I agree it’s reasonable for the characters to believe that wights can’t cross bodies of water. I’m not so sure it’s reasonable for us, the audience, to believe that. At the very least they should be able to walk on the sea floor. They can’t drown. The only question is whether White Walkers can control them without freezing temperatures, but I believe we’ve already seen wights under water still under WW control. Pulling a dragon out of the lake, for example.
The characters also don’t realize that the WWs literally bring winter with them, but I think we’re supposed to figure that out by now. So not only could they possibly build an ice bridge, but they are probably the root cause of the entire world’s messed up seasons.
White Walkers were introduced in the first scene of the first episode. Dragons weren’t born until ~Episode 10? of that season? Though they didn’t show the army of the dead until later, so you might still be onto something.
And yeah, the chains didn’t bother me much. Being near Hardhome and Eastwatch, I assumed they got them off a sunken ship. Which alludes to the wights walking under the water theory mentioned earlier. And also brings up a whole lot of questions of the technology level of the WWs, which in turn brings up issues of their motivations.
They wear armor and use weapons, and apparently use chains. They aren’t just a mindless plague of zombie locusts destroying anything in their path. They have a detailed plan. So, are they just pissed off dudes who are really cold? If they are masters of magic and technology (not to mention martial arts – dude can really chuck a spear), they might be harder to beat that we even currently suspect.
The dead may shuffle along the bottom of a still lake and make it out the other side, but if they can’t swim, trying to cross a sea or ocean would see them swept away and dispersed by the currents.
As for an ice bridge across the narrow sea, I don’t think such a thing has ever happened in this world. And if the seas could freeze, the wall is useless as the dead could just wait for winter and just walk around the wall across the frozen sea by Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.
Let’s be honest. Cersei rolled 00 on a 1-100 die. “Get Robert drunk so a boar kills him”?? With Robert being a master drinker, no slouch with weapons AND accompanied by Barristan and Renly (for what thats worth).
And he still made it back??? I will give Cersei credit that she rightly figured Ned wouldn’t spill the beans to a guy on his deathbed.
Ned was an idiot. He should have bent the knee and gone back home with his family.
“Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.”
Ned never boasted about it. Or at least there is no reason to believe he did.
Agreed that other people should have been suspicious. Although, at the time Ned didn’t have a reputation for being honest to a fault. He was like 19 at the time, and the second born son. He shouldn’t have been super well known until after the war.
There’s a reason why the peace treaty with Japan was signed on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, with a flotilla of allied warships at her side. It’s to make sure everyone understands the consequences if the peace does not happen. This was the role of the Dothraki and the Unsullied, as well as the purpose to Daeneris’s dramatic entrance.
The way Littlefinger’s eyes flicker at the moment he realizes that his secret conversations were known was one of the best moments of the episode for me.
Another was Theon’s little grin when the Ironborn leader realized that a knee to the groin wasn’t having the desired effect.
And another was the Hound asking his brother “What did they do to you?” since the Mountain not only was zombified, he was played by an entirely different actor from the last time they met.
“What is your name, white-haired dragon rider?”
“Targaryan.”
“And your first name?”
"Um… Buffy.’
“BUFFY?”
“Look, my dad wasn’t called the Mad King for nothing. He named his other kid Dweezil. I got off easy.”
There’s certainly some truth to this claim. That said, we don’t know the timeline. And Howland and Ned could easily have engaged in some chicanery to add plausibility to Ned’s story… ie, hide the baby from everyone for a few months after the Tower of Joy, and then stage a little scene in which they pay some woman in some town to pretend to be the mother in front of all Ned’s troops, or something like that. Certainly if plenty of people knew that the timeline was (1) Ned and Howland head to Tower of Joy, (2) Ned and Howland return from tower of joy with baby, (3) Ned claims that it’s his own bastard son; then they would immediately figure it out.
The problem with the Littlefinger plotline is that he is supposed to be a master schemer. He is good at figuring out if people are deceiving him. He presumably develops a network of informants wherever he goes. And he was clearly successful in raising Arya’s suspicions about her sister. The episode didn’t put in the work to show how all this was overturned. Presumably the answer is Bran but at this point he has become overpowered and can practically defeat any scheme in Westeros by himself. For example he could easily keep a close eye on Cersei and Euron and inform Dany and Jon about their treachery.
