The opening scene of this episode featured the first-ever use of piano in the show's soundtrack. Composer Ramin Djawadi said he wanted the audience to feel something is out of the ordinary right at the beginning and make them suspicious and pay closer attention to the tension of the scene.
The opening credits sequence shows Winterfell with the Wolf sigil again, replacing the Bolton's Flayed Man sigil, thus consolidating the fact that the Starks took back control of the castle in the previous episode.
The title is about the beginning of winter, officially determined by the Maesters of the Citadel and signaled by sending white ravens to the castles and cities of Westeros, which starts when Sam and Gilly reach the Citadel. The episode shares its title with the forthcoming sixth "A Song of Ice and Fire" novel and is the first to draw its title verbatim from one of the novels. Previously, The Dance of Dragons (2015) was worded similarly to the fifth novel "A Dance with Dragons."
Ramin Djawadi received high acclaim from musicians, critics and fans alike for the score of this episode, mainly for the music "Light of the Seven" and the tracks of the last few scenes. It is believed that the praise for this episode in particular, and reactions to Ramin's previous works on the show on top of that, inspired HBO to grant him his own Game of Thrones Orchestra Live Tour across America and Europe in 2016-2018.
This episode reveals that the burning armillary sphere seen in the opening titles is held within the library of Oldtown that Sam visits. The makers envisioned that the map in the title sequence was created by "a mad monk in a tower somewhere, creating as he went."