Things get tricky once you start time-traveling. Of course, that means that the way everything transpired was the way it was always supposed to go down. As Bran flees into the frozen wasteland, he must deal with the fact that not only did his most loyal companion just die (presumably) to save him, but that Bran, in a convoluted sense, doomed Hodor to his simpleton life by recklessly vision-questing on his own and drawing the White Walkers to the magical cave. (There were also shades of “The Matrix,” the hordes breaching the barricades as our hero refuses to snap out of his alternate reality.) Ready or not, the Raven told Bran, you’re me now.Īnd he’s definitely not ready. The Night’s King was the Darth Vader to the Three-Eyed Raven’s Obi Wan Kenobi, striking him down and accelerating Bran’s Jedi time-traveling warg training. We saw what that got them on Sunday, as their former creations returned to rampage through the magical tree cave, butchering forest-children and yet another direwolf. The most crucial bit of back story, of course, was the revelation that the odd little Children of the Forest were the ones who invented White Walkers in the first place, as weapons against humanity. (Do we think that guy’s still in that box in King’s Landing?) But the past, too, was on the minds of many of the characters, whether it was Sansa finally confronting Littlefinger over abandoning her to Ramsay Arya enduring a skewed theatrical version of her father’s execution Jorah finally proclaiming his longstanding love for Dany or even Varys treating Kinvara with the scorn he reserves for magical posers, thanks to his mutilation by a sorcerer, until the priestess chilled him by recounting the details of his abuse. The White Walker attack provided a tense and terrifying end to an episode largely devoted to setting up future events.