Everything I Forgot About Westeros

Season four of Game of Thrones arrived, and I sat down to watch it with the approximate confidence of someone who definitely remembered what had happened. Bloody wedding. Big dragons. That awful boy king. Right?

Wrong, or at least incomplete. The show had spent three seasons building an architecture of alliances, betrayals, and names that sound almost like other names, and somewhere between the season three finale and the new premiere I’d let most of it go. The Red Wedding had hit hard enough that I’d filed everything around it as aftermath—but the aftermath turned out to matter enormously.

The Screen Junkies recap video existed for exactly this situation: a compressed, slightly mocking guide to the previous season, designed for people who either hadn’t watched it or had watched it and needed their memory jogged. It did the job. Efficient. Brutal. Weirdly necessary.

What strikes me now, years out, is how ritualistic this all was—the communal preparation, the collective refreshing of memory, the shared expectation of something enormous about to happen. Television doesn’t often generate that kind of anticipation. Game of Thrones did, for a while. Season four was probably the last time it felt genuinely earned.