Jon Snow Lives? Mysteries Abound in the New 'Game of Thrones' Trailer

For too long now, Game of Thrones viewers have been separated into two distinct camps, as unlike each other as Lannisters and Starks: There are those who’ve read the books, and those who haven’t. Promotional material for new seasons has historically been greeted with rabid excitement by newbies, and satisfied nods from smug readers who knew what was coming down the pike. But with the upcoming sixth season, we’ve finally evolved beyond these petty divisions. We can unite and watch the new trailer in awe together, wondering which characters will perish, who will be usurped, and whether Jon Snow is really dead or not.

Scored to a cover version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” by James Vincent McMorrow, the trailer is full of action and bombast, but delivered at a strangely mournful tempo. That makes sense considering the abject misery most of the cast was in last year: Khaleesi Daenerys deposed from her throne in Slaver’s Bay, Queen Cersei forced to do a nude walk of shame through King’s Landing by religious zealots, Arya blinded by a guild of assassins, and Jon stabbed to death by his compatriots in the Night’s Watch. The trailer keeps things vague, but it’s nice to see Daenerys, Arya, Cersei, Sansa, and others all on their feet again, looking to avenge past wrongs.

With all five of Martin’s enormous tomes bled dry of material at this point, though, the show will now start pointing itself towards its own inevitable conclusion, guided only by story outlines Martin gave to the show’s creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. There’s a little bit from the novels left to cover: A power struggle among the Iron Islanders, who we glimpse in the trailer, and Arya’s continued life in the guild of assassins she joined in Braavos.

Everything else looks completely new. Daenerys is back with the Dothraki, the horse-lords who started her rise to power. Cersei is pushing back after her downfall from power, helped by a titanic Frankenstein monster of a bodyguard. Bran Stark, who didn’t make an appearance in the fifth season, appears to be hanging out with the scary White Walker king who Jon Snow did battle with last year (though, like so many of these briefly-glimpsed visuals, that could be a vision or a fantasy).

As for Jon Snow himself? We only see his cold corpse lying in repose, but it’s still hard to believe that last season’s betrayal was it for the character, who had so many unsolved mysteries to uncover, including his own parentage. The show’s creators, and the actor Kit Harington, have repeatedly claimed that Jon’s gone for good, but the fans aren’t having it, citing evidence that Harington was filming the show’s sixth season in Ireland with the rest of the cast. Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson, an expert on such matters, pinpointed a brief flash of footage on Twitter with a very familiar figure riding around in the background.

We’ll know soon enough. Game of Thrones is back on HBO on April 24th, premiering alongside new seasons of Veep and Silicon Valley. Until then, these 90 seconds of footage will have to do.

About the Author

David Sims is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

The former Breitbart editor’s attempt to schedule a provocative event on the liberal campus featuring high-profile conservative speakers didn’t work out as planned.

At first, conservative agitator Milo Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week in Berkeley, California, seemed like it might be a major event. Four straight days of provocative events on campus featuring right-wing luminaries, culminating with appearances by conservative writer Ann Coulter and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and all in the heart of one of the most symbolically resonant places Yiannopoulos could have chosen: the campus of University of California, Berkeley, a campus with a longstanding image as a hotbed of left-wing activism where protests shut down an event of his last year.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

Speakers whose names appeared on initial schedules have either pulled out or said they were never planning to go; the campus publication Yiannopoulos is working with, The Berkeley Patriot, never reserved indoor school venues and appeared to pull out Friday afternoon; and Yiannopoulos announced on his Instagram a planned march through campus on Sunday in protest of Berkeley’s supposed clamp-down on free speech. “It’s time to reclaim free speech at UC Berkeley and send shockwaves through the American education system to every other college under liberal tyranny,” Yiannopoulos wrote in his post. The event would have been an important step in reviving Yiannopoulos’s wounded image on the right after a clip of him appearing to defend pedophilia caused him to be barred from CPAC and lose his job as a Breitbart editor in February. Earlier this week, Yiannopoulos told me in a text message that “We will fight until the last man is ejected from the last step on Sproul Plaza.”