He was elected the 998th lord commander of Night’s Watch after Maester Aemon cast the
The ultimate outcome of Jon’s dedication was unexpected by him and by the other knights, if not the rest of us. Stannis has to be wondering what it’s going to take to get someone, anyone, in this godforsaken castle (“the first thing I ever remember wanting,” Jon said) and dominion over Winterfell. And in she went through theīlack door, presumably to emerge at some point through the white as an ethically clear administerer of lethal justice.Īt Castle Black, meanwhile, Arya’s brother wrestles with his own identity issues and reaches the opposite conclusion, choosing his own word and enduring bastardhood over Stannis’s promise of legitimacy Which is to say, the order’s “facelessness,” an objectively awesomeĪssassin’s gimmick, would seem to refer equally to a spiritual abandonment of the self.Īrya Stark will have to let go of the things that make her Arya - the Kill List, the decimated family - which, come to think of it, maybe aren’t all that great anyway. Hunt pigeons and pull Needle on Braavosi street rats.Īfter Jaqen had seen enough, he brought her back to the House to begin her Jedi training.
Check out the framing of the shot: Arya perfectly straddling the black and white doors behind her as she ponders her options, before crossing over the dark side to Impetuously tosses her magic coin into the bay. She took solace in her Kill List, reciting the names over and over - Cersei, Walder Frey, the Mountain, Meryn Trant - as the skies opened and rained on her devotional of vengeance. “You have everywhere else to go,” he said, and shut the door. H’ghar, despite his protestations (and disguise), because names make things easier.
“I have nowhere else to go,” she said to the man we’ll continue to call Jaqen No sooner had she arrived at her destination than she was turned away from it. ‘Game of Thrones’ Finale Recap: Shocking Deaths and a Walk of ShameĪfter growing up in the gloomy North and slogging through Westeros’s muckier precincts with the Hound, she arrived in summery Braavos like a little bloodthirsty Mary Richards,.Gwendoline Christie Discusses Brienne’s Big Move on ‘Game of Thrones’.Is He Really Dead? And Where Does ‘Game of Thrones’ Stand for Season 6?.
Whatever ultimately comes to pass, Arya Stark at least got to feel the sun on her face. Of course, is that such decisions are never totally black and white at the time.
THE HOUSE OF BLACK AND WHITE GAME OF THRONES HOW TO
The histories of kingdoms, which can seem preordained in retrospect, are built from such moments, when choices about shifting loyalties or how to define values reverberate far beyond the moment of reckoning. This was an episode obsessed with duality, both intrinsic, as with young Arya, wrestling with her righteous anger, and external, as other characters wrestled with decisions that tested their mettle and challenged “Game of Thrones” returned for its second week with “House of Black and White,” a title taken from the citadel of the Faceless Men but also one that seemed to reference the polaritiesįrom the opening shot of the Titan of Braavos, straddling land and sea as in ( inaccurate) legends of the Colossus of Rhodes, Season 5, Episode 2: ‘House of Black and White’