By skyforbes Alright, we fork the timeline.
Assumption: We keep everything up through the end of Season 5 roughly as aired (with book-ish spirit), and we start truly rewriting from Season 6 onward—the “beyond GRRM” frontier.
Season 6, Episode 1 – “The North Remembers” (Rewritten)
Logline:
As winter tightens its grip, the power vacuum across Westeros widens. In the North, Jon Snow’s death threatens to fracture the Night’s Watch and doom the realm. Far to the south and east, old gambits begin to fail; the age of clever schemers is ending, and the age of consequences is arriving.
Core themes:
Consequences catching up (every shortcut now has a cost).
Real alliances vs fake loyalty.
The difference between “destiny” and “preparation” for the long night.
Major Deviations from the HBO Version (High-Level)
- The North is a political chessboard, not a speedrun.
We slow down Jon’s resurrection and make the Night’s Watch split genuinely dangerous. Northern houses and wildlings actually matter in detail. -
Prophecies and magic are rare, weird, and costly.
Melisandre is powerful but fallible; any attempt to bring Jon back has a real price and spiritual fallout. -
Cersei is dangerous, but not cartoonish.
She learns from the Walk of Shame. Less supervillain nuke button, more paranoid, wounded strategist. -
Daenerys transitions from conqueror to coalition-builder.
Her time with the Dothraki and in Meereen emphasizes learning to share power and understand local structures, not just burn them. -
Bran’s story becomes the spine of the series endgame.
His visions clearly connect the White Walkers, the Wall, and the “game of thrones” as symptoms of the same long war.
Beat-by-Beat Outline
COLD OPEN – The Long Night’s Edge (Beyond the Wall)
Silent, snowy forest. A small Free Folk scouting party moves through the trees under eerie auroras.
They find an abandoned wildling village, frozen mid-fleeing. No bodies; just ice-burned shadows, like radiation silhouettes.
In the distance, they see blue glows moving with order, not chaos: White Walkers with a disciplined phalanx of wights.
One scout (a woman we’ll remember later) sees something new: a spiral of weirwood branches frozen in blue fire—sign of evolving intelligence/ritual.
She escapes, heading south. Smash cut to the Wall.
Title sequence.
- THE WALL – Aftermath of Jon’s Death
Location focus: Castle Black courtyard / Jon’s chambers / storage hall
We open on Jon’s body as in the show, but we stay longer with the men who did it. No mustache-twirling; we see fear:
Thorne: “I killed the boy the realm loved because I feared the man we needed.”
Davos finds Jon’s body with a couple loyalists (Dolorous Edd, a few others). Crucially:
Davos is not instantly “resurrection cheerleader.” He’s practical: get the loyal men, secure Jon’s body before it’s desecrated, figure out the politics.
Tension inside the Watch:
Some brothers are genuinely torn: they liked Jon, but fear the wildlings and feel they’ll be overrun.
A minor character we know (e.g. Bowen Marsh) openly doubts Thorne; this seeds a later mutiny-within-a-mutiny.
Davos sends Edd to ride to the wildlings and Tormund—but emphasizes: “Don’t bring them down like an invading army. Bring them as witnesses. We’ll never hold this castle alone.”
No resurrection yet. This episode ends with Jon still dead.
- THE NORTH ROAD – Sansa, Theon, and New Players
Location focus: Woods, hunters’ hut, a frozen river
Sansa and Theon flee Winterfell through the woods.
Instead of generic chase, we give Ramsay’s men actual competence and a sense that Bolton rule is a surveillance net of informants and kennelmen.
They’re about to be caught at a frozen river crossing; Theon tries to lead them away as bait, but Sansa refuses to be passive:
She uses what she’s learned at court—bluffing, lying, acting—to mislead a pursuing group (e.g. claims to be a servant, spins a plausible Winterfell story).
When things go bad, we get a rescue—but not by random deus-ex-machina.
Manderly men (disguised as Bolton soldiers at first) intervene. We introduce Wyman Manderly’s northern network quietly operating against the Boltons.
The Manderly captain makes Sansa a quiet offer:
“The North remembers, my lady. But memory without planning is suicide. If you want your home back, you’ll need more than vengeance. You’ll need bread, ships, and oaths.”
They propose getting her not directly to Castle Black, but first to a Manderly-held safehouse near White Harbor to start building a proper Northern alliance instead of the rushed “show up and everyone comes” thing.
- KING’S LANDING – Shame, Strategy, and Seeds of Fire
Location focus: Red Keep, Sept of Baelor, small council chamber
Cersei, still bruised from the Walk, has short hair, but we emphasize psychological fallout:
She wakes from a nightmare of the crowd chanting “shame,” but in the dream, the voices shift into the faint, distant roaring of wildfire.
Jaime returns with Myrcella’s body. Instead of pure rage bonding, we get:
A fracture: Jaime is horrified not just at Dorne but at the cumulative cost of Lannister schemes.
Cersei clings to him—emotionally and politically—but we see cracks: she’s begun to view everyone as a piece on a board, including him.
The Faith Militant:
High Sparrow’s power is not cartoonishly absolute. We see that the Faith’s popularity is uneven: commoners love the food and order; merchants and minor lords hate the disruptions.
