Okay, I can see that. But I’ll have to go find that episode and listen for context, because it matters. But going with your explanation, they would still want to help defeat the dead. The many-faced God must be a God of the living, of which death is one aspect. The Night’s King wants to remove the living completely. I don’t think total annihilation is an aspect of the Many Faced God. So I would think that if in this case the Red God are facing down the Night’s King, the Faceless Men would serve the Red God in that battle, would they not?
And if you are a Faceless Man, what better way to serve than to find a Stark, the natural defenders of the north, and train her in their ways so she can become a highly effective fighter? Or maybe there was a prophecy that suggested it might need to be Arya who kills him, so they sought her out and helped prepare her. Then let her go.
There is no real other explanation for why she survived leaving the temple. Jaqen could send a dozen Faceless Men after her. Leaving the Faceless Men was supposed to be a death sentence, as I recall. But they spared Arya. The waif was just her graduation test, because no other Faceless Men followed her.
This would also give us an opening for a surprise twist: After the battle is won and everyone lives happily ever after, Jaqen shows up and says, “And now that her duty is done, a girl must still pay the Many Faced God what she owes.” And kills her.
In the TV world they probably won’t do that, because it would preclude the sequel, “GoT 2: Arya Stark, Stabbing for Justice”.
Indeed. That would have been great. I’ve no clue what the explanation for that could have been (except for the worst possible one), but this would have more than made up for all the clichés and other flaws of the episode. Millions of jaws would have dropped. :eek:
White Walkers are shown shattering conventional steel weapons by grabbing them or hitting them with an ice sword. But they smack around Sam and Jon without apparently having any effect more than a normal blow. And as has been said, one carried Craster’s Last Son in his arms for a long time without freezing him.
Does he? I don’t think so. He says that the red god is owed three lives. Which would be the lives of people who should have burn to death and didn’t (since he’s the god of fire). I don’t think he says he worships or follows him.
As for the rest I wish the faceless men plot wouldn’t have ended with Arya leaving them, and that they had (through Arya) to play at the end of the series. But it doesn’t it’s going to happen. They appears to just have been a tool whose only use was to turn Arya in a bad-ass assassin.
I only managed to slog through the first four pages of this thread. So much negativity! I just sat back and enjoyed the ride, and man, what a ride! I don’t think I blinked for 83 minutes. Even though it was one long battle scene, I was captivated from beginning to end.
Yeah, more characters survived than I expected. Yeah, some of them probably shouldn’t have. I’m not about to declare the episode “garbage” or even “disappointing” because of it.
And I watched on a good TV in a darkened room and saw everything just fine. It was supposed to be dark, and it fit the mood perfectly.
(One of my favorite probably-never-happened-but-it’s-a-good-story stories involved the filming of the Helm’s Deep battle in The Two Towers. Sean Astin reportedly asked Peter Jackson where all the light was coming from, and Jackson replied, “The same place as the music.” I get it, but I also think folks here would be picking this episode apart just as much if it had too much light instead of not enough.)
I don’t think you should assume even that. He’s not worshiping nor even pretending to worship him. These deaths were due for whatever reasons, and as a worshiper of death he needed to fix that. But they could have been due to any other god , or even to a mortal who had paid a the temple so that someone would die. They were owed to the red god simply because they were about to burn alive. If Arya had rescued them from drowning, he would have similarly said that three deaths were owed to the drowned god, for instance. Owing the deaths to a specific god or individual doesn’t mean that his allegiance lies with this particular god or individual.
I wish. Or anything else for that matter (she could also leave with him to serve as the member of the cult she was supposed to be for the rest of her life). As I already mentioned, I’m terribly disappointed that there’s no big reveal wrt the faceless god (or about anything else, for that matter) while, like you, I was convinced they let her go for a purpose, that would turn to be a huge twist.
But seemingly, the writers didn’t really care about this kind of background elements, and big surprises, reveals or twists aren’t on the menu. It seems the show is headed towards a perfectly classical and unsurprising resolution, as that of the army of the dead and night king plot was during this episode. We’ll see during the three remaining episodes, but frankly, I’ve now abandoned all hope that the show is going to be subtle in any way. It jumped the shark.
I assume now that the only purpose of the faceless men was to train Arya, they let her go because they had served their purpose and Arya needed to return to the main plot with her superpowers, and the show writers didn’t care about whether it was making sense or not or about why the faceless men would let her leave.
I will be very happily surprised if they play any part in the remaining episodes.
But wouldn’t it be known if the actor playing the faceless men guy was to appear this season (I assume they have to use this actor, since he’s in fact the only faceless man we know)? Or is this kind of info kept secret until the corresponding episode is aired?
The actor playing Jaqen and the actress playing the waif have been seen in Sevilla during the recording of the show along with Maisie Williams. However the author points out that this could be a misdirection or that they could have just been visiting, and that it happened previously with the actress playing Shae even though she was dead for good. Still, it ramps up my hopes
Is anyone speculating about the effect of the Night King’s grip on Arya? Will it mark her the way it marked Bran? Or is the mark on Bran now gone because the Night King was destroyed?
The visuals for the show have always been part of its draw. The shots of the people in the crypt looked like Renaissance paintings. The failure of the visuals might be an unconscious part of the reaction to the murky did-I-see-that fog of the outdoor battle scenes. GoT is supposed to look cool, not incomprehensible.
The flip side of that is that the visually cool is incompatible with verbal cleverness. We’ll have to see which way they swing for those last three episodes.