Game of Thrones 6x2 'Home': What is Lost, and What is Returned

Game of Thrones 6x2 returns to roots of home and family to explore what's been lost. And dramatically remind us what can come back.

Reviewed while telling people who aren't caught up to avoid the spoilers of spoilers! Also while listening to araabMUZIK's Summertime Sadness and a Jono McCleery remix.

Guys. Seriously. Spoilers.

There is a theory, a basic idea, in the postmodern field of Sociology, claiming that ‘Empire’ is not a nation-state that controls lands, or any human invention at all. Empire is instead a universal order that has no boundaries or limits. It is ‘total,’ an external force, that bends humanity in the familiar ways of inequality and suppression, simply taking different forms over time. Post-Marxist or not, let's buy this theory for the time being.

That force is what took away Winterfell from the Starks. It’s what killed Ned, and sparked a war that has caused a realm of diaspora. The High Sparrow tells Jaime that his followers have no names, no family. In a world where name and family can determine whether your home is a castle, a hut, or the grave, for so many to be without those things is the ‘empire’ force exerting itself upon the world of Westeros and Essos, the latter of which has reinstituted slavery in Danaerys’ absence.

‘Home’ knows where it’s going. It knows where to begin, and where to end, and what to show along the way. The episode opens with a flashback to Winterfell in peak joy, because this really was the source of the world’s boundaries and structures collapsing. Once the Lannisters imposed themselves on the Starks, everyone became enveloped in chaos. The episode then proceeds to examine just how viscerally and mercilessly any sense of home has been destroyed by those in power since. Bran is pulled from the image of his father and uncle and aunt as children, in a happy Winterfell, and placed back into his broken body in a distant cave who, like Meera, is far from home and left with little or no family. And her disconnect from him shows how their friendship is just another casualty of that force. Dany doesn’t show up at all, and her dragons are left without a mother. They have shelter, and are free of their bonds, thanks to a new showing of bravery from Tyrion's dragon-whispering. But they don't go outside once freed. For they have nowhere to go. Is Tyrion himself much different from them at present? He was effectively disowned by his family, and now he’s lost even his brother. He’s an Ex-pat. He’s a wanderer. He is free, but homeless.

Then there’s Sansa and Theon. One knows her sister is alive, but lost as well. Sansa now seeks Castle Black, where she believes her brother to still be alive (We’ll get to that later). Family, home, locked in one man, Jon Snow. But she has been taken from it, and must journey and return to it. As must Theon, who has officially redeemed himself. It seems unlikely Book Theon will follow the same kind of salvation, and it's another nod to the show taking a complex character and giving some sympathetic weight to him. I care about Theon now. I cheer for Theon to make it back to the Iron Islands. To be home again. His sister, Yara, could use him anyway. She’s effectively disowned by her father, then literally orphaned by a batshit crazy uncle (Euron is also the first interesting Ironborn character sans Theon or Yara EVER. He actually owned his stage. Or bridge, or whatever). Her name as a Greyjoy no longer gives her shelter, and her family is gone. All she is now, potentially, is a woman without power, at the whims of a madman.

Speaking of madmen, Ramsay Bolton. Except he’s not a man. He’s a corrosive upon the soul of humanity, a vessel of malice and utter evil. A mad dog. Say what you will about Roose Bolton, but you could comprehend his humanity. You understood what he was doing, and he was no fool. He was a tyrant, a tool of that external force. But Ramsay’s betrayal, in all its forms, was something far, far worse. Credit to the show and its writers, after five seasons of such evil and cruelty, even just by Ramsay himself, they prove there’s still a way to surprise us, to truly shock and break us. It was not Ramsay stabbing his father in an embrace. That was to be expected. And it wasn't even really Ramsay killing Walda and a newborn son. It was the manner of which Ramsay killed them. Not with blood or physical torture. He didn’t cut the prick off the baby. He simply, and calmly, fed them to hounds. In his own way, he has evolved to a new form of darkness. What I said last week has only been accentuated. Ramsay is the absolute antithesis of purity. If empire is a force, and it has agents in the world, then Ramsay the Bastard is its vanguard.

