Game of Thrones’ finale season premiered Sunday night. Find out which unlucky souls didn’t make it this time (or if everyone made it, wouldn’t that be nice).
Warning: Game of Thrones season 8 spoilers are below.
Winter has come and so will many, many deaths during the final season of Game of Thrones. How did our Westeros favorites do during the premiere? Are they all okay?
We’ll get into that below, but first… Sunday night’s premiere episode immediately answered one of our biggest questions left over from season 7, which is whether or not Jon Snow would learn of his true parentage.
Samwell Tarly revealed that juicy bit of info to Jon Snow after learning from Daenerys herself that she burned his father and brother. Sam nearly could have lost his life himself had he angrily reacted towards Dany. But instead, he emotionally ran to Jon, questioned whether Daenerys is the right leader for everyone. He then revealed Jon’s the true leader of everyone thanks to who his mommy and daddy are.
Now, even though this premiere was pretty momentous, there wasn’t a massive amount of action (Jon getting to ride his first dragon is cool and all, but we need more fire, please). The show left that for the final moments of the episode, because Game of Thrones likes to see us sweat.
In the final moments of the season premiere, we see Beric Dondarrion and Tormund Giantsbane, along with others from the wall, walk into the Last Hearth. They run into Eddison Tollett and the Night’s Watch, and they all have a humorous exchange about Tormund always having blue eyes (normally that’d be a bad thing, given White Walkers’ eyes are icy blue).
Last Hearth was one of the first big obstacles the army of the dead had to go through after penetrating the Wall, and it looks like things didn’t go so well. They discover poor little Ned Umber nailed to the wall, along with a creep circle of arms around him. Say what you will about the White Walkers, but they’ve got… style?
Last we saw Ned, Jon Snow had pardoned him for his grandfather, Greatjon Umber, delivering Rickon and Osha to the Boltons in season 7. Ned was able to escape Sansa’s wrath in season 7, as she wanted him executed for Greatjon’s actions. He survived, thanks to Jon, but he wasn’t able to survive a visit from the White Walkers.
When Tormund turns his back on little Ned, his eyes open and they’re blue. Tormund is attacked by the little boy, but Beric comes in for the save with his fiery sword. Tormund lives, and we’re really hoping he’ll get out of this safely and be back in Brienne’s arms soon enough.
Game of Thrones returns next Sunday at 8 p.m. CT on HBO.