The Ending Originally Planned For “Hold The Door” Was A Lot More Gruesome…

Warning: this article contains spoilers from Game of Thrones, season six episode five (Hold the Door). Proceed at your own risk…

If there’s one thing that Game of Thrones isn’t short of, it’s gruesome deaths. From Viserys being killed by having molten gold poured on him, to Oberyn’s eye-popping end at the hands of the Mountain, it’s difficult to name anyone who’s had a nice out.

Honestly, it makes being beheaded seem like the preferable way to go.

Now, the latest GOT character to meet his grisly end was Hodor, who gave his life to save Bran and Meera from an advancing army of wights. We saw him struggling to hold the door. We saw the wights begin to break through. We saw Hodor’s face twist in pain and anguish. And then…. Nothing. The episode ended.

As director of the episode Jack Bender explained, he had actually originally planned on making Hodor’s death graphic, to say the least:

“What the dead would be doing to Hodor would be ripping his clothes off once they got through that door. They would be ripping his flesh off. If the dead can go through wood, they’re going to be tearing Hodor apart.”

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss pointed out, however, that having Hodor ripped to shreds in front of our eyes could take away from the emotion of the scene: “if it’s too horrific, we’re not going to feel the loss of Hodor”.

What we saw, therefore, was a compromise. As Jack explained:

“I still wanted to make it scary enough, see Hodor surrounded and engulfed by these skeletal arms and long fingers, that were eventually going to smother and kill and rip him apart, or whatever they were going to do that we didn’t see. But to not let the horror of it overwhelm the emotion of losing that character and making it really land on the idea that he was sacrificing himself so his friends could get away. That was the dominant idea.”

Sometimes what we don’t see is scarier than what we do, and having the episode end before things got grisly definitely didn’t take away from the scene.

What do you think? Would it have been better to see Hodor actually die? Or did you like the ending to the episode as it is? Let us know in the comments!