User blog comment:Etindel/Who else is disappointed with the Season 3 final scene?/@comment-6735528-20130615075143/@comment-10385544-20130617144218

I think calling it "downplayed" doesn't do the scene justice. They do it on purpose. I would call it foreshadowing.

The series does a fairly decent job of imitating a characteristic of the books, which is introducing you to something and then letting you forget about it. A good example of this surrounds the mysterious "Boy" who has been torturing Theon. It was known in Season 2 that Lord Bolton had sent his "Bastard" to recapture Winterfell.

Another mind trick that they play on you is that sometimes the characters are not always saying what you might at first think they're saying. When you think they're speaking in general, abstract terms they are actually not, and vice versa. The best example of this is the "Ladder" rant that Littlefinger gave The Spider at the end of "The Climb". Without the images of Joffrey and Sansa, he would have sounded as if he were speaking philosophically, when in fact he was speaking about specific people and events, both past and future.