If Bran Is Cut: No More Hodoring

Yesterday, we were stunned to learn that Hodor and Meera were telling papers that they would not be appearing in Season 5. My first–rather slow witted thought–was to picture Bran, underground, communing with the Weir tree he met at the end of last season all by himself.

But over the course of the last day, what started out as “Hodor and Meera are not back for Season 5” has morphed into “Hodor and Bran aren’t back for Season 5.”

HBO and the Game of Thrones production are refusing to comment at this time, so we don’t have confirmation-confirmation (yet.) But one look at Isaac Wright’s twitter account shows he is no where near Croatia (unlike his Stark siblings.) Instead, last I checked, he’s on holiday in Venice. If I had a Magic 8 Ball, it would tell me signs look good this will be confirmed, if not today, then soon.

As for why we may very well be without Bran and Hodor this season, let’s talk spoilers from the books.

As you can see by this infographic, Bran’s story through Seasons 2 and 3 has been running a good book ahead of everyone else. If redditer Joel Geddert, who originally came up with it is so kind to update it in the off season, one would see that Bran’s story in season four actually tracked heavily into book 5, A Dance with Dragons. They didn’t track all the way through the story–instead they padded it out with Craster’s Keep. But there is a sense we need to pause Bran’s story in order for the rest of the series to catch up.

Though we may not have finished Bran’s ADWD story last season, we did get through a fair piece. I would say we got through all the parts that are easy to translate from page to screen. From here on out, Bran becomes one with the Weir Tree under the earth. With the guidance of the Greenseer, he becomes, for lack of a better phrase, BranTree. The rest of his companions basically hang out cold, hungry and miserable, while Bran disappears into vision after vision, traveling from Tree to Raven to Wolf to Tree.

Visions have been a difficulty for the show from the beginning. Many of the “vision” sequences that characters have were straight out cut. They did this partly for time, and partly because the producers didn’t want to commit to visions of the future that would dictate how scenes down the line would need to look. Our future-casting on screen has been limited to an abandoned roofless Red Keep in the snow, trees, ravens, dragons and some B-roll footage shots of The Face of Ned Stark. If the show was looking to expland on these images, Bran’s inner warging life would be the time and the place to go for it.

I was eager to get to that too. Many of the “TV Show Only” people I know are confused by the fact that I see Bran as this main character. To them, he’s a side story, and a dull one at that. The warging of Bran into Hodor to create BRANDOR is the only part that seems to resonate, perhaps because the character they seem most attached to in Bran’s party is the gentle giant. I was hoping, when we got to these visions, Bran’s main role in the series would become more clear, and the show would find a way to give him the prominence in the series he holds in the books. (After all, in the books, at this point he has been one of the through line POVs since the very beginning.)

I didn’t like Bran being left out of book 4, A Feast For Crows. (Heck, I didn’t like anyone being left out of AFFC. It smacked too much of when The Wheel of Time went off the rails.) The whole point of the Great Merging Of The Books this coming season is due to those who were left out of AFFC. So many main protagonists were given the novel off, it was simply impossible to film straight page-to-screen. (Seriously, can you imagine if Peter Dinklage or Dany and her dragons just never showed up this season? There would be nerd riots.) But it seems to be the case that, as best as the producer’s intentions have been, they can’t manage to keep everyone in every season after all.

I’ve seen suggestions in the comments–which strike me as good ones–that we won’t “see” Bran per se. There will be no “under the earth” scenes with him and his new Ent-like pal. But we may find characters communing with Weir trees–think Ned Stark back in the very first season, praying to the Old Gods. There are others who are ripe to find themselves in similar positions this coming season. Instead of the face being just an odd tree face made of carvings and knots, we’ll look into it’s “eyes” and know it’s Bran listen. Or they’ll touch the tree and have visions that correspond to the ones Bran had last season–maybe even expand on them. We don’t know if that will be the case, but if it turns out these rumors are true, and Bran and Friends have the year off, I hope this is how the show plans to handle it.

• Published on 09/04/2014 at 3:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:40 PM CDT