Night's Watch

Cregan Stark, adhering to the old ways, offers Larys a stark choice.

He can take the black, meaning he forfeits all titles and heads north to serve in the Night's Watch at the Wall for the rest of his life, or he can face immediate execution

And remarkably, Larys chooses execution A man who has spent his entire life squirming out of consequences finally chooses to just lay his head on the block.

It's surprising, isn't it?

It is massive.

Huge.

It's the exact same sword that Ned Stark wields in the very first episode of Game of Thrones to execute the Night's Watch deserter.

Tragically, it's the same sword later used by Ilyn Payne to execute Ned Stark himself.

Okay, so we are at the wall, and the gate is opening.

We have our three men of the Night's Watch heading out into the woods for scary, spooky shit.

Now, I'm going to start off by saying, at the very beginning of this episode, that I do think that this is a... a very good episode of television and despite what is sure to be some nitpicking here and there i do think that this episode hooked me very very easily upon my first watch um and this was uh prior to me ever reading the books, because I don't know who knows this about me or not, but I watched the show in its entirety as it was coming out without ever having read anything, and then it wasn't until, like, three, four years later that I decided to read the series, and then, you know, got angry for a whole new set of reasons.

But anyway, but yeah, so this is a really interesting kind of episode to revisit with that in mind, because obviously the first time that I watched this episode, it did a really good job of hooking me.

Anyway, back to the point I was making.

Here's kind of where we're seeing the spot where the show version and the book version kind of deviate from one another.

You have the three men of the Night's Watch talking.

Waymar is being the asshat.

That's an interesting little thought for him to have.

Um, but also obviously John wants to borrow some money to basically keep the night's watch fed.

And I love how he has no idea how they're going to pay back

this loan that they're getting

So

anyway, we get to the end and she basically begs him for his... protection.

Because, and she does this not because he is the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, but because he is Ed Stark's son, which is very interesting and probably in many ways important of what is to come toward the end of this book.

So what do we think about Jon's state of mind here? Because there's something refreshing in this in that there's a little less doom shadowing on it than a lot of his previous chapters.