Kit Harington and the Producers on the Finale’s Shocking Ending
CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE WITHIN. GET THEE GONE, YE UNWARY
He’s dead, Jim.
It’s been four long years since A Dance With Dragons was released. Four long years since that moment at the end of Jon XIII, when his final word was “Ghost” and he never felt the fourth knife. In those years, there have been theories upon theories, all of which center around one basic idea: Jon isn’t really dead. Or if he is, he will shortly be resurrected.
Then last night happened. Benioff and Weiss didn’t equivocate. There was no mid-stabbing blackout to make us wonder if Jon would or would not survive. Olly put that knife square in his heart, and Jon fell backwards, as dead as all the Starks before him.
Of course, the first question everyone asked was, “Is he really dead?” In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Dan Weiss didn’t mince words. When asked whether Kit Harington was firmly released from his Thrones contract, he said simply, “Dead is dead.”
“We would hope that after seeing the scene and the way it’s shot that the answer to that will be unambiguous in the minds of the people watching it…It’s not an, ‘Oh what just happened scene?’”
But is he *really* dead? In a separate interview with EW, Kit Harington himself told the story of how Benioff and Weiss broke the news to him.
“I had a sit-down with Dan and David, we did the Tony Soprano walk [letting an actor know they’re being whacked]. And they said, “Look, you’re gone, it’s done.”…Quite honestly, I have never been told the future of things in this show, but this is the one time I have. They sat me down and said, “This is how it is.” If anything in the future is not like that, then I don’t know about it – it’s only in David and Dan and George’s heads. But I’ve been told I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m not coming back next season. So that’s all I can tell you, really.
No, but really? DEAD?
Harington is less sentimental now: “Jon dies,” he said with a grin. “It’s final. He’s dead.”
Kit actually seems relieved, in a way. According to his interview in Vulture, he considers the matter “pretty closed.” On the subject of his hair, always important to bring up whenever Jon Snow is involved, Harington said that he may keep it long for other roles, but is planning to shave off his beard, which might finally grant him some anonymity from people desperate to know if he’s coming back. As for what’ll happen to Jon Snow’s body, or his soul, Harington says “that’s up to ol’ Dan and Dave.”
“Trust me, I’m sad, too. But all I know is that he’s dead…When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
I feel like Kit Harington is trying to say that Jon Snow is dead, here.
And he doesn’t really blame the Night’s Watch for their actions. As far as Harington is concerned, it was Snow’s fault.
He hasn’t paid attention to the people around him. He’s only looked at the big picture this season. His major fault is a bit like Ned’s in that when trying to do the right thing he wasn’t observing the people around him…All he could really see is this impending doom by the White Walkers and doing things for the greater good, and what he was missing was Olly and [Ser Alliser] Thorne and some of the men around him. He wasn’t seeing their discontent and dealing with the smaller issues. And because of that, he’s served justice. Olly puts the last dagger in him. In that moment I think he realizes that he didn’t look after his kin, this young man, and let him down.
It’s funny—everybody is talking as though Jon Snow isn’t going to be on the show next year. As alluded to above, Jon’s death scene from A Dance with Dragons is written ambiguously. Readers can, and have, interpreted it in an enormous number of ways, a mania that George R.R. Martin has encouraged by replying to questions about why he killed Jon by saying things like, “Oh, you think he’s dead, do you?” Cheeky book-monkey. When it came time to adapt that scene for TV, however, Weiss said that he and the producers couldn’t afford to preserve that kind of ambiguity.
“In a show, everybody sees it for what it is. It’s that rule: ‘If [you] don’t see the body then they’re not really dead.’ Like when we cut Ned’s head off, we didn’t want a gory Monty Python geyser of blood, but we needed to see the blade enter his neck and cut out on the frame where the blade was mid-neck—it was longest discussion ever of where to cut a frame; two hours of talking about whether to cut at frame six or frame seven or frame eight. And that’s all by way of saying we needed Ned’s death to be totally unambiguous. I remember reading the book and going back and forth, like, ‘Did I miss something? Was [Ned] swapped out for somebody else?’ There’s a level of ambiguity because you’re not seeing something starkly represented. In the book, you can write around things to preserve a certain level of mystery that you have to commit to on screen.”
And commit to it they did. This morning, after four long years of theorizing, longtime fans who have known this was coming since 2011 found themselves staring out at the barren landscape, wondering what can possibly come next, after the last of the heroes has gone down. Meanwhile, for the first time, Unsullied everywhere scrambled to google all those theories in the hope that what they saw last night was somehow wrong, that Jon is somehow still alive, or going to be resurrected. After all, the romantic hero always lives in these kinds of stories, right?
Stannis said it true: Jon was too much like Ned, too honorable. It got the elder Stark killed. And now it’s done the same for Jon. He’s dead. And the long cold night of winter just got colder and darker.
Spoiler Alert!
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