WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS POTENTIAL SPOILERS
As always, the latest episode of Game of Thrones — “Dragonstone” — was packed with Easter Eggs and callbacks to earlier episodes. According to actor John Bradley (Sam), we were supposed to notice one Easter Egg in particular: the image of the knife in the book Sam is reading when he discovers that there’s plentiful dragonglass at Dragonstone.
As fans have noticed, that is a picture of the Valyrian steel dagger that someone tried to kill Bran with way back and season 1, before he’d awoken from his fall-induced coma. After Bran’s direwolf killed the would-be the assassin (RIP Summer), Catelyn took the dagger south to King’s Landing, where Littlefinger told her it belongs to him, but that he had lost it to Tyrion Lannister in a bet.
On the strength of this evidence, Catelyn arrested Tyrion, which then set off a chain of events that ended in total war. So in a way, that little dagger is responsible for the War of the Five Kings. Kudos, little guy.
And now it turned up in a book Sam was reading at the Citadel. As Bradley tells The Huffington Post, that’s no accident. “When we were shooting that scene, I was literally told make sure that you linger on this page,” he said. “They were shooting over my shoulder and said make sure to linger on this page. Make sure we get a good shot of this page before you turn the page over.”
It’s all part of the same universe, and all of these storylines, no matter how spread out they feel sometimes, they are a lot of the same storyline and in the equation … and if you think you saw something you probably did see something. It may not be what you thought you saw, but it just kind of feeds into this idea that [showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] have a plan, and they are playing the long game, and they are gonna plant the seeds…We’re waiting for some payoffs to all these little moments, as well. We know what they’re doing. We know that they’ve done a deliberate choice, but, I think … that’s gonna bear fruit if and when [Benioff and Weiss] decide it to.
We note that the dagger also turned up on Arya’s hip in a promotional photo for Entertainment Weekly, so it’s popping up all over the place.
Will the dagger turn up again? Last we saw it, it was in Littlefinger’s possession. Stay tuned.
Actually, that Sam scene was chock-full of Easter eggs. For example, the text on the page with the image of the dagger had some fun information about the uses to which the Valyrians put Dragonglass. Redditor rataface tirelessly copied the page to give people a better look at it.
But the juiciest Easter egg came from another page only briefly glimpsed when Sam was flipping through the book. Although we didn’t see all the text, part of it seems to imply that dragonglass may have curative properties. Once again, Reddit comes to the rescue, this time from Redditor Beastmodekait.
The pertinent phrases pop up in the bottom paragraph of the page on the left.
There are even tales of less sav…considered dragonglass as a cure for…in his great work on illnesses and dise…little harm incurs from the ingestion…not discount the harm to the gullible…better spent on practical treatments…
So it sounds like dragonglass is thought to cure something, but it may be all in people’s heads. Might the disease it’s thought to cure be greyscale? With Jorah Mormont wasting away from the disease in a quarantined cell, any kind of cure would be welcome, even an experimental one.
When asked about this particular Easter egg, Bradley deflected, but did say he was excited to be part of Jorah’s storyline. “There is a link,” he said. “There is a link that connects the characters, of course … which fans will probably be aware of. Maybe that’ll come into play later in the season, but this is one of those “when worlds collide” moments, and maybe finding a way of having an impact on stories outside of my own, outside of Samwell’s sphere of interest, yeah, it’s very exciting.”
I’m guessing that the link he’s talking about is the fact that Jorah is the son of Jeor Mormont, who was Sam’s former Lord Commander at Castle Black. And that’s great, but will Sam help Jorah with his problem? “[I]f Sam can find the right motive to do good for somebody else, then he will do it.”
Moving away from Easter eggs, Bradley also discussed the Sam-doing-disgusting-menial chores montage that’s already gained a level of infamy in the fandom. “It became something that was so horrendous and so disgusting, and I think between myself and the [director Jeremy Podeswa] and David and Dan, who came up with the idea, I think we pulled it off,” he said.
We haven’t done a montage like that before, but apart from anything else, it’s ― in terms of the plot ― kind of essential. It’s much more essential plot and character points than people think it is because you’re going to be seeing Samwell dissatisfied and disenchanted. You saw his reaction when he arrived at the Citadel and now you see what the reality is, and you start feeling for him and start feeling his frustration. This thing he invested so much time in just turns out to be an untruth. He had this idea of this place and it’s not the reality of it. That kind of dissatisfaction, disenchantment and frustration is so essential for the character at this point. It’s nice sometimes that you can do expositional and functional plot points and dress it up in this entertaining way.
“Entertaining” is one word for it.
Moving on, TV Guide talked to Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark) about a potential Stark family reunion, and he poured cold water on the party. “I think if they were ever to reunite at some point, I think it would be bittersweet,” he said. “They’ve been away for so long and they’re all very different people. Bran’s like a tree wizard, Arya’s (Maisie Williams) an assassin, Sansa’s (Sophie Turner) like very politically conniving now.”
I don’t know if any of them would really connect in the way that they used to. I don’t know, I’d be interested to see it one day.
Is Wright trolling? Teasing? Both. With Bran on his way to Winterfell, she should find out soon enough.
The next episode of Game of Thrones, “Stormborn,” airs this Sunday.
