Alliser Thorne
Master-at-arms at Castle Black, a bitter, hard-handed old knight who fought for the losing side in the rebellion and has hated soft southron boys ever since.
A soul born at The Crownlands, sworn to The Night's Watch.
The fuller tale
Season Four
In The Watchers on the Wall ÔÇö Wrong about everything except how to hold a gate.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Hanged at Castle Black (S6┬ÀE3)
First Ranger, mutineer, and Jon Snow's oldest enemy at the Wall ÔÇö he led the knives 'for the Watch' and hanged for it when Jon rose again. He went to the rope unbowed: 'I fought, I lost. Now I rest.'
In the show he finishes what he started. Leading the mutineers, he puts a knife in Jon SnowÔÇÖs heart beside the sign that reads traitor, holds Castle Black against Davos and the loyalists, and loses when the free folk arrive with a giant. When Jon returns from the dead, his first and last act as Lord Commander is the sentence: Thorne hangs beside Olly and the other mutineers, and goes to the rope with his spine straight ÔÇö he fought, he lost, now he rests, and heÔÇÖd do it all again. Jon cuts the ropes down himself and leaves the Watch with the bodies.
In the published books he is alive, so far as anyone knows ÔÇö dispatched beyond the Wall on a ranging by the Lord Commander he loathed, and not yet returned when the knives came out at Castle Black. Whether Jon meant the mission as employment or exile is left for the reader to weigh; Thorne himself suspected the latter, loudly.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Book-Thorne is a pettier creature with a smaller part. He duels Jon with insults rather than conspiracies, and his great humiliation is an embassy: sent to KingÔÇÖs Landing with a wightÔÇÖs severed hand to prove the dead are rising, he waits so long for an audience that the hand rots to bone, and Tyrion laughs the WatchÔÇÖs evidence out of court ÔÇö a scene that quietly explains why the realm never came to help. By the time of JonÔÇÖs command, the books have shipped him off to Eastwatch and then out on a ranging from which he has not returned; he has no part in the mutiny, whose knives belong to Bowen Marsh and the stewards. The show fused Thorne with that conspiracy to give JonÔÇÖs murder a familiar face ÔÇö dramatically efficient, and a real change: the booksÔÇÖ betrayal comes from the WatchÔÇÖs cautious middle, not its old grudge.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.