Game Of Thrones: Arya Just Moved Up In The Death Pool

Last night’s premiere of Game of Thrones Season 7 started off with a bang. Turns out Westeros’ littlest stealth assassin wasn’t content with feeding Walder Frey a pie made of his sons’ corpses and cutting the nonagenarian’s throat. Arya wiped out the entirety of House Frey in one fell swoop, by posing as Lord Walder and serving everyone poisoned wine.

In the moment, it’s hard not to relish Arya’s badassery in extracting her brutal revenge. Turning to the late Lord Frey’s tween bride, she flatly intones, “When anyone asks you what happened here, tell them the North remembers. Tell them winter came for House Frey.” Then, she strides out of the hall, sporting a tiny smirk reminiscent of the one that flitted across Sansa’s lips after watching Ramsay Bolton get his face eaten off.

The opening moments of “Dragonstone” provide another heaping helping of the delicious vengeance that made the final two episodes of Season 6 an experience to savor. But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and like many indulgences, Arya’s over-the-top brutality doesn’t sit well after a few minutes.

There is something horrific, excessive, even hypocritical about Arya’s actions in the opening moments of “Dragonstone.” In disguise, she mocks the Freys for their “bravery” in murdering a pregnant woman and a mother of five, but is cutting the throat of a cowardly old man and poisoning all his relatives somehow more noble? With Lord Walder dead, it didn’t seem like House Frey would have been a factor in the upcoming war, anyway.

Wiping out an entire house, even one known to be packed to the rafters with mercenary chickenshits like House Frey, contrasts sharply with the actions taken later in the episode by her brother Jon, now King in the North. Despite Sansa’s objections, Jon refuses to punish the heirs to House Umber and House Karstark, which betrayed the Starks by supporting Ramsay Bolton in the Battle of the Bastards. “I will not punish a son for his father’s sins, and I will not take a family home away from a family it has belonged to for centuries,” he says.

While Sansa may be right in thinking Jon naive, he shows mercy where Arya does not. For Arya, the sins of the father are to be paid in blood, by anyone unlucky enough to have been born a Frey. Even if she never sees any kind of comeuppance for this massacre, if Jon finds out he’d be horrified, and it’s easy to imagine this incident coming between them eventually. A voiceover from Sansa in the second Season 7 trailer says “the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.” It may turn out that Arya becomes the “lone wolf” cast out from the rest of the Stark pack and left to fend for herself.

Arya’s actions also cast her in a pretty dark light relative to her former traveling companion, The Hound. During the Season 7 premiere, Sandor’s hit with remorse for his callous treatment of a peasant man and his daughter. (The Hound and Arya stay in their home during Season 4; Sandor repays the kindness by stealing the man’s small savings. “They’ll both be dead come winter,” he tells a horrified Arya as they leave.) The Hound’s becoming a better man, more aware of the cost of killing and the value of human life, while the youngest Stark sister's becoming more hateful and bloodthirsty.

Of course, moral revulsion alone won’t increase Arya’s odds of dying in Season 7 or 8, though alienating the people closest to her certainly would. Jon’s not going to be a fan of her plan to take out Cersei all by herself, and Arya’s not going to like feeling hemmed in at Winterfell. We’ve already discussed our skepticism that we’ll see a Stark reunion in Season 7, and it seems even less likely in the aftermath of the bloody rampage at The Twins. What’s more, the teaser for the second episode of the season suggests Arya will reunite with her direwolf, Nymeria, perhaps enticing her to continue making progress through her kill list. But the longer Arya plays the lone wolf, the higher her risk of ending up dead.

It’s not yet clear if Arya will pay the ultimate price for her murderous showboating at The Twins, but we hope she attempts to redeem herself before her number comes up in Game of Thrones death roulette.

Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO.