Game Of Thrones: 12 Easter Eggs You Probably Missed In Season 5

All men must self-reference.

Arya Game Of Thrones Season 5 Easter Eggs
HBO
It's taken some time, but the wounds left by season 5 of Game Of Thrones' many deaths and betrayals are just about beginning to heal. Or at least scab over temporarily until your randomly vomits an image of Shireen burning. Or Jon lying holey. Or those bloody zombie children.

So now the serious business of over-analysing can begin in earnest without as many emotional break-downs. And that starts, as it always should, with some Easter Egg spotting.

While Game Of Thrones doesn't immediately lend itself to being full of more modern pop culture references, the show is built on such complex lore that there are inevitably thousands of self-referential nods that only fans of the books would understand. The show repeatedly merges characters, and occasionally events, which can infuriate and delight in equal measure (come on, it would be SO long if they didn't), and while they aren't easter eggs as such, it's still entertaining to spot them.

Even on a more superficial level, having the names of almost all of the books released so far used as quotes or episode titles would have had some fans smirking satisfyingly. But even the most casual of book fans would have spotted those.

It's far more interesting to spot the more obscure references and the fan-baiting moments, including the ones that lead to a switcheroo. And typically HBO revel in hiding those references, just as they hid a hilarious Monty Python quote in plain sight (albeit spoken in Dothraki) last season...

12. Cat Of The Canals

Arya Game Of Thrones Season 5 Easter Eggs
HBO

The show has a penchant for somewhat unnecessarily changing details from the books. You can understand it in some cases, such as narrative edits made for run-time or cutting away superfluous characters who would only distract, but other times it doesn't really add anything at all.

That much can be said of the decision to change Arya's first assumed identity from Cat Of The Canals to the less poetically named Lana. It just felt like a creative development that wasn't at all needed, nor particularly welcome.

But at least there was a nod back to the original character. When Arya narrated the routine of her new identity, at the precise point she said "now every morning, I make my way down to the canals", a cat crossed her path, very carefully framed on screen. So the cat of the canals at least still existed in some form.

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