Callbacks and Easter Eggs in “The Spoils of War”

Welcome to the wide world of Game of Thrones Easter Eggs and callbacks. As usual, the latest episode — “The Spoils of War” — was packed full of them. Let’s take a closer look.

Let’s start with the image at the top of the post, since Arya’s fight with Brienne was full of callbacks to other people Arya’s encountered on her journey. The most obvious were Jaqen H’ghar — Arya made that explicit when Brienne asked her who taught her her techniques and she replied “No One” — and Syrio Forel, the swordsman who taught her how to water dance way back in season 1.

"Now we will begin the dance. Remember, child, this is not the iron dance of Westeros we are learning, the knight’s dance, hacking and hammering, no. This is the bravo’s dance, the water dance, swift and sudden."

That about sums it up.

"[S7] Arya vs Syrio(gif), student becomes the master. from gameofthrones"

The parallel goes deeper than that. In Arya’s first scene with Syrio, Ned Stark watched the pair fight. Although he seemed glad his daughter was enjoying herself at first, his expression turned grim when he started to remember battles he’d been in — he basically had the Westerosi equivalent of a Vietnam flashback. Similarly, Sansa watched Arya and Brienne fight from the ramparts of Winterfell, her expression also growing dour, although her motives are less easily discernible.

"[EVERYTHING] Another cool throwback I noticed in the last episode from gameofthrones"

Mashable put a bow on all of this with this neat little video, which also points out how Arya was using techniques she picked up during her travels with the Hound during her sparring match.

Let’s move on to Dragonstone, where Jon Snow showed Daenerys a series of paintings made by the Children of the Forest in an attempt to convince her to team up to fight the White Walkers. Dany said she would…if Jon bent the knee to her. He was reluctant. Dany argued that bending the knee was in the best interests of his people. “Isn’t their survival more important than your pride?”

This must have hit Jon especially hard, because it’s the exact same thing he asked Mance Rayder back in “The Wars to Come,” when he was trying to convince the King Beyond the Wall to bend the knee to Stannis.

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Since season 2, Jon has been slowly absorbing the freedom-at-all-costs ethos of the wildlings. Even as King in the North, he still may be a member of the Free Folk at heart.

Sticking with the cave painting scene, we noticed something interesting about the rendering of the White Walkers.

First of all, the Children of the Forest could stand to take an art class. But seriously, take a close look at this. We’ve got three White Walkers int he back and one in the front. The one in the front has a horns on his forehead, something we’ve only ever seen from one other White Walker: the Night King.

All the other White Walkers — both the other ones we’ve met and the other ones in the drawing — have smooth foreheads. Horns not included.

So is the horned White Walker in the cave painting the Night King? And if so, why does he have a beard?

Did he shave sometime in the next thousand years? Is this a different Night King entirely? Maybe “Night King” is less of a name and more of a title that gets passed down from White Walker to White Walker. Or maybe horns are just a trait that White Walkers occasionally have, and it’s just a coincidence that we’ve only ever seen them on the Night King. Food for thought, this stuff.

Outside of the cave, fans noticed that Davos is still representing for Stannis Baratheon, the One True King of Grammar.

Okay, let’s move on to that episode-ending action sequence. The ghost of Robert Baratheon reared its head when the Dothraki smashed the Lannister army. Remember what he said to Cersei way back in “The Wolf and the Lion”:

Robert may have been a lousy king, but he was a great warrior, and his warning was borne out here.

The Dothraki probably would have defeated the Lannisters on their own, but add in the dragons and it was a rout. It seems like only yesterday when Drogon could barely manage to roast a thumbnail-sized piece of meat, to say nothing of an army.

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There were a lot of callbacks involving Jaime, too. For one, fans noticed that he’s learned how to use his golden hand a lot more effectively over the past couple of years.

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But the most important callback for Jaime was emotional. This video from Shahan Reviews explains exactly why he felt he needed to charge and kill Daenerys at the end, even if it meant his death.

We know that Daenerys has a lot of good qualities, but to the guy who killed her father to keep him from murdering thousands of innocent people, she just looks like more of the same.

One more Jaime thing: lots of people have noticed that the shot of Jaime sinking into the lake looks a lot like the shot of Bran falling off the Broken Tower after Jaime pushed him way back in the pilot. So there’s a weird kind of justice at work here.

Also, this isn’t really a callback, but YouTube’s own Nerdwriter1 put together a cool video analyzing how the Loot Train Attack (that’s what the big dragon battle is called — just accept it) borrows from other war scenes in other movies.

Finally, let’s circle back to the Arya-Brienne scene, where Redditor GrennsGal noticed something creepy.

Around 0:13, Arya points out to Brienne that she “swore to serve both my mother’s daughters.” At that moment, a woman in a long green dress with long auburn hair walks by in the background.

Between the dress and the hair, the woman resembles Catelyn Stark, Arya and Sansa’s mother. This moment may be unintentional, but it’s an eerie little touch that becomes even weirder when you consider what happens to Cat in the books.

Next: HBO releases official photos from “Eastwatch”

What other callbacks and Easter Eggs did you see? Let us know!

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