To all you herbs complaining about this episode being poorly lit and not being able to see what was going on: 1) adjust the damn settings on your flatscreen for optimal viewing, and 2) go watch 2 full seasons of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on Netflix and then come back and whine. You know nothing of low contrast film until you've seen that show. 3) IT'S THE MIDDLE OF NIGHT IN A MEDIEVAL SETTING WHERE THE ONLY SOURCES OF LIGHT ARE TORCHES AND DRAGON FIRE - IT'S GONNA BE DARK!!!! Ahem. Where the fuck do you even begin after an hour
and twenty minutes of solid on-screen battle? This may be the shortest recap I
ever write because there’s not much to describe of the actual action, save for:
there was action. Much action. And much
death. I now understand what it’s like to be a sports fan caught up in the
hoopla of a play – I screamed commentary at the television, pumped my fist in
the air, leapt out of my seat – I looked like my dad the last time the Dallas
Cowboys were in the Super Bowl.
Let’s
clear the air first – ARYA KILLED THE NIGHT KING! ARYA. ARYA STARK. “No
one” came out of left field (quite literally) and succeeded where two dragons
and Jon Snow failed. This is the second Hail Mary pulled off by a Stark this
weekend (RIP, Tony) and I honestly don’t know which one was more satisfying.
Probably this one, because Arya survived her showdown with the Big Bad, and we
lost Iron Man.
But let’s rewind. The episode opens on Sam, who is quaking
in his boots, and then we trade off across the principal characters along the
different parts of Winterfell – Tyrion and the women and children are ‘safe’
down in the crypts, and he’s made sure to bring two casks of wine, because
sullen drinking is Tyrion’s superpower. Ser Davos is in position on the
battlements, with Arya and Sansa, to give the signal to light the trench. All
of our Northmen (and women!), knights, wildlings and former Night’s Watchmen
are on the left flank, Greyworm and the Unsullied are spread wide across the
field in front of the castle walls, and heading up the army of the living are
Jorah and the Dothraki. Jon and Dany ride the dragons out of play on a cliff
many miles away overlooking the landscape, and Bran, Theon, and the Ironborn
are holed up in the Godswood.
The anticipation is painful; the Dead are somewhere off in
the distance but they haven’t struck first. Which makes it all the more
ridiculous that Melisandre should come trotting across No Man’s Land, after
having been gone in Essos for what may have been months since Jon banished her.
What has she been doing in her absence? How did she get back here at just the
right moment? Has her prophecy feature fixed itself? We don’t – and probably
won’t – know. Davos is not having it – the audacity of this bitch! He glares in
disbelief as the Red Woman approaches Jorah, asking him to tell the Dothraki to
hold aloft their weapons, which she promptly sets on fire using her Lord of
Light magic. From where Jon and Dany stand, half the field goes up in flames,
and it’s a clever narrative device because it kindled a bit of hope in we the
audience, as it was designed to. They let her pass to enter the castle, where
Arya spots her. Another person on her kill list she’ll have to disqualify;
another bit of prophecy come to pass. Davos scurries down to the walkways to
intercept Melisandre, but when they meet face to face, he doesn’t kill her.
“There’s no need to execute me, Ser Davos – I’ll be dead before dawn,” she
reassures him. That seems good enough for all parties involved.
 |
| Just before it all goes south... |
The Dothraki charge across the field, accompanied by Ghost,
who we don’t see again for the rest of the episode because the dragons are more
important to this battle. The Unsullied rip off a few flaming boulders from the
trebuchets, and it seems like a solid start – until all the horselords’ flames
are snuffed out with alarming speed, like the Grim Reaper blowing out candles
on an octogenarian’s birthday cake.
The remaining Dothraki, including Jorah, retreat, and we
finally see what we’re up against – a literally fucking tsunami of wights. From here on out, shit just gets real. Our
heroes slay dead guys bravely but they’re really no match for the sheer mass of
Dead scrambling to take the castle. Dany decides she can’t hang back and burns
a swath out of the wight army, and Jon follows as they head into enemy skies –
where a blizzard makes it nigh impossible for anyone – dragon or human – to see
where the fuck they’re going. As the Targaryens are flying blind, we catch a
glimpse of the Night King astride Viserion. A mid-air dragon showdown happens,
Drogon narrowly escaping the icefire blown by his brother by inches. Jon
manages to get Rhaegal back to the Godswood to protect Bran, and Dany loses the
Night King and all sense of direction in the storm.