Margaery remains in custody, but we show her learning: she listens to confessions, subtly mapping alliances even in prison.
The small council is in shambles:
Kevan Lannister pushes for stability and compromise with the Faith; Cersei, barred for now, is working through Qyburn and spies.
Key change:
Cersei does not immediately decide to blow up the Sept someday. Instead, we plant the seeds of a three-way struggle: Faith vs Crown vs commoners, all while winter and war loom.
- MEEREEN – The Cost of Being a Liberator
Location focus: Pyramid, streets, harbor
Tyrion and Varys walk Meereen’s streets incognito.
They see:
Former slaves arguing amongst themselves over work and pay.
Masters still secretly funding Sons of the Harpy, but some also genuinely trying to adapt to new trade rules.
Tyrion’s flaw here is front and center: he believes in clever deals more than institution-building.
He suggests reopening the fighting pits partially, but with stricter rules and shared profits. The scene makes it clear this is a compromise with violence, not a clever “win-win.”
Varys warns: “Revolutions don’t end when the palace changes hands. They end when the grain flows and people stop reaching for knives.”
We establish:
The other slave cities (Yunkai, Astapor) are uniting economically against Meereen. Not a cartoon villain alliance, but a genuine coalition of threatened elites.
No dragons ex machina. Rhaegal and Viserion are restless in the catacombs, but no easy solution yet.
- DOTHRAKI SEA – Daenerys Meets Her Reflection
Location focus: Khalasar encampment
Daenerys is captured by Khal Jhaqo’s khalasar, but instead of repeating the “burn them all” arc quickly, we slow-burn this:
She’s forced to walk among the Dothraki as a prisoner, hearing their side of what Khaleesi and dragons mean.
We meet a Dosh Khaleen priestess traveling with the khalasar (a twist): an older former khaleesi who:
Recognizes Dany and is sharply skeptical of her “breaker of chains” myth.
Tells her: “Every conqueror thinks they are the last. The grass remembers all their hooves the same.”
The conflict here is philosophical as well as physical:
Dany is confronted with people who see her not as a liberator, but as a walking omen of chaos.
By episode’s end, the priestess hints she might help Dany reach Vaes Dothrak—not to free her, but to test whether she deserves any role in Dothraki destiny.
- BRAAVOS – Arya and the Price of Many Faces
Location focus: Streets, House of Black and White
Arya is blind, begging, as in the show, but we deepen the training:
The Waif’s beatings are less “mean for the sake of mean,” more like a twisted zen training: forcing Arya to distinguish voices, weights, footsteps.
Short, unsettling scene:
Arya hears a man drop a coin and lie about it to a child. She calls him on it, purely by sound and intuition.
The Waif witnesses this, and for the first time, we see a flicker of respect.
Jaqen explains a crucial thematic idea:
“A girl cannot be no one by killing herself inside. She must become empty enough to hold truth that is not hers.”
We plant:
Being “no one” will never fully work for Arya. The House of Black and White is not an end state; it’s a powerful, dangerous toolkit she’ll later use as Arya, whether they like it or not.
- BRAN – Threads of the Long War
Location focus: Cave of the Three-Eyed Raven
Bran’s training is accelerated but coherent:
He witnesses not just cool fan-service flashbacks, but patterns:
Repeated human betrayals at moments when unity against the Others was possible.
Early pacts between Children of the Forest and humans that were broken for short-term gain.
We get our first hint that:
The White Walkers aren’t just evil ice zombies. They are a weapon created long ago whose logic has outlived its creators.
The Three-Eyed Raven warns:
“You may walk in the past, but you are not a tourist. Every step you take there wears a groove. Grooves become rivers. Rivers change the land.”
This sets up that time meddling has rules and risks, not “lol I tripped and made Hodor.”
FINAL SEQUENCE – The Wall, Again (Jon’s Fate)
Night at Castle Black. Thorne’s loyalists confront Davos and Jon’s few defenders in the room with Jon’s body.
Standoff:
Thorne gives them a final chance to “yield the corpse and the wildling sympathies.”
Davos isn’t bluffing courage; he’s scared and tired, but he’s betting that someone in the room still remembers the real enemy.
As it seems about to become a slaughter:
The horn blows—not three times for Others, but once: the gate is opening.
Tormund and a substantial band of wildlings arrive, summoned by Edd. But:
They don’t storm the castle. They form a ring outside, torches in the snow, a visible reminder that Thorne’s actions isolated the Watch politically.
The episode’s last moments:
Inside, Melisandre stares at Jon’s body, shaken by her failure with Stannis and the visions of “snow in the flames.”
Instead of immediate miracle, we end on ambiguity:
Melisandre: “If I was wrong about the king, perhaps I was wrong about the war. Or the god.”
Camera pulls back: Jon’s body, the Wall, the distant auroras like faint cracks in the sky.
This war is bigger than one man’s heartbeat—but his might still matter.
Cut to black.
If you’re into this trajectory, next step is Episode 2 where we actually decide how Jon returns (and at what cost), flesh out the Northern conspiracy, and start tightening the threads between Bran’s visions, the politics in King’s Landing, and what Dany is becoming across the sea.
What do you think???