I think all the lore seems a tad confused over the years now.
Dragonglass killed a White Walker (supernaturally created creature). Not firmly established it’s killing Wights (resurrected dead person) in any particular way. Just burning them.
But now everybody has Dragonglass to kill the Wights, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. But it was for WW’s.
And now it seemed only Valarian steel seemed to be the only way to kill WWs in that episode.
All a bit of a mess, in that sense.
One thing that this episode proved is that Cersei is definitely the smartest one. She was facing two enemies and they wiped each other out.
Am I the only one hoping the series ends like Monty Python’s Holy Grail? Instead of the police stopping everything the Iron Bank comes in and forecloses on the Seven Kingdoms. The last scene can be them repossessing the Iron Throne.
I’ve only glanced around, but the rest of the internet seems to be screaming its praises, so we seem to be in the minority here. But honestly it makes me wonder if people understand the series they’re watching, or if they’re just kinda watching and waiting for badass fantasy and war stuff to happen and kinda glossing over the rest, or something.
This is a show that gave us the Red Wedding. And Oberyn’s death. This is a show that credibly tells a story where you don’t know that the good guys will always win, or that our heroes will always survive. They spent years showing this to us, that anything can happen, that this isn’t going to be a fairy tale where everything is easy, the heroes are always right, and the good guys always win.
So what did they do for their big battle to resolve 8 years worth of an existential threat in a huge, story-defining climax? We got exactly what the show hasn’t been about all along. We got a story where we know the good guys aren’t going to lose, that if any characters die at all, they get to go out heroically exactly like they’ve always wanted. We didn’t even get some sort of clever resolution where everyone’s unique skills are brought to the table and they use it to resolve the situation in some sort of clever, personal, or unexpected way.
Instead, we got immortal main characters who were in no danger, almost being comically surrounded by unsurvivible danger, but cut to another scene and come back and they survived anyway. This literally happened dozens of times. We have a mysterious, magical character who has gone through years of buildup building him into this alien entity who takes on a millenium-long rivalry with the main badguy, who obviously is going to have some key role to play in this battle in some clever way we can’t see… do absolutely nothing. The Night King dies and the battle is won because someone jumped on him and stabbed him.
There was never any tension, any danger, any sense that our heroes might lose. There was an expectation that at the very least, our heroes would find some sort of unique or interesting way to win the battle, and that never happened either. The characters that did die got to do it in the most heroic, cliched, they’d-have-wanted-it-that-way sort of way.
We’ve been waiting 8 years for this resolution, and it’s resolved in the most boring, predictable way it could’ve been resolved, with nothing shocking, no real costs to any of the characters, no heartbreak for the audience. For the first 4 years at least, this show was a challenging show to its viewers with truly unexpected twists, morally ambiguous characters, complex conflicts and storylines, sympathetic characters having to pay real prices for their actions and undergoing growth… and what we have now is a completely stock fantasy action movie that hits every single trope, has immortal heroes, and the good guys always win.
It seems like the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice this huge, dramatic shift, which makes me wonder if they even appreciated what the show once was, or if it was always just some sort of simple fantasy story to them like it is now.
Specially after Tyrions “I’ve fought before” speech last episode.
I have a hard time parsing this. Not a single white walker was attacked all episode, so I’m not sure anything was contradicted wrt to them. We have seen them killed previously with both dragonglass (Sam and Meera) and Valyrian steel (Jon). Jon has killed wights previously with both dragonglass and Valyrian steel.
Ah yes, we do agree. I don’t mind that he died in this episode. I wouldn’t even say it was easy. He defeated many comers, and it took magic-ninja Arya to barely get the drop on him. I just wish the whole episode hadn’t been so unoriginal.
It has been stated an innumerable number of times in the show that the real threat was the night king, not the petty rivalries about the iron throne. And he’s dealt with pretty much as soon as he actually (finally, after 7 years) enters the scene with his army. He’s been surrounded by mystery for those same 7 years. And the explanation of the mystery : “he wants to kill everybody”.
Pardon me for having expected much more than that and being unimpressed and disappointed.
That would be subverting tropes.
Hey, tactics on the whole are so bad, we take what we can. At least they supported cavalry with artillery.
(Plus why would you build a siege engine, when you are not the seiger :smack:).
I still want to hear “Shoot to Thrill” as Iron Man comes in to save the day. They took our Ned, but there’s still a Stark for the Iron Throne…
Defensive trebuchets are a real historical thing. Usually they were small traction trebuchets (bunch of guys pulling on ropes rather than giant counterweight) shooting from the walls, not regular trebuchets outside your walls. The idea would have been counter-battery fire, because the sieging arming would have set up outside of bow/crossbow range. A traction trebuchet would allow you to try to counter the enemy bombardment. You didn’t need the capability of firing huge projectiles, because you’re not trying to bust down thick stone walls, just harass the enemy siege crews, or maybe light their stuff on fire.
