerys does to Sam Tarly’s father and brother. After Sam is devastated by the news, he is tasked by Bran to finally tell Jon Snow the truth of his blood lineage. The reveal of Jon Snow as no longer a “Stark” by virtue of his father being Rhaegar Targaryen is a sort of death for the Stark family.

Of the two children who the Starks took on between Theon and Jon, the latter was treated and behaved much more like an empathetic member of a grieving family that was consistently losing power and receiving humiliation throughout the show. The ripple effects of Jon’s history will certainly sow seeds of contempt between Sansa and Daenerys both of whom passive-aggressively scheme to keep the majority of Jon’s loyalty and affection to themselves. The news clearly devastates Jon, who realizes not only that his entire history with the Starks has changed in context, but the danger his Targaryen blood puts him in. With the news of being an heir, Jon is now the biggest target for the Night King. Oh, the fact that he had an incestuous relationship with his aunt (and that she is potentially pregnant) might be a bit of a problem as well.

Coming Up Next

Speaking of incest… the final shot of the show is the perfect union of prestige TV meets soap opera. While the several reunions of characters and the reconciliation with past events are what characterizes the entire episode, the final reunion takes the cake with how far it reaches back… all the way to the beginning of the show. When Jaime Lannister steps off his horse and sees Bran, who is basically Westeros’s version of Sauron’s Eye but on the good side, he realizes that his relationship with Cersei, and the result of their subsequent child Joffrey, is most certainly going to have its grand reveal to all parties soon. Where this carries his relationship with his brother Tyrion, how he fits into Winterfell, a place which absolutely wants him dead, and how he reconciles with slaying Daenerys’s father The Mad King Aerys II, will provide for endless family drama surely to fill up the rest of the season.

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Game of Thrones airs on Sundays on HBO.