S6·E1 — The Red Woman
The hour retold
The season opens holding its breath over a body. Davos and a handful of loyalists barricade themselves in a room at Castle Black with Jon Snow’s corpse behind them and Ghost pacing the door, and the hour is careful not to promise anything — this is grief administered as siege, men defending a dead man’s privacy from the officers who killed him rather than defending a cause. At Winterfell’s edge, Sansa and Theon’s flight through the snow runs out of road exactly when it needs to, and Brienne of Tarth’s oath — sworn twice and refused twice across two seasons — is finally accepted, not with ceremony but with a girl too exhausted to keep saying no to help.
Dorne pays for its coup in the same hour it staged it. Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes murder Prince Doran, his loyal captain Areo Hotah, and Trystane Martell in quick, graceless succession, seizing a house whose entire political value depended on the patience they’ve just discarded — a promise of chaos as governance that the season will spend little further time on, because the show has already made its point: violent men and women who overthrow careful rulers rarely turn out to be careful rulers themselves. And in a chamber at Dragonstone, Melisandre unclasps the ruby at her throat in private for the first time, and the mirror answers with centuries where a young woman’s face should be — the season’s first hint that faith, in this world, may be a much stranger and older trade than anyone watching has assumed.
What happens
- Davos and the loyal few bar a door with Jon's body behind it; Ghost keeps watch.
- Sansa and Theon are run down in the snow — until Brienne's oath is finally accepted.
- In Dorne, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes murder Prince Doran, Areo Hotah, and Trystane: Dorne goes to war.
- Melisandre, alone, unclasps her necklace — and centuries look back from the mirror.
The people of the episode
Davos Seaworth — Holds a dead man's room against living traitors.
Brienne of Tarth — "I swear that I shall always keep her secrets..." Accepted, at last.
Sansa Stark — Says the oath's answer through frozen tears.
Ellaria Sand — "Weak men will never rule Dorne again."
Daenerys Targaryen — Marched to the city of the horselords as a khal's widow.The fallen — spoilers
- Prince Doran Martell — Stabbed by Ellaria in his own gardens, his guards standing down.
- Areo Hotah — The captain of the guard, a knife in the back from a Sand Snake.
- Prince Trystane Martell — Killed by his cousins aboard ship — the Martell line all but ended.