So I was hype for this episode. I have a high-end massive OLED and I killed the lights for this episode which I almost never do for anything. I was pretty seriously bummed out at the results. I then did a bunch of research and did a bunch of testing on other devices and came to the following understanding.
It’s probably not the showrunners’ or DPs’ fault. First, GoT is not shot in HDR. This is a problem that they had control over but HDR wasn’t really an option when the series started and they are basically being consistent. More importantly, HBO and our TV provider are seriously downgrading the quality of the picture when they send it over the wires. Low bitrate, tons of compression, etc. This will vary a little bit depending on if you’re watching on cable, satellite or streaming, but in order to save bandwidth they are all affected. When this comes out on BluRay it’ll almost certainly look much much better.
The net effect of this problem is that there’s no contrast across those blacks. If you’re on a mid-range LCD you’re seeing everything in a somewhat uniform mush of grays which makes it hard to see any detail. If you’re on a high-end OLED like me, you probably got an even worse experience. Since the OLED can actually go really black, it highlights every flaw from the compression mostly revealed as some seriously severe gradients and banding on the dark sky/fog/shadows.
It’s a total bummer, but we should be attacking the ISPs here for their cheap-ass behaviors and the government for not setting standards that forced fiber and dropped support for SD to free up bandwidth. Personally, I don’t want the producers gimping their product to work around these limitations since that will be with us forever.
I think most of the haters are being a little too critical here. I agree that the show’s storytelling and pacing has really suffered a bit since it diverged from the books. D&D’s inexperience shows here I think, but this episode probably isn’t the worst example of it and it actually did a lot of really impressive things.
First I’ll point out that some of the “good” examples you highlighted had some serious flaws. The last minute rescue of the Knights of the Vale (and Sansa’s secrecy) in TBotB was a pretty ham-fisted bit of story telling. Jon’s solo charge was silly. The tall center pile of bodies on the battlefield made no logical sense. Each did set up some pretty sexy visuals, especially the suffocation scare in the mass of bodies, but they required a serious suspension of disbelief. Loot Train with Bron’s last minute save of Jamie and them growing gills and swim bladders to make it out the other side of the lake unseen made my eyes roll. There’s plenty more, it’s par for the course with this show lately.
The flaws in this episode that really bothered me where the constant stream of close calls for every character. The fact that at the final moments it was basically our heroes and no one else left standing. They deployed the cavalry (and Ghost!) and the phalanx in a kind of a dumb way. All valid critiques, but there were great parts.
The scene with the flaming arakhs going out one by one was a hell of a good set up for everything to follow. The video compression sort of undermined it, but it was a great mood setter.
The utter chaos of the first charge was kind of amazing. I don’t know why we needed all our heroes literally on the front line of it and why they’d have them all survive, but from a tone perspective the chaos put you off balance for the rest of the episode. The complaints about the shaky cam and quick cuts are valid, but I bet if our heroes hadn’t all been in the middle of it people wouldn’t have cared as much above noting every sword thrust and grasping hand. It did absolutely crystallize the “we’re fucked” mood they wanted to set though.
The mid-air dragon battles were amazing to watch, especially when the breached the storm. The strafing runs were cool and I wasn’t expecting the NK to deploy that blizzard, that was fun. Then Jon and Dany crashing into each other in the storm and them basically being lost in it was tense. When Viserion struck at Drogon from below it was pretty intense and again when he struck at Jon on Rhaegal in that clawing dragon fight was a totally new experience. This was fantastic. If the picture quality was better I doubt anyone would complain about it.
When the wights topped the walls, the battle basically switched from the choas of the initial change into a horror movie. This was a great idea. Arya having her Jurassic Park moment in the library and the Hound and Beric basically stalking the halls like Aliens were both totally iconic.
The scene where the folks in the crypt are listening to the battle above and they hear the desperate pounding on the doors and the cries for help only to hear them go silent shortly after was creepy as hell. The hopelessness was palpable.
So yeah, there were a lot of scenes that were simply too convenient. The plot armor was a bit too thick. But the thematic storytelling was really effective.
I was in the same camp. When things were looking really bleak, I was getting the sense that “these guys are totally gonna lose” and that it was going to come down to Bran travelling back in time and giving someone a heads up so that they’d change what happened. As I was thinking it hated it because fucking time travel is almost always a lame solution.
