Spoiler warning. Do not read until you have watched Game of Thrones S6E1.
Game of Thrones is back. The wait for the sixth season of this brutal, heartbreaking, disturbing, confusing and genuinely scarring television show is over, and we couldn’t be happier about it.
We pick up at the Wall, where Jon is dead. Like, super dead. You look at Jon and see a man who’s definitely absolutely not coming back. Because he’s so dead.
Ghost is really sad about how dead Jon is, and conveniently, it’s all of Jon’s friends who hear him howling first. Davos, Edd and two dudes whose previous encounters with Jon clearly weren’t exciting enough for screen time take his body to a room without really thinking about it.
They’re trapped while Alliser Thorne convinces the rest of the Night’s Watch that he did the right thing. Recognising that a fight over a completely lifeless corpse is on its way, Davos sends Edd to recruit the Wildings.
Staying in the North, Ramsay shares a moment with Myranda’s body, which ends with the Bolton bastard declaring her ‘good meat’ and having her fed to the hounds. So thoughtful.
The rest of Ramsay’s hounds are after Sansa and Theon, whose only issue after jumping off a 50-foot wall is that they’re a bit cold. The two of them wade through an ice cold river to lose the dogs, who are literally waiting for them the other side of the river.
Luckily for them, they are saved by Brienne, whose track record against Hounds – albeit not real ones – is currently at 100%. She and Pod dispatch the Bolton men, before the not quite knight offers her sword to Sansa, who’s waited five and a bit seasons to have something go her way.
It turns out Sophie Turner is spectacular at playing half commanding and half freezing to death (not one they teach you at drama school), and for the first time in maybe ever, I’m excited to see where she and Sansa go this season, and to finally see the extent of what she’s learned.
Cersei, meanwhile, has learned nothing from last season’s walk of shame. Encouraged by Jaime, she remains intent on revenge, and the death of her daughter doesn’t help matters.
It does mean that we get to hear Cersei admit that she’s terrible though. So at least there’s that.
We travel South for the episode’s obligatory horrific deaths, as Ellaria and the Sand Snakes actually get something to do in Dorne. Ellaria kills Prince Doran, because we all know the best way to avenge a man is to kill his brother, while Tyene stabs one of Westeros’s best fighters, Areo Hotah, in the back, in a metaphor for how the show has treated his character.
Meanwhile, Obara spears Trystane through the back of the face, despite Nymeria’s protests that he was hers to kill. With a whip. Apparently that’s a thing you can do.
The women are ruling in Dorne, but the mother of dragons isn’t doing a whole lot of ruling right now. Tyrion and Varys are doing their best to watch over Meereen in her stead, but Tyrion’s first gesture of good will is to offer a mother some money to eat her baby.
Varys, who speaks Valyrian because of course he does, corrects the mistake, but once that problem is dealt with, the run into a bigger one: some son of a Harpy has set their ships on fire. If only there was a way they could get to Westeros some other way. Like in the air. On the back of something maybe.
Jorah and Daario are searching for their Queen, when Jorah finds her discarded ring through the power of friendship. They summise that she was taken by the Dothraki. I guess because there’s fog.
Dany was indeed seized by the Dothraki horde, and she is whipped and abused all the way to the new Khal, who remarks that seeing a beautiful woman naked for the first time is the best thing in life. He later concedes it ‘one of the five best things in life,’ after his bloodriders say some things about horses.
Dany, who clearly understands tension and dramatic structure, allows all of this to play out; it isn’t until Moro makes his move that she reveals that she speaks Dothraki, and that she was Khal Drogo’s Khaleesi. She is spared the slave treatment, but instead banished to Vaes Dothrak, where widowed Khaleesis are sent to live out their days.
Arya isn’t having a much better time of it. Homeless and blind, she is challenged to a stick fight by the Waif. If you’re wondering how that goes for her, see: ‘Homeless and blind.’
Back at the Wall, Alliser offers Davos safe passage home in return for Jon’s body, but the Onion Knight is having none of it. After buying them some time, he reveals his back-up plan: The Red Woman.
‘You haven’t seen her do what I’ve seen her do,’ he reassures Jon’s loyalists. I’m not sure we’ve seen anything from Melisandre that convinces me she could take out half the Night’s Watch. I mean, one of her shadow babies would do it, but I’d trust Alliser Thorne to break down a door in the time she could conceive and birth one of those.
And Mel doesn’t have it in her right now. She’s lost faith in her fire god, and also she’s really, really old. She strips down for a nap, until only her magical necklace remains. When she removes that too, she stares at the reflection of a centuries-old witch, like one you might see in an old Disney film, but without any clothes on.
Of all the things I took from this, the only one that actually matters is that it serves as a timely reminder that her magic works, which could be handy in bringing somebody back to life. Probably not Jon though. He’s way too dead.
There is reason to believe that season 6 will be the fastest-moving yet, with Bran and his visions returning to the show next week, and Jon rumoured to be resurrected as soon as episode three. Also we know from the trailers that a battle at Winterfell and Tower of Joy flashbacks are coming sooner rather than later.
‘The Red Woman’ is a standard season opener – it’s mostly setting last season straight, but it’s violent and unsettling enough that it goes down as a decent episode in its own right. If this season is as insane as we’ve been led to believe, we’ll look back on this episode as a safe reintroduction to the world, but as one of the weaker episodes this season.
Game of Thrones returns to HBO and Sky Atlantic next Sunday night.
