All roads lead to Jon Snow
All his connections merged in Sunday’s Game of Thrones
Spoiler alert: This story contains huge details from Sunday’s episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones.
So, TV’s most-asked question has finally been answered!
A haircut from Red Priestess Melisandre — combined with hair burning, body washing and a mystical incantation (the Castle Black rejuvenating spa treatment, perhaps?) — makes Jon Snow feel like a new man in Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones. Talk about a super cut.
And this revival — nearly a year in the making after Jon (Kit Harington) was killed in last season’s finale — came about because of earlier bonds forged by the Night’s Watch lord commander.
Only the efforts of Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), who saw promise in the young commander during an earlier meeting; a few Night’s Watch loyalists and wildlings led by Tormund Giants-bane (Kristofer Hivju), who began working with Jon after some difficult times, stopped the Night’s Watch traitors who had stabbed Jon from taking his dead body.
In the best tradition of 20/20 hindsight — or perhaps a Bran Stark vision of the past — we look back at a March 2015 interview with Harington to search for any relevant comments about the character and what they might mean for Thrones’ story.
In that interview, conducted before the beginning of Season 5, Harington talked about the development of the relationship between Jon and Melisandre (Carice van Houten).
At the end of Season 4, “We set it up with them seeing each other through the fire. She’s always proclaimed her interest in the bastard-born children of royalty, which essentially is what Jon Snow is,” he said. “We’ve always known there’s something special about Jon Snow. She’s instantly fascinated by Jon Snow.”
Asked which characters he would like Jon Snow to meet, Harington made an intriguing suggestion — his own, not one from the writers’ — long before Jon’s death and revival.
“I’ve had some scenes with some of the ones I really wanted, like Arya and Tyrion. I really would like Jon to meet Daenerys. I’d like him to interact with that whole part of the story and see how he reacted to her and her dominance,” he said.
Harington acknowledged fan interest in Jon Snow, the bastard son of the late Ned Stark.
Many wonder about his parentage — an unanswered and significant question.
“There’s a mystery about him, (including) who his mother is. There’s something about him people want to know more about,” he said.
Although Jon Snow’s return from the dead may give fans hope for the future of the character, Harington assumed Jon’s dour manner when asked about the character’s future — although he could have been contemplating his then-upcoming demise at the hands of his Night’s Watch brothers.
“I don’t have hope for many brighter moments for Jon Snow. I think his brightest, happiest moments were when he was cocooned in that cave with Ygritte. There’s certain bits of that time that were happy for him. He’s not naturally a happy person. He doesn’t smile a lot,” he said. Whether a second chance at life changes his perspective remains to be seen.
At the time, Harington acknowledged that any character can die on Thrones, offering the actor’s main hope in the face of what may be inevitable: “You want a good death.”
Having a death where you get to come back to life would seem to fulfil that request.