Here’s a ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 1 Recap to Refresh Your Memory Before Season 8 Drops

The king decides to go on a hunt to clear his mind of this brewing chaos, and while on the hunt suffers a bad wound at the hand of a wild boar. On his deathbed, King Robert tells Ned that he wants him to rule Westeros until his son Joffrey is old enough to take over and signs a decree saying exactly that. Ned doesn’t have the heart to tell him the truth about his son Joffrey, but has slowly started to send letters to King Robert’s brothers to let them know that they are actually next in line for the throne.

At Winterfell, Bran finally wakes up from his coma with no memory of what happened to him. He doesn’t remember seeing Queen Cersei and Jaime Lannister having sex in the tower. Bran is now paralyzed from the waist down, and has started having some odd dreams that seem to foreshadow something bad happening.

In King’s Landing, once the king has died, Ned goes to the throne room to confront the queen and her son, who have already taken their place on the Iron Throne. He shows them the signed letter from King Robert requesting that Ned rule until Joffrey has come of age, but also says he knows the truth about Joffrey being an incest bastard. Cersei tears up the letter from Robert and throws Ned in prison for speaking such treason about her son Joffrey, who is the new King.

Sansa pleads with Joffrey for her father’s life, but Joffrey doesn’t listen and publicly executes Ned with Arya watching from the crowd. Arya is grabbed from the crowd by a man of the Night’s Watch who knows who she is. He cuts her hair to make her look like a boy to disguise her identity and smuggles her out of King’s Landing with his new recruits to bring her back North to her family.