Jaqen admits he approved the hit on her, but congratulates her for surviving the attempt and tells her she has become "no one."īut Arya declares that she’s Arya Stark and she’s headed home to Westeros, and that's apparently convincing enough for Jaqen, who just stands there and lets her leave. Subsequently, Arya somehow manages to sneak into the Faceless Men’s temple and add the Waif’s bloody, eyeless face to their hall of faces. (Update: Several kind readers have reminded me of a point that should have been obvious to me - that Arya learned to fight while blind at the beginning fo this season.) I assume that Arya had been training herself to fight in that room in the darkness, and that that training helped her get the upper hand on the Waif and kill her. And now this week, once the Waif arrived with her knife, Arya drew her sword, extinguished the candle - and the scene cut to black. Remember, Arya’s storyline in episode six ended with her reclaiming her sword, Needle, taking it out in her room, and blowing out a candle. But Arya managed to escape and lead the Waif on a chase through Braavos back to a room she’d recently been sleeping in - to spring a trap. Lady Crane dressed Arya’s wounds and helped her out before, inevitably, being discovered and horribly murdered by the Waif. (That’s the actress Arya befriended a few episodes back via offering some constructive criticism on her stage performance and, er, warning her that her co-worker wanted her dead.) In this episode, a wounded Arya managed to make it backstage to the theater troupe to ask help from Lady Crane. Everything was just as it appeared to be. Turns out these creative fans were just overthinking it. Maybe the "Arya" who was stabbed wasn’t really Arya but rather the Waif - and Arya was the perpetrator of the attack! Or maybe "Arya" was, somehow, head Faceless Men honcho Jaqen H’ghar, who was testing to see if the Waif could overcome her grudge against Arya and truly become "no one." Since the Faceless Men’s magic involves, well, face changing, all sorts of theories were thrown about. ![]() Would Arya really strut around the Braavos marketplace, throwing around a big pile of money and without even her sword to protect her, just after going AWOL from an assassin death cult?Īnd would a member of this assassin death cult really be so bad at killing people that when she found Arya and stabbed her several times, she’d just end up giving her a few non-fatal, and indeed not even particularly debilitating, wounds? How Arya managed to survive the Waif’s attacks HBOĪfter Arya’s stabbing by the Waif in episode six, fans speculated intensely about just what they had just seen happen. It made for some serviceable action, yet it struck me as an odd, lazy end to a story arc that’s lasted for two full seasons - and it calls attention to how uninspired and uninteresting the show’s portrayal of the Faceless Men is compared with their depiction in George R.R. But over the course of this episode, she somehow managed to turn the tables on this supposedly expert assassin - and apparently win the Faceless Men’s assent to quit the organization and head back to Westeros untrammeled. Things looked grim for Arya as she stumbled through the streets of Braavos gushing blood from her wounds. (Since that character’s analogue in the books is called "the Waif," that’s how I’ll refer to her here.) Turns out a few stab wounds to the stomach aren’t too hard to shake off for Arya Stark.Īfter refusing to carry out an assassination attempt ordered by the Faceless Men and attempting to escape back to her home continent of Westeros, our hero was ambushed and stabbed by her nameless female Faceless Man rival in last week’s episode. Spoilers follow for Game of Thrones season six, episode eight, "No One."
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