Game of Thrones director says Arya wasn't scheming, she let her guard down in Braavos

Epiosde 7 of season 6 of Game of Thrones gave us Arya Stark looking over the Braavos horizon and then getting stabbed by the Waif multiple times; regardless of which she managed to recover with ‘soup and a nap’. Before the Stark daughter miraculously recovered from her fatal wounds and lured the Waif into a dark room, we saw her securing passage on a ship to Westeros, which, at that time, seemed to be a smart move but it later resulted in her seeking shelter with Lady Crane(RIP) in episode 8. At the end of the episode, Arya(read badass) pointed Needle at Jaqen H’ghaar and told him, very fearlessly, that she was going home.

This, as Mark Mylod, who directed episodes 7 and 8 of season 6, said, wasn’t a smart move. While speaking to theWall Street Journal,he was asked whether this was Arya’s plan all along and that everything that conspired after that was known to her.

“Personally, I don’t think so,” he replied, crushing fans’ hopes that it was more than just bad writing,”he said.“You could certainly read into that. My choice is no. My choice is, in episode 7, the character has made her decision to leave the city, and really makes a mistake. She lets her guard down. We forget how young this kid is, and she makes a mistake. This is in my head, at least. Having booked passage with the captain, she has a moment of reverie where she’s looking over Braavos and particularly looking forward to making a move toward home to a new adventure. She’s not going to be this assassin, and she lets her guard down and nearly pays for it with her life. I think that, subsequently, she knows once she’s recovering at Lady Crane’s apartment that the Waif will come after her. She knows it’s inevitable.”

Turns out as much as we’d like to believe Arya planned the whole thing, it wasn’t really a clever ruse after all.