Meanwhile, the Unsullied are falling back, trying to get as
many soldiers into the walls of Winterfell as possible before they light the
trench. These poor bastards know they don’t stand a chance and barely even
flinch – many thanks for your service, guys. Davos gives the signal to light
the trench – but Dany can’t see it! This is the part of the story where the
plan spectacularly falls apart – without Drogon or Rhaegal to torch the trench,
the wave of wights are starting to scramble up the outer walls of the castle.
The archers with flaming arrows are having zero luck, because it’s winter AF
out there and nothing is sticking. Runners with torches are picked off by the
Walkers, and about now is the time Arya looks at Sansa and they agree Sansa is
better off in the crypts. Arya gives Sansa a blade, but Sansa has no idea how to use it, to which the only appropriate response was:
This is the first clue that Arya will be supplanting Jon's role as the slayer of the Night King, because as we all know: it was Jon who originally said this to Arya:
I think 984634569096 people screamed “LIGHT THE
TRENCH” (myself included) before Melisandre sauntered out there and lit it up
magically. The Lord of Light must really have wanted them to sweat it, because
it took a solid two minutes of chanting, and in the heat of battle two minutes
is more like twenty. So the trench goes up in flames and for a brief moment, it
holds the wights at bay. Theon tells Bran that the trench is lit, knowing that
doesn’t bode well for their future. Bran promptly tells Theon he’s out and then
his eyes go white, meaning that while the whole of humanity north of the
Riverlands is fighting to keep him alive, Bran is warging into some ravens, who
we follow as they stalk the Night King enroute to Bran’s location. Turns out,
the Night King is multitasking – he telepathically commands the wights, who for
the past minute or two have just been standing still in front of the trench, to
kamikaze themselves onto the fire to make a body-bridge to cross over. So they
start doing just that, and before long, the Dead are making towers out of
bodies to breach the walls of Winterfell. Our heroes fall back, and the Hound
is not doing well between the fires
and the undead hordes. Edd really isn’t doing well – he died after saving Sam,
taking a knife through the back of his head. And now, his watch has ended.
The tension really kicks up a notch because the wights are
getting over the walls like they’re all-star pole vaulters and the courtyard is
overrun with them. I had been holding it together pretty well until 9:45pm EST,
because that was the precise moment when Lyanna Mormont was crushed to death as
she killed the wight-giant that busted down the gates to the courtyard. In a
classic David and Goliath moment, the little girl charged the giant after
having been batted away like an insect, and as he plucked her up in his fist
she drove her sword into his undead eyeball, saving many lives with her own
short one. I’m still not okay, if you were wondering. The rest of our heroes
are besieged but manage to keep saving each other. Arya goes full Jedi with her
dragon glass weapon and gets knocked across a roof; she flees inside the
castle, only to find it increasingly infested with wights.
As Arya navigates her way across the castle, Jon and Rhaegal
manage to bum rush the Night King and Viserion before he can reach the
Godswood, where a vicious dragon fight happens midair, talons scraping and jaws
clamping down on necks – I did a lot of flinching and cringing during this
sequence so I can’t really recall exactly how it happens, but the Night King
gets kicked off his dragon and plummets down to the field full of dead bodies
below. Rhaegal wipes out himself, leaving Jon on foot in the same field. Dany gets a clean shot at the Night King and Drogon blasts him with enough fuel to melt a city block; the minute we waited to see whether or not she succeeded consisted of me screaming “FLY AWAY FLY AWAY CLEARLY HE’S NOT DEAD FUCKING FLY AWAY!” Unsurprisingly, the motherfucker is still standing when the smoke clears. HOW!!?!?!? How is he immune to dragon fire!? Hmmm, who else do we know that cannot be burned? Is the Night King a secret Targaryen too!? Prob not, but seriously - WTF?
This
is Jon’s obligatory run-head-on-into-a-strategically-moronic-situation moment,
so he charges the Night King, but a mano-a-mano never happens because the Night
King just smirks and resurrects all of the recently dead bodies within 10
square miles, including the majority of the bodies in the field separating him
and Jon.
They get within speaking distance of each other and all Jon manages to say is: "BRAN!" Dany tells him to go, so Jon bolts for the Godswood to try
and beat the villain to his brother, leaving Dany astride Drogon in the field, which
is the dumbest fucking thing this woman has ever done, because the dead aren’t
afraid of the dragon so they just scramble right up on his backside and start
stabbing him like a rotisserie chicken. Dany gets kicked off as Drogon flees
for the skies, and who should be waiting to save her but Lord Friendzone
himself – Jorah Mormont.
