【in the eroticism of life, the realms of existence reign forth.】

Another Game of Thronesepisode,in the eroticism of life, the realms of existence reign forth. another case of creepy Bran.

The Three-eyed Raven has now been reunited with both of his sisters in Winterfell -- and he's managed to weird both of them out with his emotionless glare and his casual references to moments in their past. "I saw you at the crossroads," he told Arya. "I thought you might go to King's Landing" -- emphasis on might, meaning he could sense Arya's inner turmoil at the crossroads as well as her external actions.

Bran gave an inappropriately cold farewell to Meera, who carried his ass across half of Westeros, and even freaked out Littlefinger by quoting from a supposedly private throne room chat he had with Varys back in Season 3: "chaos is a ladder."

So what exactly is upwith this kid? Is he some kind of acid casualty? Have we ever seen anything like him in popular fiction?

If you're a fan of the classic Alan Moore-penned DC Comics series Watchmen, you already know the answer. Bran is Doctor Manhattan, the big blue superman who can see all moments of his life at once but is increasingly divorced from humanity.

That's not just a neat comparison. It is literallywhat showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had in mind when crafting this season -- and it explains the exact nature of Bran's new superpower for those of us who were wondering if he was just high.

"When David and Dan read the Watchmencomics, it was like Doctor Manhattan," Isaac Hempsted-Wright said in a little-noticed interview last month. He added that Bran is trying to cope with "basically knowing everything ever" and is "not really in any fixed time."

Basically knowing everything ever: that, as Hempsted-Wright confirmed at Comic-Con, is Bran's superpower. It was Doctor Manhattan's too, and it didn't turn out too well for him.

Manhattan was known as Jon Osterman until an accident in a lab blew his body to smithereens before he reassembled himself. He's still Osterman in the sense that he can remember every second of his life simultaneously, just as the creature formerly known as Bran Stark remembers his family and everything that happened to them.

But trying to hold it all in his head (alongside the atomic structure of the universe) robs Osterman's life of meaning. He escapes to Mars, where he ponders the Red Planet's beautiful human-free desolation, while Earth lurches into nuclear war without him.

Given that George R.R. Martin has compared the fire-spewing dragons in his stories to our world's atomic weapons, that makes Watchmenan even more apt comparison. As we saw in Season 7 episode 4, Dany has finally gone nuclear with Drogon -- and while the Three-eyed Raven knows everything about it, just as he has mind-melded with the Night King and can see Littlefinger's entire evil scheme, he is just as checked out as Doctor Manhattan ever was.

At the conclusion of Watchmen, declaring that "nothing ever ends," Manhattan vanishes into another universe where he can build a human race from scratch. We're getting the sense that something similar is going to happen to the Three-Eyed Raven: he'll simply vanish into this fantasy world's tree-based internet, or things will get reallytimey-wimey and he'll end up as the older version of the Three-Eyed Raven played by Max Von Sydow in Season 6.

Either way, don't expect to see the old Bran Stark you knew and were slightly irritated by. When your head is full of everything that ever happened, there is no comedown.