As Game of Thrones begins its final season, we arrive back where we started when the series began all those years ago: Winterfell, the episode’s titular setting. It’s fitting for the show to return to the northern keep in such tight focus after years of expanding and world-building; the showrunners now have only six episodes to bring everything together again, and there’s no more perfect place to highlight the passage of time than Winterfell.
This episode’s symmetry with Season 1, Episode 1 highlighted how far we have come in all these years, and how changed the characters are as they reunite with friends and foes before the advance of the undead menace. Both episodes start with a brown-haired Northern boy climbing to view the army approaching Winterfell and end on Bran and Jaime.
Named after their ancestral home, the episode fittingly focused mostly on the changes among the Stark children. Bran is no longer the climbing daredevil boy, or even really Bran at all, but a time-traveling seer called the Three-Eyed Raven. Arya is no longer the little tomboy her half-brother gifts a sword he never truly expects her to use. Sansa is not the frivolous girl who once feuded with her sister and dreamed of a life of comfort. Most importantly, Jon is not the bastard son that so defined his concept of self, nor even Ned Stark’s son at all, but the rightful heir to the Targaryen’s Iron Throne.