You may think you know what the new teaser trailer for Game of Thrones‘ sixth season (which airs starting April 24) means — until it clearly, or at least hopefully, starts completely messing with you. The teaser takes us back on a tour of the Hall of Faces — where the waxy visages of the dead rest. Here, we revisit characters we’ve known are dead for a long time: Joffrey, Ned and Catelyn Stark, for example, before the trailer brings us to Jon Snow’s lovely, and now (within the trailer) dead, face.
This, of course, may be where you start to question the veracity of the Hall of Faces’ curation, as pretty much everyone assumes that Snow is coming back this season. (Though there’s no question that he seems temporarily very dead).
After HBO Tweeted a photo of Jon Snow upright with news of the Season 6 release date — with his face bloodied, as though to suggest it’s not long after the seeming death at the end of Season 5 — it seemed confirmed that Kit Harington would be back, and not just as a corpse. So while this Snow-face in the Hall of Faces may upset some, it seems like it’s probably there just to stir speculation and concern; this appears to be even more the case when, right after, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) appears in the wall, also dead. And then when it zooms out to reveal the equally dead faces of Daenerys and Arya Stark — who are, at least where we left them in the series, still very much alive.
Some might choose to see this as foreshadowing, but that seems unrealistic, even for a show that kills its beloved characters as cavalierly as Game of Thrones. Rather, we can only hope that this is the show’s sly way of commenting on and exaggerating its own tendency to kill characters — and on the inhospitality and precariousness of Westeros, the fact that at any instant, anyone could die — rather than on the fact that all of these characters will actually meet their demise this season.
Regardless, here’s the teaser trailer — make what you will of it, mourn who you will from it: