<em>Game of Thrones</em>: All Men Must Serve
Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts in installments.
Spencer Kornhaber: “Hold the door” are the words that will render this one of the most memorable episodes in Thrones history. But a more telling phrase might be, “A servant does not ask questions,” Jaqen H’ghar’s dictum to Arya.
Hodor, the ultimate servant, was denied a lot more than the ability to ask questions. Pressed into decades of thralldom thanks to the psychic wanderings of a boy he knew back in Winterfell, the stablehand Wylis now ranks as one of the most poignant characters in Thrones history. It’s tempting to say his sacrifice at the intensely dramatic end of this episode was a noble one. But for that to be true, wouldn’t he have had to have some choice in the matter? While the realm has people who want to serve—the Briennes and Jorahs, the Crows and the Maesters—it’s also full of people denied self-determination because of larger forces.
Those forces, whether magical or manmade, can have consequences that ripple across time. The revelation that “Hodor” is really “Hold-the-door” was the last of the episode’s many examples of how the past can boomerang into the present. Some of these examples were small: Sansa confronting Littlefinger for his recklessness as yenta; Tyrion summoning a sorceress based on what he saw in Volantis; Arya watching a warped version of her family tragedy on a stage.
But there were also glimpses of much larger and more overdue reckonings. Long-festering resentments against the
