New thread merged with existing thread.
It wasn’t quite out of left field as it seemed at the time. As Stanislaus notes, we’ve seen her being trained as an assassin for several seasons. Within the episode, Melisandra’s meaningful pause before “…and blue eyes” was a clear message of what Arya had to do, although I didn’t catch it until after the fact. Bran made a show of giving her the dagger last season, at which point some fans guessed at its purpose. There was the duel between Arya and Brienne last season where Arya showed off her hand-switch trick. And in the first episode of this season, Jon says “how’d you sneak up on me?” when she suddenly appears behind him in the Godswood, the same place she’ll sneak up on the Night King.
And if you believe this was all intended foreshadowing, then also note that when Arya appeared back in Winterfell, Bran was surprised - he thought she’d go to Kings Landing because “Cersei is on her list.” Bran has said his visions are jumbled, so he doesn’t always know the order in which things happen. And for the prominent people Arya has killed, Walder Frey has brown eyes and the Night King has blue eyes. Which leaves green eyes, Cersei’s eye color. It will be interesting to see if Arya’s list or the valonqar prophecy wins. If Arya is wearing Jaime or Tyrion’s face, does it still count as fulfilling the prophecy?
dupe post
Ooh, I like that. Perhaps even better would be replacing his golden hand with Wolverine/Freddy Krueger dragonglass claws - it seems like a lot of his weapons training would translate to something like fairly well.
I’m subscribing to this newsletter. I can see this all ending with Gendry on the Iron Throne. All that paddling had to add up to something.
In “Inside the Episode,” the writers said that they have known for “about three years” that Arya was going to kill the Night King. Since Melisandre mentioned “blue eyes” to Arya when she met her in season 3, filmed in 2012, they evidently didn’t know about Arya’s role when they wrote that, so it’s a retcon.
[Moderating]
Note that in the show, the “valonqar prophecy” doesn’t exist. It isn’t included in Maggie’s prophecy to Cersei. Let’s stick to what we know from the show.
Colibri
The early direwolves were real dogs, as the young direwolves were about the size of a large dog.
The later direwolves were CGI. Ghost in the last episode was CGI.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but one of the biggest challenges in CGI has always been hair/fur. We’ve come a long way and can now make it realistic, but I’ll bet it’s hella expensive to get it exactly right. Dragons are easy by comparison.
The Direwolves were quite clearly meant to be magical creatures sent by whatever magical force to protect the Stark children. There was exactly one puppy for each Stark, and a special white one for the Targaryan Stark. A little hint there about his true parentage, I guess. Or just white as Snow. Ghost was also the first to bring back a piece of a dead wight to prove that they exist. And maybe I’m remembering wrong, but didn’t he have something to do with the discovery of the dragonglass weapons originally?
Well, you would have liked it if the attack of the dead had gotten more screen time, drama, build up, and so on; it doesn’t follow that it should have been done that way. I liked it fine the way they showed it; I think it’s good narrative and thematic consistency to have what seemed poised to be some grand good vs. evil struggle as we’ve seen it unfold hundreds of times before turn out to in the end not matter all that much, since well, in the real world, the grand good vs. evil struggle doesn’t really mean that much after all. What matters is people muddling through, and trying to deal with things as best they can.
Jorah didn’t get an arc as such, he just died at the end. Theon’s death was meaningful and completed his journey as the boy/man torn between Winterfell and Pyke so fair shout there. Melisandre’s death didn’t move me as much but was the natural finish to her story. So I’ll amend my claim to nearly all the characters, and stand by the fact that so much more could have been done with e.g. Brienne, Jamie and Tormund that it isn’t even funny, and that Sam should never have survived that battle.
Yeah, that really bugged me. The Three-Eyed Raven has a lot of powers that could have been very useful against the Army of the Dead, from long before they hit Winterfell. He should have been scouting them, looking for weaknesses, launching harassing attacks, etc.
For example, here’s a scene that would have solved a lot of problems with this story. We complained that Tyrion was useless, that the Three Eyed Raven was useless, and that the ending was too much of a Deux Ex-Arya. Well, how about this:
We had the scene where Tyrion talks with Bran all night. Move that back a day. The next morning, Tyrion goes to Gendry and says, “I need all the dragonglass shards left over from shaping the weapons.” Gendry points him to giant piles of shavings, bits, etc. Everyone else is busy, so Tyrion gets some children and women and they all start loading the dragonglass shards into buckets. Then they take them down into the Crypt where they are all preparing to hide out the battle, and Tyrion says, “Okay children, this is what we need. You need to find the longest, sharpest pieces. Then dip one end in this pitch, and attach this…”
The night of the battle, Tyrion and the children haul the boxes up to the top of the walls of Winterfell, and start pouring their creations out in a line across the top of the wall. Cut to the point of view of a raven flying over Winterfell. It starts to swoop down. Then another, and another… Cut back to the battle.
