The “them” is Winterfell, of course.
Sean Bean may have dramatically bowed out of Game of Thrones in the climax of its first season—thanks to Ned Stark getting his head lopped off—but his shocking exit cast a long, often complicated shadow over the rest of the show, metatextually or otherwise. You might be inclined to think that the actor kept up with how his on-screen kiddos were avenging his death, but Sean Bean’s a very busy man (there are, of course, plenty of films and TV shows for him to go die in), and Game of Thrones is perhaps too much television for anyone to keep up with, let alone Sean Bean.
The actor revealed as such in a recent interview with the Times about his career and his role in the upcoming prison drama Time. But rather than leave it at that, the basic plot of Thrones’ final moments—and particularly that Sansa, as Queen in the North, secedes her lands from the wider control of the ruling powers in King’s Landing after Bran takes the throne—got explained to the Bean.
“So did Winterfell stay separate? Oh, good for them,” the actor simply said.
Which, honestly, is probably the most diplomatic response to Thrones’ ending you could get out of anyone, let alone the former patriarch of the Starks himself. Good for them, indeed!
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