Jon’s lifeless corpse in the bloodied snow and his direwolf, Ghost, howling desperately in a lonely cage.
There’s no more potent way that Game of Thrones could’ve opened its sixth season, and no doubt fans were pleased to see that the creators would be following up on last season’s most hotly-debated scene right off the bat.
And surely almost as many felt that their theories about Jon’s resurrection were confirmed the moment the otherworldly Melisandre arrived to grieve his passing.
More on that later.
Things are generally a mess at Castle Black, as Thorne attempts to justify Jon’s murder, while Ser Davos and his band of rogues guard his corpse.
We won’t believe he’s really gone for good until he’s six feet under.
From there, we switch to a death that was considerably less mourned by viewers, with Ramsay grieving Myranda, who was tossed from a tower by Reek in the Season 5 finale.
Roose Bolton then reminds us that Stannis is also dead, but there’s reason to believe otherwise, (In Westeros, no one is really dead until you see a corpse. Even then…)
The unlikely duo of Reek and Sansa ford an icy river (Hey, at least he doesn’t have to worry about his junk getting cold!) to escape Ramsay’s hounds, and for a moment, it looks as though their escape efforts will be short-lived.
With Bolton soldiers on their tail, Reek instructs Sansa to go find Jon at Castle Black, and one gets the feeling that all of the show’s storylines are beginning to intersect in a way that screams endgame.
That feeling is underscored moments later when Brienne and Pod come to Sansa’s rescue in the episode’s most rousing action scene.
In case you’d forgotten just how many characters didn’t survive Season 5, Jaimie returns from Dorne short one daughter.
Thankfully, we’re spared another distressingly rape-y post-death sex scene as he attempts to console Cersei.
The news of her daughter’s death prompts a heart-wrenching soliloquy from the defeated former queen that proves this show really can make any character sympathetic.
What might be even more impressive is that the writers have managed to make Dorne interesting with the assassinations of Doran and Trystane Martell. Fortunately, the action doesn’t linger in the sun-soaked south for long.
With the sort of jarring shift in tone and locale that defined this episode, we then head to Meereen, where Tyrion and Varys are still making their case for a spinoff buddy sitcom.
Meanwhile, Jorah and Daario were also bouncing insults off one another (It was all about odd couples last night!) as the hunt for the missing Khaleesi progressed with surprising speed.
No complaints on that score, as we don’t want to see these two doing their Holmes and Watson routine all season, do we?
From there, we get updates on Daenerys and Arya who are both doing about as well one would expect for a captured queen and a blind beggar.
More interesting is the episode-ending revelation about Melisandre.
Apparently, when she removes her color-changing mood choker, the sexy redhead transforms into the naked old lady from The Shining. Who knew?
Anyway, she never brought Jon back to life, but considering he’s still above ground, and Davos and company are rather heavy-handedly guarding his body, you can bet that’ll happen soon.
All-in-all, the episode had the feeling of an hourlong recap (Daenerys even reminded us how many nicknames she has!), which might have been unavoidable considering how much happened at the end of last season.
The show is at its best when it doesn’t feel the need to bring us up to speed on every character, but at least in “The Red Lady” it effectively reminded us of the ways in which their stories are intertwined, and inched however incrementally toward their inevitable conclusion.
It was a table-setting episode of GoT, but an occasionally thrilling one, nonetheless.
Watch Game of Thrones online to get caught up in time for next week.