“What Is Dead May Never Die”
April 15th, 2012
“They are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.”
This central idea has been at the heart of Game of Thrones from the very beginning: the children we’ve come to know, and the younger characters who jostle for power, do not know the true struggles of both the actual winter (starvation, struggle) and the metaphorical winter (war, bloodshed) that await them in the future.
Unfortunately, almost all of these characters have been faced with this reality sooner than they anticipated, pushing characters like Sansa and Arya Stark, Theon Greyjoy, and Renly Baratheon into positions where they must reconcile their fears and insecurities with a path they might not have chosen if not for the circumstances. Their struggles, however, must remain largely personal: while Theon Greyjoy might struggle to decide between his two families, for example, he has no one on the Iron Islands to talk to but a single flame and a piece of parchment. When he chooses to burn what he’s written, he makes his decision by isolating himself and accepting that this is his burden to bear as his father’s son.
“What Is Dead May Never Die” is about exploring these kinds of relationships, and exploring really is the right word: although partnerships both begin and end in the episode, other scenes are more about the complicated politics of those partnerships as winter approaches. While the show is still at the point where plot remains on the backburner, the pieces moving into place no longer seem motivated by the whims of the script; characters are taking greater agency in this environment, and the result is a strong thematic piece which lays some important groundwork for characters both new and old.
Cultural Learnings 