I don’t approve of ending the story this year though. The show is falling into the trap a lot of shows do, where “Okay, we’re going to end it, so let’s just wrap up every storyline, even though some of these storylines could stand to get a lot more time”. They spent 2 and a half seasons on the war between the Starks and the Lannisters and they are going to wrap up TWO even huger conflicts in just four episodes? The war with the dead needs the whole season and we need a ninth and tenth seasons to wrap up the Iron Throne battles.
The writers have shown that they don’t care about geography.
I’m not predicting this, but what if the army of the dead basically ignored Winterfell and just kept heading south? I realize a) They could have done that if they wanted and b) The whole Three Eyed Raven thing.
I do wonder if the living survivors head to Moat Cailin or some other fortification to the south.
Brian
The title for this episode that I’m seeing is “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”
Castle Black?
It’s a staff. I think we saw her spend a ton of time training for staff combat with the waif. Sort of like Morgan on Walking Dead. The only difference is that her staff has dragonglass blades on each end, ala Darth Maul. It should be quite effective in her hands against the dead.
I suppose if Dany and Jon dies, I could stand more politicking
Ditto
It struck me that they’re beating us too much with the crypts being the safest place for non-combatants. They must have said it three or four times last night.
They’re doomed.
Sam and Gilly and Little Sam and the new spunky girl with gray scale (what happened to that being so impossibly rare in Westeros?) and all the rest.
And that was the point of the Little Bear scene: they don’t want her dead (or at least not yet) so they had to explain why she won’t be down there as she naturally should.
I’ve been discounting the posts these last weeks about the Winter King reanimating a zillion dead Starks inside the crypts. Mostly because the wights we’ve seen have had quite a bit of flesh on them so they can move and fight. Using a bunch of pure bone Harry Hausen skeletons would simply look ridiculous.
So the attackers will mainly be regular wights, pouring in through some access way that’s been overlooked. In Real Life, many castles had ‘sally ports’ so that knights could slip out through them and harry the other side during sieges, without opening the main gates for attackers to flood in. One of these will be found/used by the wight army.
Actually, if it turns out to be true that the man who the Children turned into the Night King was a Stark, he might know exactly where these exits are.
I think the big shocker will be the identity of one of the wights: CATELYN. For all of you who have been longing for Lady Stoneheart, you’ll get Zombie Kate instead. 
I bet that seeing her is what panics Arya into the blind panic run we saw in a promo.
Yes, she died at the Twins, and several years ago. But it’s likely the Freys allowed for the various Houses to collect the bodies of their dead and take them home. and maybe it hasn’t yet been long enough for all her flesh to rot away. (Hey, it’s COLD down in those crypts, right?)
Hmm. I think Rob and Ned are dead dead, severed heads in both cases, but Rickon could be a possibility, too, but would the audience care about him at all?
A few more random thoughts:
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So much talk of the crypts, I’m almost wondering if they’re setting us up for a surprise. It’s too easy for all of us to figure out “OMG! Crypts are full of DEAD PEOPLE! Night King reanimates DEAD PEOPLE! They’re DOOOOMED!” Also, the dead in the crypts are mostly old dead - bones, etc. Are we going to get skeletons now? I really hope… something unforeseen happens down there.
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We saw a LOT of Brienne this episode, plus she was knighted. She’s all poised to die a glorious hero death next week. I’ll be sorry to see her go.
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Arya / Gendry: called it.
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Nice to see Ghost again. Guessing he’ll do something significant in the next episode.
I can hardly wait until next week. I keep hearing reports of 55 days filming just this one episode. It’ll be glorious!
Sorry, ignore that. I had a temporary mental block and had forgotten that Sansa was ever at the Wall. Carry on.
On other occasions when we’ve seen the Army of the Dead before a battle, we’ve seen the Army – but this time at the end of the episode we saw half a dozen white walkers, rather than a hundred thousand wights. I have to wonder where the army is if it isn’t at Winterfell.
My wife said she looked like her face was burned.
But we did see zombie skeletons, near that tree where Bran met the three-eyed raven, and Jojen Reed was killed by one of them.
…and they did look ridiculous, at least to me. (The fireballs made it so much worse.)
But yeah, skeletons are on the table.
If they really wanted to shock the fan base, they would have had everyone bathe the night before battle…
Who wants to see a headless Sean Bean errr Ned Stark, Head in one hand, sword in the other
I had the impression that the army of the dead was stretched out in a line to the left of the zombie cavalry.
Loved it. The knighting of Brienne was fire. And go, Arya! You get you some.
There were great moments in the episode, but as a whole it wasn’t great. The story didn’t really advance, it was just a lot of “let’s enjoy these characters talking.” Which is fun, but better writing can allow you to have that and some action and story.
The Arya/Gendry thing was inevitable but honestly, guys, you can cut that scene off when they start kissing. We don’t NEED to see Maisie Williams’s boobs.
Wait a minute, where are the Dothraki?
The best scene BY FAR was Brienne’s knighting. It is one of the greatest scenes in the history of the show. A few scenes before that my wife asked me “Are they gonna have sex?” and I vehemently said no. It just would not fit their characters; Jamie isn’t attracted to her that way, he just admires her nobility. His knighting her is, for those characters, the perfect act of affection and admiration, and the pinnacle of Brienne’s life’s work. The great sadness of her life has always been that in a world where “knights” almost never live up to the theory of what they’re supposed to be (which is pretty square with how European knights were) Brienne has always been the perfect knight, living up to every theory of it, and could never be one because hardly anyone took her seriously. Jamie righted a great wrong by knighting the one person in all of Westeros who most deserved that honor.
I don’t know how the story will end up; maybe Jon will be King Aegon VI, maybe Danaerys will be Queen, maybe Cersei will win (unlikely but it’d be badass) or maybe Sansa will be Queen which in my opinion would be cool. Maybe a Jon/Danaerys rule will grant some form of independence to the North and Queen Sansa I. Jon/Danaerys seems likeliest. But really, the thing about this stuff is that the story of Westeros is a neverending tale of war and disappointment. Three hundred years before all this the continent was conquered by the Targaryens, and before that all kinds of shit happened and after the events of this show more shit will happen, and it’ll be like Jorah said; the common folk just hope the next harvest will be good. There is no final victory; once the White Walkers are beaten and the possibility of total annihilation is gone, Westeros will go back to an endless cycle of times of relative peace and times the people get ass-banged by yet another royal conflict. In the endless cycle of violence and rebuilding, you take such victories as you can find, and Brienne of Tarth becoming a knight is about as sweet and deserved a victory as I can think of.
You usually see one or two walking behind Dany.