She can if she has anybody with an elementary knowledge of tactics advising her. But she has Jon and Tyrion, so she’s screwed in that department.
remember the blackwater battle was also at night. Not as long or as big but it was dark.
I’m pretty sure both dragons were badly injured in the battle, which is why they stopped participating. I would expect that Dany’s airforce is off the agenda for the time being.
how many unsullied were left alive? Hard to tell
I’m sure we’ll find out next episode that at least some survived, but it seemed from the shots we got after the battle that the only ones alive were Grey Worm, Tormund, Brienne, Jamie and Pod.
The number of people in an army from one episode has basically no relation to how many are in an army the next one. Plot needs, not logic or consistency, will drive everything. See the Iron Islands fleet, or Unsullied from last year to this one, or Highgarden’s strength.
Not sure how much reconnaissance was going to help. NK was coming to Winterfell (because that is where Bran was). There were two mighty shitloads of them, which Bran could have determined well before the battle. So, not sure what more info would have been useful.
I actually thought that went the other way, and Sansa gave it to Arya? She had it when she sparred with Brienne (IIRC) (but that was pre-tension, wasn’t it, so you are probably right) But I’m positive it was what Arya used to deal with Littlefinger, so Sansa must have given it back at some point.
And looking at the GIF, you can see one of the minor WW responding to something behind/to the side of him, which was presumably Arya passing by.
I don’t think the Iron islands sent people did they? If not they could be in the next battle.
I was actually hoping that this would be the case. I thought that he was going to charge the NK and stab him in the back.
It would have been the ultimate redemption for the guy who was one of the biggest backstabbers in the series.
I found the episode a bit disappointing, but nowhere near as bad as most of the people in this thread.
As far as the Night King getting killed so “easily”: I think that was fine. Look back to Season 1. Ned Stark was the main character, the ‘hero’…and then he was dead. Just like that, with no fanfare, no heroic end…he just got his head chopped off. Now, in Season 8, we have the Night King: the villain, the Big Bad Evil Guy, the ‘real enemy’…and now he’s dead. No great standoff between the Hero and the BBEG; he just gets stabbed and dies. Like so many ‘major events’ in history, they just sort of ‘happen’, without any great fanfare.
I thought the lighting and the overall camerawork were appropriate for the episode. It was frustrating not being able to tell who was who in a lot of cases, but I think that was completely intentional, to give the viewer a sense of how the battle was from the standpoint of the defenders. It was dark, and chaotic, and confusing.
My biggest problem was that all of the main characters were saved almost entirely by plot armor. Pretty much everyone involved in the actual fighting came to exactly the end that the standard ‘fantasy narrative’ dictated:Brienne saves Podrick and Jamie saves Brienne (I actually thought that Brienne went down, but others are saying that she was there at the end); Edd saves Sam, and dies heroically; Jorah saves Daenerys, and dies heroically; Theon defends Bran, and dies heroically; Arya the Assassin saves everyone. It was all very neat and tidy…and I would have much preferred one of the ‘favorites’ to meet a sudden and unremarkable end.
And now that the existential threat has been taken care of (or so we assume, anyway), we go back to the ‘main’ storyline - the Game of Thrones. I predict that in the end, nobody sits on the Iron Throne, because it, along with most of King’s Landing, will be destroyed. Whoever winds up the ‘winner’ in the South will rule over a broken kingdom.
Yara will want revenge on Euron, so yes, I assume we’ll see her and her troops again.
So who was that in one brief scene who looked like Yara Greyjoy?
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:
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.
When Dany blasted the Night King with a long shot of dragonfire, he seemed unaffected and was just standing there, I think smiling, when the fire and smoke cleared. Was that what was expected or was the intention that he has the same invulnerability that she does to fire? Perhaps he’s a Targaryen? On the other hand, I really doubt we’re going to revisit anything to do with the Night King or the Children of the Forest.
Put me on the list of those who were completely swept up in this episode. I thought the darkness and the clouds added some “fog of war” realism. Showing the Dothraki fires go out was an effective (and cost-effective) way of giving an “uh oh…” sense.
I thought for a moment that Sansa and Tyrion were about to commit murder-suicide…very glad that didn’t come to pass.
Kudos to all of those last week who foresaw the problems of hiding in a crypt.
Bran sure is a worthless lump, isn’t he? His role in the big battle was: bait? Did warging into the ravens provide any useful intelligence?
Not only did the battle look like Helm’s Deep, but the demise of the Night King sure looked a lot like Merry and the Witch-King of Angmar.
(In fairness, all Storming the Castle battles have to follow a similar pattern or they’d be excruciatingly boring.)
The wights would have attacked even if the Dothraki hadn’t charged into battle with swords aflame. Perhaps this way the battle takes place far from the castle? Also the Dohthraki had no idea what they were up against, and riding into battle is their thing.
In the post-show feature, the show runners said that the plan was indeed to draw the NK out into the open. But when Dany saw the Dothraki massacred she jumped on her dragon prematurely (forcing Jon to follow) and threw the plan out the window.
If the plan centered on taking out the NK, turning some Valyrian steel swords into Valyrian arrowheads would probably have been smart.
The night is dark and full of terrible blurs.
Their plan was flawed anyways because they didn’t know NK was immune to dragon fire.
So did Arya even use her detachable-head spear at all? Or is that for a future battle? Or was it just a Macguffin to get some Arya-Gendry sexy time last episode?
It was the spear she was using to kick ass at first. Though the design notes made it look detachable I guess it was just showing a dragon glass head inserted into a wooden spear.