‘Game of Thrones’ season 6 spoilers: Does Jon Snow shocker influence George R.R. Martin’s future books?

Tonight’s “Game of Thrones” episode was stuffed full of shockers, and while book readers may know a thing or two in regards to what happened to Jon Snow at the hands of the fellow members of the Night’s Watch, that doesn’t mean that TV viewers we had any clue. Also, remember here that it is not exactly like the series follows everything that the books do exactly. (SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Still, are we meant to take what happened tonight with Jon’s supposed death as gospel for the future of A Song of Ice and Fire? We have now heard from multiple sources that within this world dead is dead, and the show has no intentions of reviving him, just as they have no intention of bringing back Lady Stoneheart seemingly (as much as we wanted that for some time). However, Jon’s death was left somewhat ambiguous in A Dance of Dragons, and as George R.R. Martin tells Entertainment Weekly, “if there’s one thing we know in A Song of Ice and Fire is that death is not necessarily permanent.”

As for the show, executive producer D.B. Weiss explains going a little more definitive here because the show did not want to leave open that much open to interpretation. He uses Ned Stark as an example:

“In a book, you can present that kind of ambiguity … In a show, everybody sees it for what it is. It’s that rule: ‘If don’t see the body then they’re not really dead.’ Like when we cut Ned’s head off, we didn’t want a gory Monty Python geyser of blood, but we needed to see the blade enter his neck and cut out on the frame where the blade was mid-neck—it was longest discussion ever of where to cut a frame; two hours of talking about whether to cut at frame six or frame seven or frame eight. And that’s all by way of saying we needed Ned’s death to be totally unambiguous.”

Sure, it is possible that the producers are pulling an elaborate prank on us and that secretly Jon is alive somewhere, but for the time being we’re really not banking on that. We’ll just go with the people who are still alive, and at least we have Davos, while Sam is not heading to the Citadel. It took a while for us to even remember after the fact that Sam left in the midst of our insanity over the ending.

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