S6·E2 — Home
The hour retold
Bran’s education under the Three-Eyed Raven takes him somewhere the season has been circling for years: a younger, whole Winterfell, where a stableboy named Wylis speaks in full sentences and answers to nothing like the name the world will later give him. It is a small, devastating preview of a larger reveal the season is not ready to cash yet, and the show lets the visit sit unexplained, a mystery stacked on a mystery. At Castle Black, the wildlings simply walk the mutineers’ garrison down without a fight — Tormund and Wun Wun make a persuasive argument out of numbers alone — and the men who murdered their Lord Commander are marched to the cells to wait for a judge who, unbeknownst to them, may not stay dead.
On Pyke, the Iron Islands settle an old grudge the way they settle everything — with iron. Balon Greyjoy meets the brother he exiled on a rope bridge in a gale, and only one man walks off it; Euron Greyjoy returns from his long absence claiming the storm itself as kinship, and the show gives him exactly one entrance to establish he is the season’s strangest and most dangerous new player. And at Castle Black, Melisandre — faithless, out of options, trying a spell she does not believe will work — washes a dead man’s body and prays without conviction, and Ghost stirs, and Jon Snow gasps back into a story that was not supposed to have room for him anymore. The show underplays the miracle almost to a fault: no triumphant music, just a man breathing air that shouldn’t be his to breathe.
What happens
- Bran, training with the Three-Eyed Raven, walks in a Winterfell where Hodor was Wylis and could speak.
- The wildlings take Castle Black without a fight; the mutineers go to the cells.
- Balon Greyjoy meets his brother Euron on a rope bridge in a storm — and only one walks off.
- Melisandre, faithless, tries one old spell. Ghost stirs. Jon Snow breathes.
The people of the episode
Jon Snow — Gasps awake on the table, remembering nothing after the knives.
Melisandre — Washed a corpse and whispered a prayer she no longer believed.
Bran Stark — The past is a place he can visit now. It will cost him.
Ramsay Bolton — A stepmother, a baby brother, and hungry hounds: heirs resolved.
Euron Greyjoy — "I am the storm, brother."The fallen — spoilers
- Balon Greyjoy — Last of the five kings, thrown from his own bridge by the brother he exiled.
- Roose Bolton — Warden of the North, hugged onto his bastard's dagger — as he taught him.
- Walda Frey & her newborn son — Fed to Ramsay's hounds within the hour of the boy's birth.