Everyone on Game of Thrones is a little doomed. It’s hard to escape that when there’s a full battalion of frozen undead soldiers standing outside the walls of Winterfell. Lots of people are going to the great magical unknown — including some of your favs — and it’s probably a little late in the show’s run to go and bring anyone back to life through sorcery. It would be good to start coming to terms with that now. I’m steeling myself for Tormund’s fate. My giant, flame-haired, milk-chugging prince is a goner. I can feel it. It hurts. I’ll be ready, though.
Most of these are just gut calls and an acknowledgment that the last few episodes will need to focus on the core group of main characters. The herd needs to be trimmed. People like Tormund (no!), Theon (eh), Jorah (double eh), various members of the Watch whose names I don’t remember (not a great sign for them, or for me), and maybe Jaime (outlived his usefulness on the show) are not long for this world, I imagine. Some theories are even based on prophecy and other close-reading/watching, like what we learned when knight-in-training and legendary sex doer Podrick sang “Jenny’s Song” by the fire.
One potential death falls somewhere in between gut-feeling and prophecy, though. Maybe two deaths. Around the midpoint of the second episode, Grey Worm and Missandei had a sweet little conversation about their future, which featured statements like this.
Grey Worm, you fool. You complete idiot. I may not have read all the books to know all the various prophecies, and I may not have the bank vault mind that stores obscure facts from the show’s first seasons to be deployed later, but I have seen hundreds of action movies, and “making plans with your loved one before you do a dangerous thing” is a surefire way to get killed. That’s like Rule Number One of action movies. Come on, you two.
And it gets worse: They even invoked the beach. The beach! That’s a nail in the coffin. No character in any movie has ever used any form of “Once we do this one last job, you and I are leaving all of this in our rearview and moving to the beach to simple life” and lived to see it. And let’s be clear: This is very much a One Last Job situation. Grey Worm referenced that himself. He said, essentially, that he’s retiring once Daenerys takes the throne. After the battle. After this one last job.
Remember Heat? Remember how Robert De Niro’s character was going to move to New Zealand after his one last job? Remember how that worked out for him? How about Daniel Craig’s character in Layer Cake? Or Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way? I could list examples all day. You could, too. Grey Worm sealed his fate with his own big mouth, a truly wild turn of events for a character who typically speaks maybe six words per episode.
It’s important to note here that the doom in question might not mean the end of his life. It could be anything that ruins their beach plan, which again, will absolutely never happen. Grey Worm could die, Missandei could die, they could both die, perhaps in a “Missandei is killed and a furious Grey Worm charges headlong into a suicide mission charge to avenge her” situation. You can’t just be out here blabbering about retirement and expect to survive to enjoy it. That’s not how this works. The only way I could be more sure is if one of them had referenced getting a boat and using it to fish. No one ever gets to fish.
Of the two, though, Grey Worm is definitely the most likely to go, if only because he’ll be in the battle and Missandei will be safe in the crypt. Unless, wait…
Astute fans have noted that the famous hidden and enforced crypts of Winterfell are actually less safe than they appear to be. The Night King has the ability to turn any corpse into a member of his army. The crypts, in addition to temporarily housing scores of women and children, are lousy with corpses. Famous warrior corpses. Starks of yore. So that’s part of it.
But again, prophecies and deep knowledge of who has what powers and where bodies are buried is not necessary to know that there will be problems in the crypts. You could tell this plan was going sideways by how many people said some variation of “They’ll be safe in the crypts.” It happened four or five times. If the One Last Job thing is Rule Number One of action movies, then You’ll Be Safe Here is at least in the top five. Say it once, okay, maybe. Multiple people saying it over the course of an hour? Not so much.
The crypts are not safe. Grey Worm and Missandei will never get to retire to the beach. They all did this to themselves. If they had just shut up and said nothing, they might have had a choice to survive. But there are rules here, long-standing rules involving movies and television and the foreshadowing of doom, and you can’t just break two of them in the same episode and expect to make it out of the following episode alive.
This is why Tormund is smart. He’s addressing it all head-on and at least giving himself a chance. Please. Let me believe he has a chance. I lied earlier. I’m not ready for him to die.
