John Bradley as Samwell Tarly and Jim Broadbent as Archmaester Ebrose – Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO
5. Sam will find something interesting in a book
It looks like Sam’s function this season is to basically serve as a repository of knowledge. It makes sense, of course, because he’s in the Citadel in Oldtown. What else is he going to do? Well, that answer now includes “cure greyscale,” apparently. Since Archmaester Ebrose gave him a bunch of old books, and he already found the dragonglass deposit at Dragonstone in a book, it’s pretty reasonable to expect that his new job of copying old books will lead to him happening upon something else as well. It might not necessarily happen in episode 4, but then again, Sam has gotten quite a lot of screentime. We’d expect it to happen sooner rather than later.
Spoilers follow:
Word on the street is that that something entails evidence that Jon Snow is not actually a bastard at all, and that his real parents were married, based on Gilly reading it aloud. In “The Queen’s Justice,” the Archmaester does mention that the books Sam has to copy out have mites in them and are damaged. Why wouldn’t he bring the less damaged ones to his rooms with Gilly and let her practice her reading skills?
Those same spoilers also got the bulk of one of Cersei’s scenes from “The Queen’s Justice” correct, which lends some credence to the idea that they’ve gotten this plot point right as well.