Everyone Left Standing Has Someone to Kill

The second trailer for season four of Game of Thrones is almost entirely about revenge—which tracks, because at this point in the series, everyone still alive has watched someone they loved get slaughtered at a dinner they were promised would be safe. The Red Wedding happened. Ned happened. The list is long, and the survivors are building toward something.

HBO has been dropping these trailers at a pace that feels like psychological warfare. April is still weeks away and they keep releasing just enough footage to remind you what you’re waiting for without satisfying anything. It’s the same mechanism as the show itself—deferral as a structural principle, payoff perpetually one episode further down the road.

Under all the political maneuvering and tits and wine, the actual engine of Game of Thrones has always been simpler: power as the ability to decide when someone suffers and who. The trailer understands that. It’s not about dynasties. It’s about score-settling. The throne is just the excuse everyone uses to justify what they were going to do anyway.

I’m curious how many of the people I’m still attached to survive the season. The show has been thorough in teaching you not to get comfortable, but it keeps replacing the dead ones with new ones you end up caring about anyway. Whether that’s a flaw or the entire point, I genuinely can’t tell anymore.