The HBO series grappled with issues of faith in multiple
plotlines
The erstwhile star of Game of Thrones—insofar as the sweeping ensemble
show can be said to have a star—was only back for a few moments before he was
walking around and greeting the assembled Castle Black soldiers. Some of them,
naturally, had been critically involved in killing him, but all of them, it
seemed, had something to say about Jon’s unnatural reappearance. “Is that still
you in there?” asked one. “I think so,” said Snow. “Hold off on burning my body
for now.
This rejoinder, as close to a Bruce Willis action-movie
comeback as dialogue in Westeros gets, indicates a slightly more amped-up
approach to storytelling around Snow than last week’s too-methodical-by-half resurrection sequence might have implied. Indeed,
Davos and Melisandre had left the room before Snow’s sudden jump back
to life last week; this week, they were right by his side as he swiftly became
reacquainted with his surroundings, and the stakes of an ongoing story of which
he’d only missed a very small part.
The episode, which also featured a lengthy sequence between
King Tommen and the High Sparrow that played up the religious leader’s gifts
for manipulation, showed glimmers of real ideas around the spiritual aspects of
Snow’s comeback. “The Lord let you come back for a reason,” said Melisandre,
the priestess who ended last week’s episode apparently convinced that the Lord
would not let Jon Snow come back at all. “Stannis was not the prince that was
promised, but someone has to be.” Melisandre staked her credibility and many
other people’s lives on the idea that Stannis was the standard-bearer for her
faith; having failed, she’s grasping at straws to explain the world to herself. Someone has
to be the leader she was promised, right?
Unfortunately, it seems as though that leader will not,
right now, be Jon, who ended the episode not merely by executing several of the
conspirators against him but then by stalking away from Castle Black, declaring
“My watch is ended.” Snow saw nothing in the afterlife (if one exists in
Westeros); he recalls nothing between his death and his resurrection. And, most
crucially, he seems, having been brought back, to believe in nothing.
It’s not that anyone expected that Jon Snow wouldn’t come
back from the dead, or that we had previously believed a return from the dead
for any character was outside the show’s rules. But Snow’s turn toward
nihilism, in his first moments back, was a bit of a surprise. The show Snow
appears on believes that practically anything is possible; Snow, right now,
wants as little to do with any of it as he can get away with. The deal the show
made with its viewers by creating a world in which such fundamental laws of
storytelling as “the finality of death” can be broken would seem to be that a
resurrection would be meaningful. Right now, it means a little more than
itself, but only a little.
It’d be a bit silly to assume that Snow’s state of mind in
the moments following his resurrection will be his through the end of the
series; it was as easy to guess he’d come back as it is to predict he’ll find
motivation beyond revenge to carry him toward the show’s endgame. But, with all
respect to the potential arc that Snow is to work through in the weeks ahead,
that will hopefully come soon. Seasons’ worth of an increasingly deadening Arya
storyline have apparently failed to impress upon the showrunners that angry
disaffection has its limits as a character trait.
But he has jokes, or something like them. “You shouldn’t be
alive! It’s not right!,” one of Snow’s prisoners, hanging from his noose, says
moments before his death. They’re his last words, but he’s not allowed to have
the last word: “Neither was killing me,” Snow says. His comeback from the dead
was the most-talked-about event of the year so far on TV. His comebacks in
conversation? They feel imported from another show, one with a great deal less
to say.
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