'Game of Thrones' actor compares Bran's crazy time traveling to a malfunctioning iPhone
Helen Sloan/HBOWARNING: Spoilers ahead for "Game of Thrones" season six.
"Game of Thrones" is a series filled with mystery, and no character is more prone to confusing storylines than Bran Stark.
When Tech Insider had a chance to speak with actor Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran) about the greenseer's season six flashback's and his character's possible future, we knew we had to clear one thing up: How do Bran's visions work in conjunction with the weirwood trees?
In season six episode five, "The Door," Bran is pulled into a complicated time travel flashback to Winterfell. Meanwhile the cave he's in is attacked by the Night King and his White Walker buddies, so Meera pulls Bran away from the tree and into a sledge.
"I think the whole point of Bran not having physical contact with the tree during that big sequence in episode five is it's almost like a malfunction," Hempstead Wright explains to Tech Insider. "It's like when your iPhone's connected to your Mac and it [automatically opens] iTunes - then you pull it out just as it's syncing and everything goes haywire."
HBOBran going "haywire" in the episode resulted in a devastating consequence - Bran accidentally linked past-Hodor with present-Hodor and completed a crazy time loop that made Hodor into Hodor.
Then, in the following episode, Bran's visions continued despite him being completely removed from the Three Eyed Raven's cave and the weirwood tree.
Continuing with the iPhone metaphor, Hempstead Wright says: "I think what happened there was it's like Bran is kind of rebooting." The visions were definitely different from the single-place time travel Bran had been doing earlier in the season. It was more of a rapid-fire flash sequence, one that even showed the future (Cersei blowing up wildfire beneath the Sept of Baelor).
"[Bran has to] be really careful now because it could all implode again, or worse," Hempstead Wright says.
In the books it's implied that greensight can work without being physically connected to a weirwood tree, but clearly Bran hasn't reached that level in his training yet. With the Three Eyed Raven dead, can he ever achieve full greenseeing potential? Hopefully his experimenting phase won't lead to anymore ruined lives in season seven.