I so hope this replaces the old version.
Worst battle plan ever.
“Hey, all the zombies are stopped staring at the lit trench”
“Think we should be killing them with flaming arrows or dragon’s fire or something?”
“Nah, let’s just stare at them back!”
The ridiculousness of nobody of importance dying despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of fast zombies with weapons made me honestly think Bran was gonna flick to the past or some other time travel crap.
No, her mission was never to stop the Night King per se. The reason she came to Westeros was to find the Prince Who Was Promised. She first thought it was Stannis, then Jon Snow. She only wanted to stop the Night King in order to protect Jon Snow.
Melisandre and Beric were the two surprising deaths to me in this episode. I assumed that Melisandre would still want to help Jon Snow take the Iron Throne. So her abandoning her life here doesn’t seem to make much sense.
So it is. Edited title.
Would it have killed them to have the sun rise toward the end so we could see stuff?
I just watched a YouTube clip with the showrunners and they said they’ve had Arya killing the NK worked out 3 years ago.
The showrunners also said Arya stabbed the NK in the same location where the Children of the Forest stabbed him with dragonglass to create him, using the Valryian steel to uncreate him.
Actually, the Night King and the Walkers employed the most sensible strategy, suggested by someone last week. They all hung back and used the Army of the Dead to breach the walls. They didn’t expose themselves until the wights had mostly won.
I just watched that. The speaker said it had to be Valryian steel to unmake the NK. Which makes little sense to me.
“Brown eyes, green eyes, blue eyes”.
Anyone else think that “green eyes” might be a misdirect now that everyone will think that green eyes = Cersei?
Is there anyone else in the show with green eyes?
Jon did tell her he would execute her if she came north again. And you know Jon. So she could wait for that or just go out on her own terms.
I thought I would like this more than I actually did. My complaints about the show has mostly been able the story structure and the lack of good character scenes that the show was so amazing at doing for the first 4 seasons (and occasionally after that). They really lost the ball on subtle, well written, amazing character scenes recently. But they’ve been good at spectacle. Even as the character and politics and overall story of the slow declined, the big spectacular moments improved. The battle at the wall, hardhome, the battle of the bastards, the Sept of Baelor sequence, the wagon train battle - all the big events were better than ever. So when I heard that they shot one of the biggest battle sequences of all time, and it took like 90 days to shoot, I figured they were going to get that one right, that whatever was missing this season, that was going to be amazing.
But… meh. I feel bad that I don’t like it that much because I know they put a shitload of effort into it. But for a well-made, very expensive, very difficult battle scene, there were surprisingly few iconic moments or great shots or interesting battle tactics or any surprises of any sort.
It was pretty much paint by numbers, exactly what you’d expect, even fewer twists and turns that you would expect. I thought we’d get a cool scene of someone we know being a part of the army of the dead, or significant character deaths that weren’t heroically perfect and telegraphed, or some sort of surprise, or something interesting, or someone coming up with a unique and interesting way to kill the night king, or Bran contributing in some unexpected way, or… something more than we got.
Bran, with all his pivotal importance as the three eyed raven, millenia long rival of the night king, didn’t actually do anything at any point besides be bait, did he? He didn’t warg into a dragon or a person or show us some sort of unexpected three eyed raven power or even serve some pivotal reconnaissance role.
The whole first hour had our heroes feeling like, safe, immortals surrounded by red shirts. They would absolutely swarm them over and over again with danger, situations they couldn’t possibly survive… and then we’d go to another scene, and then back, and oh look, all our important characters survived. It made the battle feel safe and boring. Nothing was at stake. You knew how this was going to go. There was no chance of a big surprise, like the Night King winning, or having one of our important characters die when even the smaller ones are immune to danger.
But only a couple of our heroes die. They die in the most heroic, relevant, telegraphed, predictable, perfect ways. The Night King loses because of a predictable case of being stabbed to death. Nothing really changes or shakes up the game or unexpected happens. There was no mass slaughter of beloved characters. No one even got an ugly, unheroic, unexpected death.
To give a counter-example, in the movie Serenity:
Wash was killed suddenly, without fanfare. Book had already died. Kaylee appeared to be fatally wounded. I’m sure the doctor would save her, except woops, the doctor just got poisoned and probably fatally wounded too. Firefly was only around for 13 episodes, and yet created some of the most memorable, beloved characters of all time. We loved those characters. When I sincerely thought that they were all going to die here, that this was the end of our beloved characters, I felt sick to my stomach, just watching their final moments, and possibly the failure of their mission. It was one of my most memorable movie experiences. The stakes felt real. It didn’t feel like the day would be saved. We were just going to lose characters we loved, and they might fail.
… On the contrary, it never felt like the characters in this episode were ever in danger, or that the outcome was ever in doubt. The dramatic tension wasn’t there. The feeling of being punched in the gut wasn’t there. I wasn’t invested, I was bored for most of it. Even though it had been created by an obviously huge amount of work, and it should’ve been really compelling, it just wasn’t.
Jon’s not Robb, or Danaerys. He wouldn’t have executed her.
The picture was so dark, I thought it was Arya.
Well, that was dark and it looked like white bits of fire extinguisher goop were sprayed everywhere just to ensure zero visibility. I also had to watch Arya vs NK three times to see whose hand stabbed NK.
I think the producers are watching uncompressed video on state of the art monitors. My TV is more than 10 years old and my Roku box is streaming video over wifi. They should have taken into account the capabilities of an average consumer TV setup.
I have to say, once it became obvious about an hour through that the only possible way to resolve the battle and still have three episodes left to go was to kill the Night King and destroy the whole army in one fell swoop I kept thinking “Get on with it, willya.”
I just rewatched one of the final scenes and they are in the crypt with the others who survived there.
Really disappointing episode
The wood in the trenches was a good delaying tactic (why they didn’t use dragon fire strafe the wights waiting is another story). But, basically her purpose was to be used to defeat the Night King. She helped the best she could (and tapped all of her power, apparently). Also her pep talk to Arya probably helped, who knows.
But once the Night King was dead there was no purpose to her life anymore. So she let herself die.
What do you think the Prince was Promised For? “The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors” - to defeat those terrors.
Absolutely not. She had no idea the Night King even existed when she came from Essos to help Stannis. Defeating the Night King was just something that became necessary after the fact.
Incidentally, when Melisandre met Danaerys she tried to suggest that Danaerys might be the “Prince Was Promised.” Missandei explains that in High Valyrian the word used is gender neutral, so it can mean “prince” or “princess.” What we’ve just seen pretty strongly suggests that it’s Arya and not Jon who is the Prince(ss) Who Was Promised. But then what is Jon’s purpose in all this?
Not true at all. She knew that the Long Winter was about to come and she needed the champion to defeat it. She doesn’t give a damn about Westerosy politics. She does about defeating the darkness.
After you said it yourself, it made no sense to you that she let herself die rather than have Jon take the Iron Throne… unless the Iron Throne didn’t matter to her at all except as a way to consolidate the armies of light to use against the armies of darkness.
If you’d like more evidence (because sometimes it’s difficult to know what was said in what medium), I’d invite you to the other thread.