# Game of Thrones 8.03 "The Long Night" 4/28/19 \[Show discussion\]

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-8-03-the-long-night-4-28-19-show-discussion/833190>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [April 28, 2019, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-8-03-the-long-night-4-28-19-show-discussion/833190 "2019-04-28T20:36:26Z")\
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**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2019, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-8-03-the-long-night-4-28-19-show-discussion/833190/192 "2019-04-29T15:29:15Z")

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A few random thoughts:

So apparently the battle between the Army of the Living against the Army of the Dead went down much like we discussed last week:

> [@Game of Thrones 8.02 "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" 4/21/19 \[SHOW ONLY\]](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-8-02-a-knight-of-the-seven-kingdoms-4-21-19-show-only/832867/470):
>
> Right, so in the hypothetical battle envisioned by **Sam Stone** , both armies lose half of their combatants. The NK’s army of wights goes from 50K to 25K. The 25,000 wights that are “killed” by dragonglass, Valyrian steel, or fire stay dead.
> 
> However, the army of the living also sees its numbers reduced from 50K to 25K, and the 25K that are killed are immediately raised as wights, so it’s actually now 50K wights against the remaining 25K living.
> 
> Regardless, in such a battle, there’s really no way for the living to prevail in a normal straight-up fight. The only way to win is to take out the Night King and the other White Walkers.

The main difference is that it seemed evident that the the two armies were not evenly matched up in numbers at the beginning of the battle. Instead, the living were apparently outnumbered by the undead, possibly by several orders of magnitude. On that note, it seems like a better battle plan would have been to take on a defensive posture against the attacking forces behind the walls instead of taking them on head-on in the field, especially if the size of the attacking force was unknown.

In the one instance when the NK ended up alone in a face-off with Jon without any supporting forces, he promptly raised up the surrounding casualties as wights, just as predicted.

So with that being the case, there was really no point in taking on the undead in the first place. It seems that more effort should have been spent on drawing the NK out into the open sooner, and that more attacks should have been aimed directly against him than were shown.

On another note, how pathetic is it that two live dragons were unable to stop one undead dragon? At the climax, the one undead dragon was rampaging through the castle and about to flambe Jon with blue fire, and the other two dragons were nowhere to be seen.

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