‘Game of Thrones’ season 6, episode 6: Writer on Benjen Stark decision

The sixth season of “Game of Thrones” has been ripe with many surprises, but on Sunday night’s new episode, one of the biggest ones was merely getting a chance to see the return of a long-discussed character in Benjen Stark! In between him and Rickon, we’ve gotten many names back into the fold this year.

In speaking about choosing to bring the man back now to assist Bran, co-executive producer / writer Bryan Cogman had the following to say to Entertainment Weekly:

“It’s hard for me to talk about Benjen’s return without getting into the nitty gritty of the adaptation process. But, yeah, season 6 is rife with Stark reunions! That’s another thing that’s been very heartening to track with the fans. The show is so sprawling and there are so many threads, but, at it’s heart it’s largely about this good family that was torn apart. So seeing some of them connect again (Jon, Sansa), (Benjen, Bran) was very satisfying to write and to shoot. And it was great to have Joe Mawle back with us – it must have been a trip for him to step back into the character after so long – but he’s also decidedly not the Benjen of season 1, so that was fun to explore.”

One of the very interesting things to us about Benjen is that he is intelligent at least somewhat in what Bran is going through, and we’re not sure how much time there will be for us to fully explore that. We hope there will be some, given that there is a lot of ripe material here, and Bran could use a valuable aid to get him through with Hodor gone. We have to assume that the Night’s King will continue his pursuit in some way…

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