‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8, Episode 5, “The Bells”: 5 Clues and Easter Eggs You May Have Missed

While Green Bay Packers fans are still fighting over when and where quarterback Aaron Rodgers pops up in Game of Thrones “The Bells,” we can confirm that he is indeed in the episode. In HBO’s super-sized behind-the-scenes look at the episode, The Game Revealed, we get a quick interview with the football star. The good news? He did a good deed in the middle of all the mayhem last night. According to him, he helps an injured woman before deciding it’s every man, woman, and pale horse for themselves.

(Also, based on his costume there, it doesn’t look like the fans have identified him…yet.)

Way back — oh, five weeks ago? — when Game of Thrones Season 8 premiered, we broke down the brand new opening credits and surmised that the showrunners had something spectacular planned for the never-before-seen spiral staircase in the Red Keep. Last night we discovered that those stairs would be the setting for the much-hyped “Cleganebowl,” but we also learned that basically all of the King’s Landing animation was foreshadowing Cersei’s fall.

Think about it. The first “new” part of King’s Landing are the North Gates, which are totaled by Drogon’s fire. It’s the place where the Stark and Targaryen forces easily defeat the Golden Company and manage to breach the city. Then, we see the staircase and the map room — which are destroyed by Drogon, and where Qyburn and the Cleganes fall. Finally, we go down to where the skulls of all the dead dragons are kept…and that’s of course where Cersei and Jaime perish.

The opening credits weren’t showing off the strength of King’s Landing, but the key pressure points of its destruction. Next week’s opening credits will probably have reduced these shots to rubble and ash.

When Game of Thrones wants to show us a great big battle, the showrunners turn to one director: Miguel Sapochnik. He brought us “Hardhome,” “The Long Night,” and “The Battle of the Bastards.” For last night’s battle, Sapochnik went back to his own work on the show to make a point about the mental state of our heroes. Namely that they were, in his words, there “for blood.”

To accomplish this, he set up shots that framed the Golden Company under the leadership of Harry Strickland (Marc Rissman) in the same way he shot Jon Snow and his ragtag coalition of Northerners and Wildlings. Not only do we see Strickland staring down Jon’s forces in the same way Jon looked on at Ramsay’s, but as everything falls apart for the Golden Company, Strickland is left on his feet, with the Dothraki rampaging toward him, in a panicked and doomed retread of Jon Snow’s epic hero pose against the Bolton calvary.

The message: the good guys are no longer the good guys. This battle was going to make villains out of our heroes, and you best be prepared.

At the end of Game of Thrones “The Bells,” we watch Arya Stark struggle through the mayhem on the city streets. It’s not just that Dothraki, Unsullied, and Northmen are committing atrocities, but the city is burning to ash. Since 2001, the natural impulse for creators and viewers dealing with scenes like this is to draw a harrowing parallel to the horrors of September 11, 2001. However, as The Game Revealed points out, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss went further back in history for their inspiration: the bombing of Dresden.

The 1945 bombing of Dresden is one of those late World War II events that’s mired in controversy. Allied forces rained fire on the German city, basically destroying centuries of architecture and killing an estimated 25,000 people. The photos taken during the event show mountains of rubble and, worse, piles upon piles of charred remains.

When you look at these photos, the correlation becomes clear, as does the thematic message of the Battle of King’s Landing: again, war makes villains of our heroes.

Last night’s episode of Game of Thrones ends with a rather on the nose poetic image. Bloodied and coated in ash, Arya Stark comes to and discovers that King’s Landing has been transformed into a smoldering city of death. The kind people who saved her earlier are nothing more than charred skeletons holding onto each other in their final moments.

Arya then sees one other survivor: a pale horse.

In the Bible, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is Death and Death rides a pale, or ashen, horse. As Arya rides this horse out of King’s Landing, it may be foreshadowing that the girl who has devoted her life to standing up to Death might have been transformed into Death itself. Perhaps she’s on a mission now to kill Daenerys.

It could also be an eerily beautiful moment about the possibility of life to endure in the midst of death and destruction. You know, just a moment of haunting calm after all that horror.

We’ll have to wait until the final episode of Game of Thrones to find out if Arya Stark delivers death to Daenerys.

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