Meanwhile, the civilians down in the crypt are now being savaged
by the resurrected Starks and they have Jon to thank for their trouble. I have to say,
this was so obvious and predictable I rolled my eyes and groaned – oh, you mean a
place where they store corpses is going to become problematic when the dude
you’re fighting can raise the goddamn
dead!?!? Varys, Gilly and Sam, Missandei and some others manage to hide in
a small area behind a sarcophagus, and Sansa and Tyrion wind up hiding in the
back behind another one. This former forced couple spent the earlier part of
the evening making small talk about how Tyrion was the better of Sansa’s
husbands and though they seem like they could get along now, the “Dragon Queen”
would always be between them; divided loyalties do not a happy marriage make.
Huddled together facing certain death, Sansa pulls out the dragon glass knife
Arya gave her, and they hold hands (Tyrion kisses Sansa’s hand, which would
have been sweet if the sound mixing wasn’t brimming with horrific death sounds)
before silently agreeing to pull a Butch and Sundance to try and help the others.
Back in the castle, Arya has managed to ninja her way out of
some sticky situations but she’s outnumbered on a battlement up high. About
the same time, Beric Dondarrion has been screaming at the Hound for help, but
Clegane is frozen by the futility of their fight. Beric points to where Arya is
getting her ass kicked, conveniently giving the Hound the pick-me-up he needed
to re-enter combat.
Arya and the two miserable old shits fend off wights in
many narrow hallways, Beric taking several hundred shivs to the kidneys to give
the other two time to get ahead. The three manage to barricade themselves in
the room that just so happens to have Melisandre in it, and Beric dies for the
7th and final time. It’s strange that Arya should find solace from
people who once topped her Kill List, but there she is, lightly mourning
Beric’s definitive passing, listening to the Red Woman’s assurances that the
Lord of Light brought Beric back to life so many times to fulfill a specific
purpose, which was now fulfilled. She reminds Arya that the last time they met,
she told her:
Melisandre repeats her prophecy, only this time she says: “brown ones, greens ones, and blue
ones,” emphasis on blue because the entirety of the Dead army have blue eyes.
She’s building Arya up to something, and the last bit of encouragement she
needs to set about the task we now know she’s about to complete is a direct
quote from her beloved ‘dancing’ master, Syrio Forel:
NOT TODAY!!!!!!!!! C’mon, you know you screamed it in
response.
The Godswood was breached and besieged by wights earlier,
but somehow Theon Greyjoy has managed to outlive and outlast all of the threats
to Bran’s life. Which sucks, because he’s def out of arrows and Bran is still
MIA doing Three-Eyed Raven sightseeing. The next few minutes are a tense supercut of Jon trying to
get past the hysterical ice fire of a masterless Viserion to get into the
Godswood, Dany and Jorah fending off wights, and Theon biting his nails as the
Night King cometh with the White Walkers in tow. Can't wait until someone inevitably dubs the House of Blue Leaves song from Kill Bill over that part. Bran snaps back to reality
just in time to absolve Theon of his sins before he charges the
Night King, getting impaled with his own spear immediately. A
way more dignified death than I ever would have pictured for Theon Greyjoy – he
proved useful and brave in the end. He even got a "You're a good man, thanks" from Bran - which is more than Meera Reed got for her sacrifices. Perhaps this means we will be seeing more of Meera, and Bran knew as much so he didn't give a final farewell?
As the Night King slow walks his way to Bran, Jon is still
trapped on the sidelines by Viserion, and Jorah takes a few too many cuts to
the gut. Bran is a sitting duck, the Night King is about to draw his sword –
when out of NO WHERE, Arya leaps, Catspaw blade drawn, for the Night King’s
back.
He spins around and catches her by the throat, causing her to drop her weapon
– which she then promptly recovers with her right hand, shoving the Valyrian
steel dagger into the fucker’s belly, shattering him, causing a chain reaction
of exploding White Walkers and collapsing ice zombies.
Jorah lives long enough to know they’ve won, and dies in his
Khaleesi’s arms. Thus passes the House of Mormont, and I have to say, aside
from the fact that Jon wasn’t the one who did the Night King in, this was the
most shocking thing to happen in the episode. I assumed Jorah would die, or Lyanna would die - but not both.
