Hey, Darren. What if we spent this entire podcast just saying Hodor over and over again,

just Hodor is all the way down? Hodor! Exactly, with like an occasional summer thrown in there.

I'm James Hibbert, editor at large, AEW, and a few states across from me is senior writer Darren

Franich, and we're talking Game

of Thrones season six, episode five, The Door.

We're going to talk about Hodor, we're going to talk about what happened to summer, we're

talking dire wolf name fan theory, and what does it mean that Game of Thrones in its sixth season

has suddenly become a time travel show, all that and more.

Music has suddenly become a time travel show. All that and more. Okay, so let's start.

I need to gush about that terrific, heartbreaking final sequence.

We have this weird triple heart punch of we learn Hodor, where his name comes from.

First of all, this is big, huge chunk of his backstory finally explained.

We learn that Brand is actually responsible for Hodor's condition all this time.

We learn that Hodor dies, which is horrible in itself, and a very, you know, he dies

in a very heroic and awful way. And we learned that Brand was responsible for that, too. It's sort of like

all Brand's fault. And yet, Brand is also the person that Hodor cared about the most and unintentional,

but still, you know, in a large way, his responsibility.

What was your reaction to this, the ending, Darren?

Well, you know, James, to me, this is an example of how when Game of Thrones wants

to, it can just do great, you know, old-fashioned, like, filmmaking.

The great thing about that final sequence was it was accomplished by just, like, old-cutting. You know, you had like this really thrilling sequence happening in the present day. And then, you know, the whole time there was also Bran in the flashback. And it was kind of like, you know, when you're watching an episode and you're very aware that like there's four minutes left, there's three minutes left, you know something big is going to happen. So every time it would cut back to Bran kind of looking at young Hodor, you were waiting to see what was going to happen. And I was kind of like, you know, is Hodor going to get like hit in the head by something? Like, what is the Hodor origin story? The surprise here is we all had our expectations about what brand was going to see in the

past. I don't think any of us realized there was going to be a Hodor origin story. And then, you know,

...