Melisandre hasn’t appeared yet and she won’t show up to help defeat Cersei. So unless she shows up with Kinvara and a horde of cultist with flaming swords next week the night king will be in play until the end.
I watched The Falling last night, so I was kinda inoculated.
This was a much stronger episode filled with the sort of character moments they just failed on last episode.
Battle of the Bastards is widely held as one of the finest pieces of TV ever and of a medieval battle on TV or in a movie.
The Castle Black fight episode was fantastic as well. And so was the Dragon V Lannister battle.
Inoculated? I thought I saw that and don’t remember anything that inoculated us for tonight.
Really one long episode. If I was binging this show, I’d just put these on back to back.
It isn’t that the fighting scenes weren’t well done. (They are, in fact, usually more detailed and coherent than most comic book movies.) It’s that everybody (i.e. all the named cast members) should have died.
For all the talk of being the series which kills off main characters, how many of them have ever fallen in battle? Compared to the miraculous number who have survived, effectively zero.
I think that everybody in the crypts will be dead before morning and that Ser Davos will be killed by mini-Shireen.
A girl is horny.
This episode would be great while binging, but I’m not a fan as a standalone episode.
Jaime knighting Brienne though, was the most heartfelt scene since… Sansa meeting Jon at Castle Black? Ever?
The first two episodes feel mechanical to me with the characters showing up to their appointed locations to deliver the necessary lines to advance the plot forward towards the inevitable conclusion. A slow moving and ponderous epic soap opera.
I found the Arya/Gendry sex seen unsettling, even more so than Sansa being raped on her wedding night. Which makes no sense Arya and Gendry are both consenting adults.
Funeral customs in the North involve cremation, except for the nobility who’s remains are somehow made processed into statues. I don’t think any of the remains are in a state to be reanimated.
There’s still the battle for Iron Throne to get out of the way.
At least we’ve resolved the questions about Arya’s sexuality.
It could be, but it will take months for the Army of the Dead to reach Kings Landing. By the time they get there, Winter could be over.
Not a terrible episode but it’s so obvious they ran out of source material before last season. I still want to see the end, but this is like when a show goes on too long and the main characters just become caricatures of themselves. I loved the GoT where it was unpredictable. Maybe if Jamie had chopped off Briene’s head during the knighting ceremony and killed his brother, taking his head back to Cersei it would have brought some of that back, but now it’s just cheesy.
I loved it so much I had to immediately watch it again. I’ve always been a bigger fan of the character driven episodes and all the scenes were reminders of how much the characters have been through and why we care about them. It was also sad to know that it was goodbye to a lot of them.
Brienne vouching for Jaime, Theon and Sansa meeting and Davos with the little girl got me misty-eyed. Tormund’s story was hilarious. It was fun to see he and Jaime “spar” over Brienne. The knighting scene was probably the best of the episode. Brienne’s smile was so wonderful to see. Gendry and Arya having sex - I did not see that coming but I’m glad it happened because it boosts my prediction that Gendry will get the Iron Throne with Arya as his warrior queen. 
I also loved her scene with the Hound (“I fought for you”) and think when she saw Gendry, she decided that she didn’t want to die a miserable shit like the Hound and Beric.
I was wondering why no one in the war council mentioned that the Night King will be riding Viserion. Surely they know that is that is going to happen. When Jaime said he wouldn’t expose himself, I expected someone to say he will be all by himself on a dragon. That’s pretty exposed to someone else on a dragon.
Maybe they just decided that, with so much to get through in the first episode, they just postponed them to this one.
Another thing I meant to mention is that Daenerys keeps saying that she has wanted the Iron Throne her whole life, that it is all she ever wanted. That’s not true. Until Viserys died there was never any possibility that she could get the throne. She grew up believing that he was the true king. She was sold to Drogo to get an army for him. She had no expectations of ruling anything. So she has only wanted the throne for a few years. I guess revising that history is supposed to make it seem even harder for her to give it up.
One thing that stood out to me was the idea that the iron islands are somehow safe. The Night King has a dragon. He could fly over, and raise an ay from those that he killed. I don’t think a bit of water would stop him there, or at Essos for that matter.
He could, but it’s a challenge, or at least it seems so. Since the dead bring winter with them, I think they could probably actually just freeze a bridge to the Iron Islands.
Although I thought the first two episodes were good, this was bad pacing. Two episodes about the same thing where nothing actually happened, in a six episode season? This only works because I’ve come to love these characters and thought about them for years so that they’ve gotten under my skin and will live there for the rest of my life. If I was just binging the show it would be coming to a screeching halt right here.