“Nothing’s happening.” It’s a complaint Game of Thrones viewers make every year during the first three or four episodes of the season. There’s so much set-up and characters explaining what they’re going to do, with actually doing it, and no one ever gets to the fireworks factory. Well, in tonight’s devastating and season-best episode, “The Door,” Bran and Hodor finally arrived.
Unfortunately, so did the Night’s King and his army of wights.
Bran, having been stuck in a tree for seemingly forever (and peeved that he didn’t get to see the remainder of the Tower of the Joy origin story), makes a curious and colossal mistake by making contact with the Night’s King, last seen in “Hardhome,” during a vision. Oops. Now the wights are able to enter the cave where he’s hiding with Meera, Hodor, the Three-Eyed Raven, and Children of the Forest. (We learned in season four that the frozen bad guys are forbidden from entering the cave, thanks to some convenient magic from the Children — if they try, poof.) Before long, the cave is crawling with wights, and Leaf sacrifices herself to save Bran, Meera, and Hodor. But that’s not where the desolation ends: the Three-Eyed Raven and Summer (!!!) are killed, and we learn that Wylis became Hodor when Bran warged into the gentle giant, causing him to have a seizure and scream “hold the door.”
Hold the door… Hodor. R.I.P. (probably? You never know with this show.)
When someone asks you to hold the door…. #GameOfThrones pic.twitter.com/1fatMi4Bah
— Jon Snow (@LordSnow) May 23, 2016
So, yeah, things happened. We’ll have more tomorrow (including why the White Walkers breaking through matters in Westeros). Until then:
We need some levity in a time like this.
