Will Jon Snow be the same after that Game of Thrones shocker?

Game of Thrones fans’ theories proved true Sunday night when — SPOILER ALERT! — the Red Woman brought Jon Snow back from the dead.

The resurrection wasn’t entirely a surprise thanks to leaked photos of Kit Harington on set (despite his character being fatally stabbed in the season 5 finale). Still, the actor and showrunners managed to mostly keep their secret, insisting for more than 10 months that the lord commander of the Night’s Watch was gone for good.

But now that the eldest surviving Stark is alive, what will he be like? Could there be consequences for Melisandre messing with mortality?

“If he came back and he was just totally back to normal and totally the same and there was no differences at all, then what would be the point of dying?” James Hibberd, author of Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on the game-changing twist, said Monday on EW Morning Live. “And that was definitely a question that both Kit Harington and the writers wrestled with going into this and were very aware of.”

Hibberd added that Harington, 29, was “very happy that he was going to get to continue in this role that he loves and that he puts so much time and effort and passion into pulling off,” though “what he went through in order to keep Hollywood’s biggest spoiler from being revealed is pretty extraordinary.”

A Song of Ice & Fire readers have long wondered why the TV series didn’t include a major plot point from George R.R. Martin’s source material: After being murdered at the Red Wedding, Catelyn Stark’s corpse transforms into Lady Stoneheart, a vengeful ghost.

Hibberd told hosts Jessica Shaw and Dalton Ross that he thinks the decision to skip that story line stems from early plans about Snow’s fate.

“One of my suspicions has been that since they knew they were going to be playing this card, they didn’t want to play that card, too,” he explained. “This is a big card to play, and they want to retain the sense that there’s real stakes in the show and that when someone dies, they’re not coming back. So if you’re going to do this, I think it’s the type of thing that they’d only want to do once.”

GoT airs Sundays at 9 pm ET on HBO. Listen to EW Morning Live weekdays from 8-10 am ET on SiriusXM Entertainment Weekly Radio (Ch. 105).

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