The final season premiere of Game of Thrones had a ton of interesting interactions between characters, but none were quite as exciting as Jon’s bonding moment with Rhaegal. When Dany’s dragon shows interest in the former King of the North, Daenerys tells Jon to go for a ride with her. Naturally, Jon is reluctant to just hop on a dragon and go, but he does it anyway, and the results aren’t as disastrous as he might have imagined. In fact, Jon makes a pretty decent dragonrider when you consider that this was his first time.
And while some fans might have found it suspicious that Jon was able to mount a dragon with such ease, many of them have accepted it as a part of his Targaryen heritage. And as Inverse points out, a cut line of dialogue bolsters their arguments.
You can hear the line during an 18-minute behind-the-scenes feature about the episode. We’ve time-stamped it to the appropriate moment:
The original conversation happens after Dany and Jon’s dragon ride. “You’ve completely ruined horses for me,” Jon says. But originally, Jon had another line after that: “It almost seemed like he knew where I wanted to go.”
It’s amazing how one sentence can change the meaning of a scene so drastically, but this might do it. In George R.R. Martin’s books, it’s long been established that people with Targaryen blood have an easier time, at minimum, with handling dragons. If Rhaegal knows where Jon wanted to go, it’s another hint at his Targaryen heritage. “Only Targaryens can ride dragons, and that should be a sign for Jon,” David Benioff said during the Inside The Episode mini-doc. “It’s a major thing for when she sees they have some kind of connection to him. They allow him to be around them.”
Perhaps Daenerys realizes more than fans are giving her credit for, or perhaps she and Jon are being willfully oblivious to the signs that he’s not quite what he appears. But now that Sam has revealed the truth, the two will have to grapple with Jon’s true heritage and all the potential problems it presents.
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