And behind him stand the Karstarks, the not so subtle plot devices to emphasize the metaphor of the wheel turning. Death begetting death begetting death. Lannisters killed Karstarks in battle, Karstarks murdered Lannister sons who had nothing to do with it, Robb Stark executed the Karstarks responsible, and the Karstarks turned on Robb. They’ve been so ground by the wheel of death that they are no longer truly autonomous. Perpetual death has removed them from something to be understood. They have no will, no ties to humanity itself. They are only mad dogs, liege to the most despicable fictional character in quite some time. If the concept of home implies agency, independence, and having something to hold on to as your own, then the Karstarks are a smaller and more evil example of being homeless.

Ramsay is the staunchest example of an external force turning the wheel of death and suffering, and his literal residence in the husk of what was Winterfell emphasizes the episode’s main point of displacement. Against that scene of a baby being fed to dogs, how can one viewer hope? We must now return to the High Sparrow, and his simple words: 'Every one of us is poor and powerless. But together, we can overthrow an empire.' The resistance to empire is the will to be against. The will to end the cycle of violence and death. The will to question truths fed by power-mongering monarchs and vindictive warriors and… well, mad dogs. And then to assert one’s autonomy against the mad dogs’ tyrannical reign.

Will is everything. When we are bound together, when we unite and not kill, we can defeat the that which tries to divide us. The powers that be, the Boltons and Eurons and slavers and, yes, still, the Lannisters, who seem to be sort of an afterthought these days compared to the tension in non-King’s Landing sequences. The will to endure the long journey home. Brienne’s unwavering will saved Sansa and Theon. Yara’s almost saved her brother before, and it may save her in the future fight for the Iron Throne. Tyrion’s will to face the most extreme example of his own mortality in facing the dragons has probably begun the turnaround for said dragons and hope for Mereen. And let’s not foget, as ‘Home’ did, the will of Dany, and Jorah and Daario.

And it’s Davos’ will that lays the greatest foundation. Jon is dead, Alliser Thorne is a traitorous, remarkable asshole who is somehow not dead (Good for you, Edd, taking the high road!!). The Freefolk have lost the man who was their main safeguard this side of the wall. And Melisandre is hopeless. Her home was so strongly her faith that its removal when Stannis died withered her. It was hard once to imagine a broken Red Woman. Yet here we are. This is what homelessness does to one. We are left feeling powerless and exposed, wilted against that great external force. We may never know who her family is, or her true name. But we know she is alone, and shattered. Where ‘Home’ begins with a Stark Winterfell, it ends with an old woman sitting by a hearth in a freezing winter, with nothing left to shelter her. That’s why the world needs Davos’ purity. He doesn’t care about Seven Gods, Drowned Gods, or ‘tree Gods,’ as he says. He cares about what’s right. About restoring life, and hope, to the world. He rebuilt the walls of a home for Melisandre, and likely the freefolk and the Night’s Watch as well. All in one dead man.

Oh and probably the world. For with his convincing of Melisandre to help, we have seen the resurrection of hope. Hope that the foundations will hold, that those without name or family may yet still be sheltered from the embodiment of the wheel of death in the White Walkers. We have seen what we knew deep down was going to happen all along. Home restored.

Jon Snow, alive.

Grade: A

When I got sidetracked

-I was actually nervous there for a minute in that last scene. Not that he wouldn't come back. But that he'd go into the Wolf or something. Which just wouldn't work narratively for me.

-The Freefolk are officially dubbed the WUN WUN CLAN!!

-I feel the need to remind people that Iwan Rheon is a fine actor and a perfectly lovely human being. Let's not forget that.

-'I'm a friend of your mother's.' Not the best statement by Tyrion, innuendo-wise. 'I want to help... Don't eat the Help.' Better.

-After Ramsay's unfathomable shittness, the next scene is Brienne asking 'What happened at Winterfell?'... *Silence*

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