Right. Most of the fighting men and ships went with Euron.
I’m pretty sure she has to have another confrontation with Euron. (And from what we have seen in this episode, such expectations are likely to come true.) But realistically it would take Jon/Danaeys remaining forces (what’s left of them) months to regroup and reach King’s Landing, so there are similar time travel considerations for them as Yara.
Why was Ghost running with the Dothraki and Ser Jorah? AFAIR, neither Ghost nor Jon had any close ties to them.
He would have been more useful inside the walls. I imagine that the producers wanted to show him and then get rid of him. But maybe he was scouting or Bran was warged into him for a bit.
I predicted a week or so ago that Arya was going to use it to kill either the zombie dragon or Night King. Turns out I was wrong. Sorta. If she was going to kill the Night King it should have been wirth that spear. Says I!
The Night King knows perfectly well about Valyrian steel and dragonglass. He saw Jon kill a White Walker at Hardhome, so he knows he has such a sword. He knows Meera killed a Walker with dragonglass.
As has been said, the Night King’s strategy to hold the Walkers back and let the wights serve as cannon fodder made perfect sense if he know they were vulnerable. And it would have worked, too, if it hadn’t been for that pesky girl!
We were only shown Bran warging into the ravens, so I think we can assume he didn’t warg into Ghost.
Meant to write earlier, I would like to’ve seen the Hound using his dragonglass axe to much better advantage, laying waste to any wights who came near.
Those were pretty awesome, you two! Wish they’d hired you.
Strongly agreed.
Yup - and those were even Lannister troops!
Theon had his small group of archers, from the ship he came in, guarding Bran, but otherwise not. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we’re sure to see Yara and an Iron Islands fleet “unexpectedly” sail to the rescue sometime before the show wraps up.
I don’t think Winterfell could usefully hold all the soldiers that they had assembled. It’s just not that big. They were camped in tents outside the walls.
Clearly they should have reserved more people on the walls, though. The dead should have eventually broken through somewhere, but there shouldn’t have been 20-foot sections of wall with like two people guarding them.
I think the live dragons did the right thing there and got the fuck out of dodge. Can they even kill a wight dragon? Their fire didn’t do it. They ripped a chunk of its neck out and that didn’t do it. The longer they fight the more chance that there are two dead dragons.
I think the issue with viewing is less the televisions (modern televisions do have a pretty good picture), and more the compression. Video compression does not handle dark scenes well at all. Even if you adjust the contrast and brightness, the compression algorithm has already decided that one shade of dark is about as good as any, so let’s fill 3/4 of the screen with three bands of slightly different dark bluish.
There were definitely moments in the episode that I liked. The dwindling fire of the Dothraki charge was great, for example. But I largely agree with the criticisms.
The whole thing was way too by the numbers. Nothing interesting happened. No one did anything clever. None of the major characters felt like they were really in danger. And for all the time and money and special effects they spent on this, you couldn’t see it! Did we really need 90 minutes for this? They should have had one of the named characters go down in the first ten minutes, be raised as a wight, and take down another of the named characters. That would have given the whole thing some urgency. Instead it was just piles of dimly-lit redshirts and heroic death scenes.
But the Night King’s death wasn’t anything like Ned Stark’s death. There was so much fanfare. There was literally a slow-motion, just-in-time, climax-of-multiple-fights-in-multiple-locations action-movie death. We don’t need to have Arya kill the Night King just as he is about to kill Bran and just as Jon Snow is exposed to the dragon wight and just as all the other named characters are on the brink of being overwhelmed (for like the eighth time). A much much better and more early-season GoT death would be that she just drops on him as he’s walking through the courtyard. Death when you least expect it. Death in GoT doesn’t have to be heroic and scenic. It’s nasty and brutal and quick. Similarly, Theon shouldn’t get to make his heroic charge all the way down a row of wights. They should just close in and overwhelm him.
The reason Ned Stark’s death was surprising is that it contradicts all the normal tropes of storytelling. Like, how many times have we seen the main character rescued from what looked like a certain execution? Our lead character sure seems to be on the down and out, but don’t worry, he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Maybe the executioner will take of his mask to reveal the trusty sidekick. Maybe he’s already secretly untied his bindings. However it goes, surely his wits and his allies will get him out of—oh my god is that his head?!
The good guys barely hanging on and dealing a critical infrastructure blow to an overwhelming enemy in just the nick of time is just a normal underdog storytelling trope. Boring.
Even if they wanted that last scene, they could have upended expectations at other points. I was really hoping that instead of Melisandre managing to light the trench barricade just in time, the dead would just swarm and overwhelm her and her unsullied phalanx. That would have been great! And nothing else meaningfully changes. The Arya/Melisandre encounter could just have been earlier in the episode if you need it at all.