Why a sunken ship? Harbors have large chains all over the place. If there was a ship docked there, it would have anchor chains attached to pylons on shore. Even if it was sunk, the chains would still be attached to the shore. For that matter, there could be chains in warehouses, chains being repaired in shops, whatever. Big ports have big chains around.
The average dead guy doesn’t have a plan - he’s just a mindless zombie under control of the Night King and his handful of minions. It’s not like if they win the dead guys will start living the good life. They’ll just collapse into dust or something. And I don’t think they are working in factories making weapons for other dead guys like the Orcs in LOTR. I assume that whatever weapons and technology are being used are either scavenged from dead humans, like the chains, or they are conjured by magic, like the awesome dragon-killing javelin and the strange armor the leaders wear.
As for the night king and his minions - they are fully sentient, but I’d think of them as basically implacable evil. This is a common trope. You pit your heroes against an uncaring, irresistable force. The story comes from how the characters deal with it. The force can be the army of the undead, or a typhoon, or crazy aliens from Mars, or even crazier aliens that like to suck your face and plant their babies in you, or some demonic figure that destroys dark towers protecting mankind, or whatever. It’s enough to say that the Knight King is an evil dark magical being conjured up for the sole purpose of killing everything living. It’s all we really need to know.
Not ‘presumably’. The answer is Bran. Littlefinger couldn’t possibly anticipate the existence of a person who could literally go back in time and observe every single action he did. Had Bran not been there, it’s entirely possible that Littlefinger would have survived. He might not have managed to get Sansa to kill or imprison Arya, but then he would have just moved on to another scheme.
A better question is why Littlefinger didn’t arrange to murder Bran the instant Bran said to him, “Chaos is a Ladder”. That should have made Bran enemy #1 - not Arya.
The occasional wight appears agile but most of them especially in the last episode appeared very slow. If you have horse-archers they could kill the wights without being at much risk themselves. And the Dothraki are based on the Mongols though I don’t remember if any of them are horse-archers. Even regular archers, protected by infantry could do a huge amount of damage before the fighting begins.
This part bothered me as well. Mainly because, (A) Euron’s too brash and stupid to pull off that kind of acting job, and most importantly (B) Cersei never really believed that wights exist, until one jumped out of the box. Unless they had schemed up some contingency plan for all possible outcomes (“If there’s nothing in the box, you say this…”) but that just doesn’t seem logical.
Cersei allowing Tyrion to live makes sense, because she had Unsullied & Dothraki & hungry dragons at her doorstep, plus she’d already planned her betrayal in advance. Allowing Jamie to live I think was just because, in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to kill her brother/lover.
Cersei totally missed that aspect when she said, “If the North loses, we’ll mop up the remainder of the dead army.” or something to that effect. The point is, if the North loses, the army of the dead is now the entire army of the dead, plus all the armies of the now-undead North.
Cersei would be facing undead Aegon Targaryan and Undead Denaeris, flying two undead dragons, along with her undead brothers, an undead army of Dothraki riding undead horses… Fun times. All those soldiers that Jamie and Bronn looked at and said, “We’re fucked” would become the same armies, except much harder to kill.
Cersei’s only hope is that the North wins, but just barely. Then she can mop up the remaining living and go on being ruler of the ashes. She’s totally fine with that. And from her standpoint it beats the alternative, which is that she joins the war on the side of the living, loses as many men as the North does, then when the war ends still has to face down a dragon queen who can lay waste to anything she wants.
I imagine it’s rather difficult to kill Bran now unless it’s done spontaneously which goes to my point that he is way overpowered. In fact it’s a major mystery why everyone isn’t just following his advice since he clearly knows what is going on more than anyone.
.
They only appear slow when marching en-masse. Most foot soldiers look slow when marching long distances. But when battles start, they are anything but slow. Then they become hyper-speed raging maniacs. I suspect the minute arrows started raining down on them. the Night King would give the order and they would begin to disperse at high speed.
I think the next season is going to take a turn towards outright horror. It’s going to be dark, cold, and there will be lots of scenes of innocent people being jumped by crazed dead things. Basically, the entire north is now beyond the wall. The next battle is going to make the Game of Thrones look like a child’s game in comparison.
I dunno. They seem pretty damn slow in this battle shot.If they had been even moderately fast and skilled they would have easily overpowered the group. A few bows or spears would have been handy too.
