Don't Close The Door Just Yet

Game of Thrones's sixth season quite literally blew us away in flaming green fireball, and the death of Kristian Nairn's Hodor was quite the talking point. We are only just beginning the long "winter" until Season 7 of #HBO's epic returns, but the sixth season may be worth a rewatch for more than just a refresher course.

The use of #EasterEggs may be more common in your average superhero movie, but #GameofThrones actress Ellie Kendrick's cryptic interview suggests that fans are missing something from that Hodor scene!

The scene in question came in Season 6's fifth episode, "The Door," and saw Kendrick's Meera escape into the wilderness with Bran Stark. We can never look at the "hold the door" button in an elevator in the same way, but perhaps we were too busy absorbed in Hodor's death to notice everything that was going on. Kendrick recently teased:

"It still boggles my mind...because there are so many different layers that are going on with the time travel, backwards and forwards. So I think that scene could do with a few watches and there's so many different theories about what is going on there."

There is no denying that the Hodor death scene played with us emotionally, we recently voted out most emotional fictional death of 2016, so what (if anything) could we have missed?

The Voices In Your Head

"The Door" was the first time that we saw the real ramifications of what Bran's powers can do moving forward, while Meera was sadly instrumental in the breaking of Hodor as "hold the door" echoed in both the past and the present. We have already seen Bran seemingly call out to the younger version of his father outside The Tower of Joy, and it looks like his cries didn't go unheard then either.

If turning Hodor into a lumbering mound of mashed potato wasn't enough, there is a wild theory that Bran could actually set the entire Ice and Fire saga into motion. We may have seen relatively little of Aerys Targaryen a.k.a. Daenerys's daddy, but we do know that he intended to burn all of King's Landing with wildfire, well, that was before Jaime Lannister put a sword in his back.

The so-called "Mad King" Aerys was reportedly driven insane by voices in his head and chants of "burn them all." Hmmm, where does that sound familiar? Given the Hodor scene, and the recently depleted stockpile of wildfire under King's Landing, it could point to someone meddling with timelines to try and stop the onslaught of White Walkers.

We already saw Max von Sydow's Three-Eyed Raven warn Bran that there could be dire consequences, suggesting that he too screwed up in the past, or could foresee Bran's monstrous f*ck up (again). There is also that prevalent rumor that Bran becomes the Three-Eyed Raven, meaning that the entire Hodor scene Bran interacting with his future self. A crippled Bran being amalgamated into becoming Von Sydow's man in a tree certainly makes sense.

Bran's visions have flipped between the past and the present, but his little montage did predict the blowing up of the King's Landing sept in the Season 6 finale, so we know that they aren't just there for show. Other eagle-eyed viewers noticed the way in which Bran's visions have been cut together could mean they are connected, moving from Aerys to White Walkers.

Visions aside, he won't be having many more unless Meera can get Bran the hell out of there and back to his siblings at Winterfell. According to Kendrick, It looks like Season 7 will continue the Meera and Bran road trip:

"She's always been kind of Bran's protector...and now she's in a stage where we see them leaving that cave that she hates so much and going out in the wilderness. So whatever happens, a huge challenge awaits them. They don't even have Benjen anymore. So we'll just have to see — the challenge for Meera is how is she gonna get this kid to safety? And so seeing that journey we'll be exciting. We'll have to wait and see!"

Given that Meera is a relatively minor character, does she really know what is lying ahead? However, with Kendrick's scenes almost exclusively tied to Isaac Hempstead Wright's Bran, she could be about to be thrust into the GoT limelight. We will undoubtedly explore more of Bran's time-travelling warging in the show's final two seasons, but seriously, this kid needs to watch The Butterfly Effect.