In retrospect I think that sense of impending doom and Bran’s warging or greenseeing or whatever was just a huge misdirect to make you forget about Arya. And for me it worked. I wasn’t expecting the leap even though it now seems totally obvious. I honestly prefer this to just about any other outcome I can think of. If Jon had fought his way through the castle and concluded things with a Skywalker-esque duel with the NK would have been dumb. A arrow in the back from the wall would have been anticlimactic. Bran somehow using his magic to mind-fuck the NK would have be way too out of left field and kinda would have made the entire battle pointless.
I agree that they really copped out by not sprinkling in a few more key deaths throughout the episode. I hate when the heroes are literally the only ones left standing and they are nigh one invincible compared to the cannon fodder. But I still really enjoyed the spectacle of this episode every bit as much as I did Hardhome and the Battle of the Bastards.
I sincerely think that if everyone got to watch this in BluRay quality on a OLED TV in a dark room, they wouldn’t have 10% of the criticisms. They were too often yanked out of the moment by some crappy compression artifact or were having to look too hard to tell what was happening. When you’re not totally immersed it’s easy to start nitpicking the details.
That scene took place much earlier in the show. Melisandre told Arya of her destiny and she took off running. The weirwood tree is inside Winterfell. She should have reached it long before the NK. To have her fall from the sky at the last second was more of the contrived plot armor everybody has been talking about. Had she been stalking him?; lying in wait?; floating in a hot-air balloon? I would have been much happier if she died in the process just as Lyanna Mormont did.
Destiny is very tidy, but tactics aren’t. Either Bran could be killed by the wights or else the NK himself had to do so. If the former, then why didn’t the wights go after Bran in one giant swarm as soon as they breached the walls? If the latter, then what difference did Theon’s defense make? Are the wights mindless or are they controllable and directable? They seem to be both or either as the script requires.
The battle tactics bothered me as well, for reasons well-laid out here. I finally realized the reason for idiocy of throwing away thousands of the best fighters in Westeros for the sake of a pretty image. They won’t be mouths to feed in the full year it will take to regroup and get everybody to King’s Landing. (Did I say a year? I meant a fortnight.)
GoT didn’t used to be a comic book movie. This episode was, and not even a well-done imitation. The story was built around deeds and their moral consequences. It has to return to those in the last three episodes, and not do video game battles against faceless multitudes who can be killed without moral weight because they are EEEE-VIL.
Parting thought: did you see Sansa and Tyrion in that literal touching moment in the crypt? They’re getting back together. Told ya.
If the Night King is so easily killed by Valyrian Steel, why didn’t they prepare lots of arrows with Valyrian Steel arrowheads? Since NK was casually strolling around most of the time, he could have been easily picked off by archers without any ninja moves.
Dragonglass is specifically shown to kill wights at the dragon pit during the demonstration for Cersei.
So any bets on who dies next week? You know they are going to sucker-punch everybody after the light body count here. I wouldn’t put it past them to have Arya trip over a rock or catch a random arrow in the throat fired by a brigand in the woods somewhere. “Today you are The Hero; tomorrow you are worm food” is just the sort of “bittersweet” D&D would do.
My first reading of that scene was that they were about to commit suicide together.
D&D don’t do bittersweet. They do fan service. George does bittersweet.
As was pointed out above, there were only five swords that were made of Valyrian Steel, plus Arya’s dagger. None of those who wielded those weapons were going to give them up to be made into arrowheads.
Plus, the NK was riding a dragon most of the time. Once he left the dragon, he headed straight for the weirwood. After raising the dead, of course.
There is no more Valyrian steel to make arrows with. The entire world supply is maybe 4 swords and a dagger.
Not anymore, surely. Dany rained down hellfire on the North’s enemy, right in front of them. I would be surprised if the North feels anything but undying love for her. They could even add “Savior of the North” as one of her titles now.
Neither.
He can raise any dead body regardless how long ago they died (thus the crypts) and those risen stay risen until permanently killed by dragonglass, Valyrian steel or fire. We saw the demonstration one in King’s Landing keep fighting even after being cut in half. (Both halves!)
Meaning once a wight is actually killed, it’s dead forever and can’t be raised again.
Theon, along with most Ironborne, has consistently been shown to be an excellent bowman, perhaps unrivaled in all of the seven kingdoms. With a sword he’s mediocre, but with a bow and arrow he’s as deadly a combatant as you could face.
Jon demonstrated to Cersei (and us) that dragonglass kills wights when they brought one to King’s Landing.
Also, it appears they were going for the idea that the Night King was special, since he was created by the ritual of the Children while the other WWs were made by him. So Valyrian steel / dragonglass / fire to kill wights, Valyrian steel / dragonglass to kill regular WWs (who seemed immune to fire at Hardhome), and only Valyrian steel for the Night King himself.
It didn’t fall, she dropped it as part of a move.