When Arya sees Jon ride beside Dany, she’s proud, happy, then sad: he doesn’t see her. As the Northern menace descends, gaggles of armies and families and whatever stone-soup defenses they can rustle up are heading to Winterfell to prepare to fight the army of the dead. (Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be warg-boys.) In Season 1, the visitors were the Bad News Baratheons in Season 8, it’s Queen Daenerys and friends. The scene opens at Winterfell, where a Bran-in-Season 1-looking boy, scrambling to watch an approaching procession, ends up climbing a tree, as little Bran once climbed a castle wall. The opening credits had the same spinning gears-’n’-spheres-but, thrillingly, instead of the Sunset Sea, the map sequence began with ice, the broken Wall, and the freezing menace it portends, ice dominoes tipping ever southward. A zesty reel of other HBO shows we might enjoy-winter won’t last forever!-was followed by a thanks-for-the-memories montage: crossbow-on-toilet patricide, teen-wedding regicide, green-wildfire kaboom. The season première of “ Game of Thrones” began with pre-show hoopla, like fanfare introducing a monarch.
