Game of Thrones recap: 'The Door' 

Get behind-the-scenes insight each week during season 6

With tonight’s “The Door,” season 6 continues to rack up what’s looking like the drama’s highest body count yet — we’re only halfway through the season and have lost name-characters every week. But none have been as gut-wrenching as the loss of poor Hodor, with

delivering a triple mind-freak punch by revealing the origin of his condition, his dreadful demise, and Bran’s responsibility for both.

Plus, oh yes, the Starks lost another damn direwolf.  

Mole’s Town: A place whose very name, like Flea Bottom, tells you that the property values are never going to be high here.

We get Sansa’s long-awaited face-off with Littlefinger. She rightly rips him for selling her to a sadist. “Would you like to hear about my wedding night?” she asks, and plenty of viewers yell, “No!” Sansa continues: “I can still feel it, what he did in my body standing here right now.”

Littlefinger is smart enough to not argue. He looks uncharacteristically shamefaced and uncertain. “I made a mistake a horrible mistake,” he says. You think?

Except he’s saving one bit of news to reveal: Sansa’s uncle, Brynden “The Blackfish” Tully, has re-taken his home of Riverrun from the Freys (Tywin Lannister gave Riverrun to the Freys as a Red Wedding gift). This means she could be able to wrangle a Tully army in her fight against the Boltons. And Littlefinger says his Knights of the Vale will be there for her too, not that she wants his help.

Actually, two bits. He can’t resist calling Jon Snow her “half-brother.” He wants Sansa to trust him, and only him, and their newfound alliance might not serve his eventual purpose. So he plants that tiny seed on the way out the door.

Braavos: Arya and the Waif are practicing staff fighting. I’m wondering if the staff is going to be Arya’s preferred weapon moving forward, like Morgan on

She could inflict some serious damage against Georgia-based zombies with those skills.

The Faceless Man enters and says he’s ready to give Arya another shot. Her task should be exceedingly simple: Kill an actress named Lady Crane. She’s warned not to mess it up. Arya goes to check out her target’s play. We’re hoping for

because this would probably be the only way we’re ever going to get to see it. But no — the troupe is putting on the stage version of

. The actors tell the story of the rise and fall of King Joffrey. We feel play-within-a-play meta dizziness as we realize Arya is tasked with killing off an actor playing a part in a warped mirror version of

At first Arya is amused, but then the play’s hillbilly version of Ned Stark comes along. At one point she watches from the crowd as fake-Ned gets beheaded, just like he did in the first season. Except now Joffrey is sympathetic, Cersei is caring, Ned is ambitious, and Tyrion is sinister. The broad strokes of the story are correct, but the playwright’s assumptions about the characters’ motives are wrong, and I wonder if this is the

writers’ way of riffing on the show’s own online commentary. That would add yet another meta level to this whole endeavor and I suddenly have to hit pause, take a few deep breaths — and this is all before

Then suddenly given a random backstage shot of

full frontal nudity, and now this really feels like some reverse version of

Arya notices Lady Crane drinks rum and nobody else does. So that will be her killing technique.

NEXT: Euron pledges to make the Iron Islands great again

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