When asked point-blank of Snow is firmly gone—as in, is actor Kit Harington released from his Thrones contract?—showrunner Dan Weiss told EW, “Dead is dead.”
“We would hope that after seeing the scene and the way it’s shot that the answer to that will be unambiguous in the minds of the people watching it,” Weiss explained. “It should be pretty clear what happens in by the time you’re done seeing that scene. It’s not an, ‘Oh what just happened scene?’”
Yet when we asked Martin about his A Song of Ice and Fire saga, the author gave a very different answer. “Oh, you think he’s dead, do you?” Martin teased us in an interview in 2011. “My readers should know better than to take anything as gospel.”
And then just a few months ago when we re-asked about the topic, Martin told us: “If there’s one thing we know in A Song of Ice and Fire is that death is not necessarily permanent.”