Jon Snow has finished his watch duty and enters the Wall's mess hall. Samwell isn't there, which is convenient for the plot, because Jon needs to take advantage of the leadership position his fighting skills have given him among the recruits. That's quite a sentence! I will admit that I believe that as long as a sentence can be properly diagrammed, it will automatically be both grammatical and understandable. That's a weird thing to rely on, since nobody diagrams sentences anymore. Not like they used to, anyway. Anyway, I hope I've distracted you from the complexity of that one sentence. You've probably forgotten that it even happened, which is good for me. But that means you've also forgotten the content, so I may have to start all over. Here's my point: Snow tells the other recruits that Sam's no worse than them, because he has nowhere else to go. "He's our brother now and we're going to protect him." Most of them seem okay with that, but one jerk at another table turns around and says, "You girls can do as you please. But if Thorne puts me up against Lady Piggy, I'm gonna slice me off a side of bacon." I like how they're calling Sam "Lady Piggy" because it simultaneously insults his manhood and his weight. It saves time to double up on insults like that. I also promise to try to remember that the instructor is called "Thorne." I hope to learn the jerk's name at some point.

The jerk is sleeping. Snow and the boys encircle his cot and hold his head down by gagging him with a piece of rope. He wakes up and sees a white dire wolf on his chest. Snow tells him, "No one. Touches Sam." They leave. Hey, remember when Snow got that dire puppy a few episodes ago? I think this is the first time we've seen it since then. I guess it's nice that the Wall lets you bring pets. You have to renounce your family and take a vow of chastity, but at least they have a doggie daycare on site.

The next day, Thorne is angry, which is nothing new. But this time, he's got a fairly valid reason, namely that no one's even trying to attack Samwell. They're just parrying Sam's thrusts and gently tapping him, as opposed to trying to kill him. Thorne sends the jerk in, and the jerk whispers for Sam to hit him. When he can eventually find the courage to do even that much, the jerk falls theatrically and yields immediately. Thorne knows what's up and grabs Snow to demand whether he thinks this is funny. "Do you want a man at your back? Or a sniveling boy?" It's a good point, really. I can't imagine that Sam's going to come out of this training somehow being an expert fencer.