<em>Game of Thrones</em>: What Is Dead May Never Die
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.
Christopher Orr: And thus ends the most emphatic, if never particularly persuasive, effort to deny a widely foreseen plot development in television history. Forgive me if I sound judgmental. But I find the never-ending claims by the Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss that Jon Snow was definitively dead—and their clear mandate that everyone else involved comply with said claims—more than a touch obnoxious now that those claims have been revealed to be untrue.
There’s maintaining appropriate suspense, and then there’s flat-out dishonesty, and I think that this falls on the wrong side of that line. Maybe there’s some as-yet-unknown narrative trapdoor—he’s not really Jon Snow, but a reincarnation of Ned Stark!—but even if so, it will likely be a depends on what the meaning of is is level distinction.
In my preview of the season, I expressed concern that Benioff and Weiss might struggle now that they’ve (mostly) passed George R. R. Martin’s novels and are thus working without a narrative safety net. And while I don’t want to read too much into just two episodes, the evidence to date has not reassured me.
Begin with Jon’s resurrection. All signs pointed to its failure: Melisandre had never performed this magic before; her faith is at an all-time low ebb; last episode’s Big Reveal suggested her . Perhaps this effort might fail but a future one would succeed? (A , maybe?) Instead we got the annoying bait and switch of followed by gasping life-breaths. I for the year in .
