Speaking of the Wall, Sam and Jon Snow are up on top of it, talking about how they'll miss girls. Well, Sam is talking about that. Snow is too busy paying attention to the wasteland between the Wall and that forest to the north. And his vigilance is rewarded when he sees a rider coming toward the Wall! Sam rushes off to a horn, where he takes time to read the instructions. You know the sort of thing, "one long blast for a rider, three short blasts for an incursion of mole people, Flight of the Valkyries for helicopters," and so on. He takes so long that before he gets around to blowing the horn, Jon has noticed that it's really just a horse without a rider. Sam and Snow run to the elevator, which is still being operated by a single guy pushing a stick in a circle. I still think they should get themselves a donkey or something. As they ride down, the horse pounds through the tunnel under the Wall. I'm surprised they keep the outer door open like that. It seems counterproductive. When they get down to ground level, Jon is able to identify the horse: it's Uncle Benjen's.

Ned is out for a stroll in King's Landing, probably looking for some other huge political mistake he can make, when he's stopped by Renly Baratheon, who says, "Ned! It's Robert. We were hunting..." Uh oh!

Robert's in bed. This show has a lot of bed-acting, doesn't it? That's a good way to lure the good actors. "You'll get to shout a lot and twenty percent of your scenes will be in bed. And if you don't want to commit for the whole series, we have characters who die unexpectedly partway through!" Surrounding Robert are members of his family and council. He tells Joffrey he should have spent more time with him, showing him how to be a man. Then Ned comes in and Robert tells Joffrey to shove off. So he doesn't seem to have been all that sincere in that, since he's throwing the kid out of the room before he accidentally has a father-son moment with him. He tells Ned that he had too much wine and missed his thrust, so he got gored by a boar. Ned looks at Robert's grievous side wound (which, if I remember my high school English classes, automatically makes Robert a Christ figure) and Robert says it stinks like death. But Robert is proud that he managed to kill the giant pig with his knife, so he has a plan for a feast in his own honor. Everyone is to eat the boar that killed him, which is weird. And having established that, he tells Cersei, Selmy, Pycelle, and anyone else I didn't notice to get out so he can talk to Ned privately.