One (maybe?) redeeming possibility will be that it turned out that Bran was actually doing something when he was warging away during the battle. Did I miss something? He went into a flock of ravens, they flew through and around the battle, and then… he sat there all white-eyes for the next 30 minutes and nothing at all came of it?
For a minute there at the end I thought something was going to happen that REALLY would have been unprecedented and unique. As the Night King walked up to Bran, I thought that the two of them were actually going to have dialog. I was like, “holy shit, this is awesome, Bran is the only one who has the capability to speak to the NK and he’s the only one who the NK would deem worthy of actually speaking to.”
After building him up as this voiceless, soulless, totally malevolent entity, I thought he and Bran were going to, like, negotiate some kind of truce. And I thought, “damn, I certainly didn’t see this coming.”
And then, of course, it became abundantly clear that I did NOT, in fact, see it coming, because it didn’t happen.
She did tell her. That was the entire point of the scene of them talking.
The tactics were awful. Cavalry only does that in movies. Charging straight at massed prepared infantry is suicide. See: Charge of the Light Brigade, extra credit see: Agincourt. Cavalry is used to hit the flanks and rear or exploit a break in a formation. Or you use them in guard, screen or cover missions. That was the case when it was horses and it’s still the case when it’s mechanized. A frontal charge into massed infantry in the dark had the obvious conclusion. Everybody dies.
They wanted the Night King drawn into the open. They didn’t want everyone to die. Obstacles in depth to slow and funnel the enemy. Long range weapons zeroed in on where the enemy is funneled. Cavalry harassing the flanks. Infantry behind barricades. Air attacks as needed but hold back until the other dragon is in play. Maybe all your troops don’t die. The battle would take longer but there is room for exposition to cover time jumps.
The tactics only work if the commanders wanted to sacrifice the lives of all their troops.
Theon had a small group of Iron Born with him. They were who “protected” Bran.
Am I misremembering or is dragonglass just another word for obsidian? I got the feeling that it’s primal nature is what made it effective as opposed to man-made steel. Not that it literally had a connection to dragons.
Thanks. I disagree with you about #3, though - seemed to me they were riding into dark, unseen terrain and had no idea of the wights’ dispositions.
The night was possibly full of terror, but mostly very, very dark.
I liked how the overall battle was impressive and well conducted. For instance the charge of the Dothrakis (even though it made mostly no sense) and their flames being extinguished so quickly, giving a sense of dread and doom, for instance. I should probably mention that the scenes were quite dark, and I generally couldn’t tell what was happening (for instance, I was completely wrong about the outcome of the fight between dragons)
Except when the main characters were involved, at which point it was becoming ridiculously cliche. The undead mob can overwhelm whole regiments in a matter of minutes, but three surrounded and exhausted characters, on of them already down will get through, no problem. Not mentioning that those main characters were pretty much the only survivors of all fights. Obviously cowards who fled while the men they commanded heroically died holding their ground. If they wanted them to survive, they could at least have spared us the half a dozen “doomed and about to die but somehow surviving because another main character jumps in at the last moment” scenes each of them had and make their survival a bit more credible. It would also have been nice if the scenes had been a bit less dark and I could tell which character was involved.
As many have said, not enough deaths (of main characters), a lot of cliche and not a single surprise except whom killed the night king. So, this episode was underwhelming despite being very well directed (apart from the lack of light that I should point out). And…the night king, the long winter, the army of the wights…that’s all there was to it after 7-8 years of building this threat? Just a supervillain who wants to kill everybody and is defeated in one episode in a perfectly predicable way?
As someone said, this show could have been one of the greatest of all times, and they let the narrative go down to the level of your average predictable and cliched TV show. Very disappointing.
And very dark.
My TV is only a couple of years old and I think it’s pretty good. The episode looked like shit on my tv. I was able to see everything and tell what was going on but it didn’t look good. I was going to scramble and try and change the contrast settings but then I just said screw it and watched it as is.
Even in the daytime it’s suicide.
Yes, Sam said obsidian = dragonglass both when they found the stash at the Fist of the First Men, and in talking to Stannis.
The tactics that bothered me the most is that the Dothraki and dragons weren’t making strafing runs on the army of the dead for the weeks since they broke through the wall.
I vaguely hoped for it too. But I already had lost any illusion that the show would include anything truly original and unique, something I had believed for years watching it. So, it would have been very happily surprised if something like that (or anything really special or surprising) had happened.
Unfortunately, it didn’t.
It is obsidian…but can be made into weapons that arnt brittle somehow.
Well ultimately he was vulnerable cause it was Obsidian that made him.
He was looking through the 14 million possible outcomes of the battle to see if this was the one where they win.
I was thinking:
“I love you.”
“I know.”
Loach, the Cavalry was at least initially supported by a bombardment from the trebuchets, which makes it better tactics that 99% of fiction.