Ranking the episodes of Game of Thrones Season 6
By Dan Selcke
3. “The Door”
The final scene of “The Door” is among the most powerful on the show. Hodor isn’t a character fans usually give much thought—when you have a one-word vocabulary, your potential as a dramatic figure is kinda limited. But he was always there, carrying Bran over mile after mile of open countryside without complaint. He was warm and friendly and dependable, and we took it for granted that he would always be around.
“The Door” kills Hodor, but not before recontextualizing everything we thought we knew about him. He wasn’t always mentally disabled—Bran accidentally crippled his friend during a trip back in time. While he was having a vision of a Winterfell long gone, White Walkers overran the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave. Bran needed to warg into present-day Hodor to protect himself and his friends, so he projected his consciousness through space and time. In the present, Hodor bravely held the door to the cave shut so Bran and Meera could escape the rampaging wights, while in the past, a young Hodor had an unwilling vision of his own death. In one time period, Hodor dies, and in another, he’s born, and it all happens at once.
That’s all very convoluted, and the show deserves credit for making it easily understandable onscreen. In this moment, the show turns Hodor from a likable curiosity into a tragic figure, a victim who was doomed from the start, but who protected the people he cared about nonetheless. And just as it deepens Hodor’s character, it snatches him away. It’s an emotional gut punch of a sequence.
Hodor’s final moments easily take Scene-of-the-Episode honors. But even if they were cut completely, “The Door” would still have a lot to offer. The hour kicks off with a long-time-coming conversation between Sansa and Littlefinger. Here, the show proves that it didn’t throw in Sansa’s rape a season earlier for shock value—it was playing a longer game. “I can still feel it,” Sansa tells Littlefinger, stone-faced. “I don’t mean ‘in my tender heart, it still pains me so.’ I can still feel what he did, in my body, standing here, right now.” It’s a powerful moment where Sansa gets to tell her own story, and makes damn sure that everyone understands that violence has consequences.
Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys tugs on our heartstrings when she bids goodbye to Jorah for the third time in as many seasons. But this time, she forgives him first, even if she never says it, and leaves a bittersweetness in the air. Beyond the Wall, Game of Thrones builds its mythology when Bran discovers how White Walkers were created. And in Braavos, Arya takes in a performance of “The Bloody Hand,” a stage drama that is at once a parody of the show itself, a comment on how history is written by the victors, and an emotional trigger for a burgeoning assassin who, deep down, is still a young girl ripped to shreds by her father’s death. In a normal episode, any of these scenes could have been the highlight of the hour. In “The Door,” they’re excellent runner-ups.
The only scene that flops is the Kingsmoot on the Iron Islands. Yara Greyjoy is a likable character, but her stump speech to her subjects is underthought. Meanwhile, new baddie Euron Greyjoy comes off as more crass than menacing. You get the sense the writers were rushing through this bit, but the rest is Game of Thrones gold.