Game of Thrones Episode 801: Do [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] survive their encounter with the dead?

Warning: Game of Thrones season 8, Episode 1 spoilers follow, as we’re covering the episode live.

This might sound like the start of a joke, but we promise it isn’t: Tormund Giantsbane, Beric Dondarrion, and Dolorous Edd (along with some brothers of the Night’s Watch) walk into an abandoned castle. Game of Thrones borrowed from horror in shooting this sequence, and whoo, it is not good for our heroes.

Basically, when they arrive at the Last Hearth, all they find is death. Good on Game of Thrones, by the way, for giving us a good jumpscare when it’s revealed that the steps Tormund and Beric hear are all the Night’s Watch.

Fortunately, there’s some straight horror to be found with the young Lord Umber stuck to a wall, with body parts finding the spiral. He returns to life, only for Beric to set him alight and make him scream out his death throes.

“It’s a message from the Night King,” he says just before that, and we learn that this is a race against time. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see if they make it to Winterfell before the episode wraps up. However, the episode 2 preview tells us that Tormund makes it, at the very least, in order to give Jon a warning.

You know who doesn’t show up? Everyone else who explored that castle. Not that we’ll be quite as sad if someone like Beric bites it, but we have a strong concern about Dolorous Edd. The poor man already has the worst nickname in the series.

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