Game of Thrones, Season 6: Why the death of Jon Snow matters even more now that he’s alive

The biggest cliffhanger in the show’s history has been resolved – but it flouts the rules that it set out from the start
Guess who's back: Jon Snow has been brought back to life on Game of Thrones - but at what cost?
HBO
Ben Travis3 May 2016

In the run-up to Game of Thrones’ return, there was one question that mattered more than any other: is Jon Snow really dead?

The Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch was the latest casualty of George RR Martin’s killing quill – another name to be unexpectedly crossed off the list of the show’s major characters.

Something was different this time, though – where the triple murder of the Red Wedding was a huge shock for those who always considered the Stark family to be Game of Thrones’ central players, that bloodbath had a significant role in the overall story, ending the war between the Starks and the Lannisters, and pushing the focus of the series in a new direction.

In the case of Jon Snow, there was a reason why people expected him to come back – his story felt like unfinished business, incomplete as opposed to cut short. Snow’s trajectory was a dramatic one, from bastard son of a murdered Lord to the leader of humanity’s first line of defence against the huge army of marauding corpses making its way down Westeros. Surely he couldn’t be out of the picture before the ice-blue corpses even turned up?

Still, as it was in A Dance With Dragons, Snow met a sticky end in the closing minutes of Season 5 as his men betrayed him and left him to bleed out in the crisp white snow of Castle Black.

By the end of Season 6 Episode 2, fans had their answer to that looming conundrum: Jon Snow was dead, but now he’s alive again thanks to the meddling magicks of Melisandre, overcoming her shaken faith in the Lord of Light to breathe some life back into Harington’s buff corpse.

It’s hard not to feel conflicted about the decision. On the one hand, it’s a good move that Snow is back – his untimely end would have gone down as one of the show’s biggest shocks, but also maybe as one of its biggest anti-climaxes – between his still-unaccounted-for true lineage and his upcoming role to play in the war on the dead, there’s a lot left to come from him.

Fate decided: see how Kit Harington reacted to the latest twist in Jon Snow's story
HBO

It’s good, too, that Snow’s revival has come in the early episodes of the season. To be honest, many of us saw his return coming – especially considering Kit Harington was seen on set in Belfast and didn’t get his long shaggy hair-do (which he notably dislikes) lopped off. Fair play to showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss for just getting on with the damn thing instead of making us all wait until the final episodes.

But while it’s exciting, it’s also hard not to feel that one of the fundamental rules of the show, one that’s given it such power in the past, has been broken – that stomach-churning sense of finality and consequences, that what’s done can’t be undone. The gut-punch of Ned Stark’s beheading, the Red Wedding, Joffrey’s poisoning, Oberyn’s skull-crushing, was that these players were knocked out of the game for good – their time was up, their story was over, and the rest of the world had to move on without them.

Game of Thrones: Season 6

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In bringing Snow back, the show seems to have acknowledged that some individual characters matter more than the rules of mortality – and that some are simply too important to die.

It does make sense that the person this happened to was Jon Snow – there’s an obvious symmetry of him being the ying to the Night’s King’s yang, both now undead leaders who will inevitably come to blows in the coming seasons. And there’s the shared symbolism of Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, whose dragons will surely play a key role in the war against the dead, as the Ice and Fire of the title of George RR Martin’s book series.

HBO

What’s really important will be making Jon Snow’s death matter – rather than just coming back and getting on with the usual business, there has to be a cost.

It’s something that’s been done with varying degrees of success in other series. When Buffy was ripped back from the underworld by her friends, it offered emotionally complex storylines. The Cali cheerleader came out of the ground a different person, apathetic and anxious about telling her BFFs that she’d actually found some kind of peace – and that they’d taken her away from it.

Then there was Fred’s gut-wrenchingly sad death in Angel – her character immediately reborn as demonic ‘Old One’ Illyria. Actress Amy Acker was still the one gracing our screens, but aside from the odd trace of memory or emotional response, the sweet and charming scientist was gone. The shell remained, but Fred really had been lost.

Speaking of Lost, John Locke’s death also worked well – his mortal demise and spiritual return as the corporeal form of the Man in Black kicked the show’s mythical elements up a gear, connecting its lofty philosophical themes to the complex castaways we’d come to know.

When there’s no consequence, it makes for frustrating viewing –many of the underwhelming events in recent season of Doctor Who have arisen from get-out-of-jail-free cards that immediately lower the stakes. The entire Series 6 story arc, leading up to Matt Smith’s Doctor supposedly being forever-killed by an astronaut in a lake, was simply not intriguing – because we know Doctor Who can’t exist without the Doctor. Rather than feeling clever or satisfying, the reveal that it was actually the mechanical Teselecta that was shot landed with a whimper, not a bang.

Perhaps Jon Snow’s return will be something like the miraculous reappearance of Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica. When Kara Thrace came back, she was still the same hard-drinking, hard-talking pilot as before, but imbued with a new spiritual sixth sense that led the rest of the fleet to their end-game. Despite the bungled final explanation of who or what the new Kara was, her death and revival served to develop her character and drive the series forward.

Still, at least it sounds like George RR Martin is of a similar train of thought. In a 2011 interview, he spoke about the importance of death being “a transformative experience”.

“My characters who come back from death are worse for wear,” he explained. “In some ways, they're not even the same characters anymore. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they've lost something.”

After becoming HBO’s biggest ever show, Game of Thrones’ next biggest challenge is making Jon Snow’s return feel like a brave new chapter for the character rather than a cheap back-pedal – and if they can’t pull it off, the show might have transformed for the worse.

Sky Atlantic, Monday, 9pm

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