If you watched the Game of Thrones Season 6 premiere last night, there’s a good chance you’re still pondering that shocking final scene and what it means for the future of one of the show’s most enigmatic characters.
After a breakneck episode that often felt more like a hasty recap of the events of Season 5, we found ourselves alone with the Red Priestess Melisandre as she readied herself for bed.
She removed her clothes, which surprised exactly no one, as Carice Van Houten is naked for about a third of her screentime.
Then she removed her choker and [SPOILER ALERT, OBVI!], we received quite a shock indeed.
It seems the sexy redhead who’s been yammering about the Lord of Light for four seasons now is just an illusion created by the amulet Melisandre wears around her neck.
Her true self is a decrepit old woman whom Van Houten estimates to be between 100 and 400 years old.
Quite a range in that estimate, but once you pass 100 does it really matter?
Anyway, it’s one of those twists that’s meant to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about this character.
Unfortunately, for the show’s producers GoT fans are a particularly obsessive lot, so they did go back and re-examine Melisandre’s history – and some of them didn’t like what they saw.
Yes, as you can see, Melisandre doesn’t always wear the choker, which kind of ruins the whole “she’s actually a withered old crone who’s been deceiving everyone for years” thing.
Though as many fans have pointed out, the Season 4 scene above appears to be the one and only time she doesn’t rock her magic amulet, and it’s possible that it was by design.
The only other person in the scene is Stannis’ wife Selyse, and many fans have theorized that Melly intended to show Selly her true form, either to show her the extent of her power, or to prove that she’s not a threat to the Baratheon’s marriage.
The theory holds that the audience didn’t see the scene from Selyse’s point of view and instead continued to see Melisandre as she presents herself to the world.
Selyse’s uncomfortable reaction to Melisandre’s nudity seems to support that hypothesis.
Of course. her awkwardness may have just been a result of the fact that Selyse was kind of a prude.
The dialogue from the scene is may be more laded with meaning than we initially realized, as the Red Priestess dismisses her body as “just flesh” and explains to Selyse that she uses her body as a persuasive tool.
Again, hardly iron-clad proof, but certainly enough to give the show the benefit of the doubt.
It’s unlike creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to overlook important details, but at the same time, the show has never toyed with perspective like that or given us the notion that the characters are seeing something different than what we’re seeing.
(Which is a bit odd, as the books frequently offer different viewpoints on the same events.)
So it’s possible that D & D simply messed up, but it actually seems more likely that they knew what they were doing all along.
Either way, we’ll never look at those many Melisandre nude scenes the same way again. (But make no mistake we will look at them again.)