You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Slate Game of Thrones podcast. Today we are going to be discussing season eight, episode one, Winterfell.

Joining me is Dan Koyce, who is an editor at Slate. Dan, hello.

Hey, guys. And June Thomas, who is the senior managing producer of a podcast here. Hello, June.

Hello, Sam. All right. Let's start right off. It's been almost a year and a half since the last time we saw Game of Thrones and we returned to Winterfell on the episode title, which at HBO kept from us until 10 p.m. last night. So suspenseful and then so boring as Just Winterfell. But what do we make of this episode? Just Winterfell.

The new episode of Game of Thrones.

The things I liked about it were all the things that were sort of callbacks to the premiere,

like everyone gathering at Winterfell and all these people getting together and even like a kid climbing a tree, for God's sake.

There were like all these fun callbacks to that pilot. And also some

limb art by the artists of the White Walkers. Right. We also had that in season one.

Scattered on the snow in the premiere and then someone also got pinned to a tree in the pilot,

if I recall correctly. So those were all fun. And I liked seeing all the various, the remaining starks greed each other in various

touching or creepy ways in the case of brand.

But wasn't that, I was a bit disappointed by that.

I mean, I know that there would be impossible to meet expectations.

But after all that time, some of them so long and so many traumas, and then it was like, hey, how you doing?

Like, I don't, again, like, we're stuck with the emoting capacities of these actors, but I was expecting a few more fireworks than what we got.

Right. I mean, you're sort of stuck, Willa Pin in her review for Slate kind of ranked and wrote down some of the major reunions that I don't even think she kind of mentioned all of them because they're just too many, but she had 10.

And that is a lot.

And you can't have 10 overwrought emotional reunions in the same, you know, 50-odd minutes of television because it's just too much.

So some of them inevitably get kind of short shrift. Yeah. And it's just like, hey, it's up. It depends which one is the one that matters to you. The one that mattered to me was John Snow and Aria. And that one I thought paid off very nicely. That was my favorite scene in the episode. I think those two meeting after Aria had been, as Sonsa says,

skulking around Winterfell, but seeing those two get together and their hug and him sort of

...