Now, we have the battle as usual, with the White Walkers hanging back where the humans can’t get to them and letting their minions overrun Winterfell. Our heroes are pinned against walls like they were, trying to survive. The Night’s King is marching for Bran. Arya is stalking him, but she can’t get close. Too many dead. All looks lost.
Then, suddenly Bran starts Warging. Night King looks confused. Then, out of the sky comes hundreds of Ravens, each one clutching a few dragonglass darts in its claws. They start dive-bombing the white walkers, taking them out with sprays of dragonglass flechettes. As the white walkers are killed, the dead that each one animated fall all over the place, giving our heroes a chance to survive. And in the confusion, Arya gets close enough to the Night’s King to kill him.
If they had done something like this, having our heros survive wouldn’t have felt so cheap. Tyrion would have had a reason to be at Winterfell, and the combinaton of his brains and Bran’s powers and Arya’s training save the day. We have a good explanation for why the heroes survived, and it would have made for an awesome visual and a surprise that would have left viewers cheering. And the Night’s King’s death wouldn’t have felt so inconsequential, because it wasn’t just a girl sneaking up and stabbing him, but everyone important coming together to bring their own strengths to the table and take a whole bunch of steps necessary to separate the NIght’s King from his huge army and make it possible to get close enough to kill him.
I said in the other thread that this reminds me of the end of WWII. Not the manner of victory but the speed with which the US and Russia went from Allies shedding blood and treasure on each other’s behalf to defeat a common foe; to manoeuvring for the spoils of war (e.g. Rocket science); to the Cold War. Victory is sweet but the world doesn’t stop turning.
If they’re not going to any use fighting the dead, then they absolutely should have been held out of the battle. Either the good guys win without them, and they’ll be at full strength for the battles against Cersei, or the good guys will lose and they’ll be overrun by the dead in turn.
I wouldn’t want to be the guy to tell the Dothraki that they’re useless, though.
Outside of the unforgivable forward deployment of the artillery, I’m actually willing to mostly give a pass on the tactical stupidity. What frustrated me the most was the internal contradiction of the episode - the wights are an unstoppable swarming mass that can wipe out thousands of Dothraki in seconds, can grind through a couple dozen ranks of Unsullied phalanxes deployed in tight, well-ordered formations in just a few minutes, but 3 guys standing on a pile of corpses desperately flailing about can survive indefinitely. No. They. Can’t. Either they’re all dead, or the rank and file should have performed much better. I can happily suspend disbelief for all kinds of things, but I can’t deal with the show telling me simultaneously that the wights are unstoppable and that they can be held off indefinitely.
And frankly, that’s almost just down to editing. They probably have lots enough footage that you could just show more regular troops fighting and less named characters isolated from those regular troops getting swarmed, and the whole thing would hang together much better.
Yeah, our expectations of consistency have to be tempered by the difficulty of filming something like this. There are hundreds of people involved, all working on different parts. For example, it could well be that the CGI guys simply made the battle too ‘exciting’ by showing the awesome power of the army of the dead, not even knowing that another team was filming scenes where the heroes were successfully fighting them off.
Then you get last minute changes for logistical reasons, script re-writes at the last moment, things that looked good in the script but looked lousy in post production and had to be cut, etc.
If you ever watch how some of these grand spectacles are filmed and edited, it becomes like the dancing bear - the wonder isn’t how well it dances, but that it dances at all.
As for the Dothraki, instead of a mounted charge against an unknown enemy they should have been sent out before the battle to find the enemy’s flanks and try to get behind the enemy and harass them. Or better yet, they should have been used to try to get to the White Walkers and take them out or keep them occupied to make them unable to control the dead effectively.
But then we wouldn’t have had that awesome scene of them riding into the darkness, then watching their flames go out one by one. That was pretty cool.
I would like to point out that, other than Craster’s sons, no living thing has ever gotten to within spitting distance of the Night’s King much less stabbing distance. The simple fact that she had the skills to get that close undetected and the skills to perform the deed makes the feat quite spectacular in my opinion.
A second Game of Phones hotline parody: Game of Thrones Hotline for Confused Fans #2 - YouTube
They were far from useless. The Army of the Dead had several giants when they went through the Wall, but only one of them made it to Winterfell so clearly the Dothraki charge managed to take out some of the heavy hitters. There just weren’t enough of them to handle all the wights, but then again there evidently weren’t enough soldiers in the entire army to handle all the wights.
This may very well be one of the coolest suggestions I’ve seen about this show. Outstanding idea. Well done.
Now I’m just lamenting the lost opportunity to show this.
This kinda puts into perspective what a disappointment the white walker threat ended up being.
Arya is OP (overpowered).
She’s a one woman wrecking crew. She kills the Freys (all of them). Little Finger. Ser Meryn. The Waif. She’s beaten the Hound and tied with Brienne. And of course the Night King.
There are more than just those but that is what I can remember.