The battle won, her destiny fulfilled, we follow Melisandre
outside the walls of Winterfell, where she greets the sunrise. She casts aside
the magic necklace that’s been keeping her tight all these years and she
literally disintegrates, because there weren’t already enough GOT/Avengers
parallels.
Let's now take the time to remember our fallen characters, none of whom were so vital to the story to really disrupt the narrative - this does not bode well for the coming episodes; I have a feeling Bronn is going to make good use of that crossbow. Thank you for your service, ladies and gentlemen!
 |
| Valar Morgulis |
There will be countless articles and talking heads
complaining about the fact that Arya wound up killing the Night King and saving
the day; that it was undeserved and too much of a deus ex machina to be
considered legitimate. I doubt Arya will be the slayer of the Nights’ King in
the books – we’ve diverged so far from the source material, I think the only
outcome that will be the same is who winds up sitting on the Iron Throne at the
end. But this is a definite nod to the sort of thing George RR Martin was
trying to do with the Song of Ice and Fire series – upend tropes in the fantasy
genre. For the past 3 seasons, Jon has been built up as the Night King’s
primary adversary, the most heroic of all of our protagonists… so it’s actually
very satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way that for all Jon’s blustering
chivalry and selflessness, it was ultimately his stealthy assassin of a sister
who killed the Night King, not in the midst of some epic duel, but by
surprise attacking him. Jon has won against all
odds in countless situations up until now – how much of a bummer is it that he
failed to get within ten feet of the Big Bad? Can’t you hear GRRMcackling
with glee in his livingroom?
Plus – it’s so deliciously
poetic that the very blade that nearly killed Bran was the instrument that saved his life. The origins of this knife are so much more interesting
to me now; we don’t actually know who the original maker was, only that
Littlefinger blamed Bran’s assassination attempt on Tyrion using the blade as
justification. It popped up in that book Sam had been reading in the Citadel
that talked about the White Walkers – how old is this thing really?
Anyway, Melisandre brought up some interesting points about
destiny and prophecy before her death that seem consequential to what happens
next. She implied Beric’s multiple resurrections had been necessary to lead him
to his final stand; orchestrated by the Lord of Light, to help Arya kill the
Night King. Does this mean that Arya is the Prince(ss) that Was Promised aka
Azor Ahai reborn? (Azor Ahai is the messianic figure that ended the Longest
Night millennia ago and was prophesied to return to save the world from
Darkness again)? Well, no – there’s a lot of other criteria that Arya doesn’t
meet, including being born or resurrected among salt and smoke, awakening
dragons from stone, and be descended from the Mad King Aerys (if certain hedge
witches are to be believed). The only two people who meet this criteria are
Dany and Jon (Jon didn’t wake any dragons, but if you consider him the dragon,
I guess it could work). Following Melisandre’s logic, Jon was also resurrected at
the Lord of Light’s discretion – which means his purpose has yet to be
fulfilled, perhaps as the Prince that was Promised? Just because the Night King
is dead (it would be super Tolkienesque if he wasn’t like, dead dead, but I guess he could still be somewhat alive in a weird
Voldemort type scenario) doesn’t mean the world has been delivered from
Darkness! Cersei can’t raise the dead but honestly her type of banal evil is
scarier to me than the existential evil the Night King represented. I doubt Cersei
is a bigger obstacle than the Night King, there have been too many symbolic
hints left by the White Walkers. Perhaps a greater cosmic evil has yet to reveal
itself, and the Night King was just the symptom?
Another interesting tidbit about this prophecy is that, like
Azor Ahai, the Prince(ss) will re-forge Lightbringer, the mystical flaming
sword, by sacrificing someone they love. So: either Dany is the Princess, and
Jon was reborn to die at her hands to make the weapon, or Jon is the Prince,
and Dany will be killed by him. Remember that prophecy from waaaaay back when
Dany lost her dragons and went on that magical mystery tour at the House of the
Undying? The warlock told her she would be with her dragons through “winter to
summer and winter again.” Those exact words just cropped up in the song Pod
sang about Jenny Oldstones last episode; Dany just survived one winter, the
coming episodes will be in the warmer climates of the South… perhaps another
winter is upon us?
At any rate, Melisandre's emphasis on the different colored eyes Arya will shut gives hope to my pet theory that Arya will wear Tyrion or Jaime's face to fool Cersei into getting crossed off Arya's kill list:
I think if this comes true I won't give a shit about who 'wins' the Game of Thrones - I will have gotten my happy ending.
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