My thoughts on Arya, The Night King and maybe the most polarizing Game of Thrones ever.
As the Night King walked into the weirwood, smirking as only the *unkillable* leader of a 100K (and counting) undead can and stared down an emotionless (and motionless) Bran I thought, “Well it’s certainly not going to end like this. There are too many episodes left.”
So when Arya did her very best Cat of the Canals leap onto an unsuspecting Night King it was for sure a momentary, “What the?” surprise. But after a beat, it really wasn’t much to have seen it coming. Of course, Arya had been set up for this very encounter, given the Valerian dagger by Bran, trained in just this kind of combat, told by Melisandre she’d close eyes of all colors, set about with a singular purpose to avenge all those in the world who would seek harm on her family.
It couldn’t have been Jon. Dude makes every tactical mistake in the warfare book (see: Battle of the Bastards, see: Walking the Watch out beyond the Wall, etc). And Daenerys already shot her shot with a “Dracarys”-led fire breath that didn’t even singe the bony eyebrows on the Night King’s head.
Everyone knew Theon maybe had “the balls” but wasn’t likely to be the man. And Bran’s warging only takes him so far. He’d seen the end and probably knew, in a Doctor Strange-like way that there were 14 million ways to die and only one out. This was it.
That it was Arya wasn’t necessarily surprising, but it sure was easy. 90 minutes of the dead running roughshod over Winterfell culminated in a leap, a grab, a stab, a shatter and silence. Seven plus seasons of filming, 1,000s of pages of source materials and eons of waiting for Winter to come was undone in an almost Thanos-like snap.
I know some folks appreciated the wow factor of the kill. It was a pretty damn cool move. Others were rightfully disappointed by the solution. The living army at Winterfell had like zero outs and yet still pulled off the W. Being annoyed is justifiable.
The Game of Thrones writers are a spectacular bunch. The moving of chess pieces to get just about every relevant character back to Winterfell rather seamlessly in the narrative is a feat all on its own. Staging a hectic and frenzied battle with this many moving character parts is damn near impossible. Were their problems? Sure, but they mostly tackled them.
But ultimately, the writers (and George R.R. Martin) had boxed themselves in. They had a Big Bad who was virtually indestructible which is tough enough. That this icy mother had nearly infinite *followers* at his back makes it all that much harder.
With this in mind, the writers really only had three ways out:
Option A: Night King wins, kills everyone, starts the real Long Night and the show’s effectively over. If this was the last episode, I think this would have been the way to take it. Akin to The Sopranos cut to black inside Holsten’s, HBO might have had a mutiny on its hands. But the GOT folks have always had a knack for the unexpected like this.
Option B: The folks at Winterfell are able to withstand the siege, drive back the dead and one (or a few) of the characters go 1v1 (or like 3v1) with the Night King and take him out. This would’ve also been problematic because he’s just way too powerful and an interaction like that would have been sliced and dissected to death.
Option C: We get the quick hitter and get out of the mess.
Of course, Option C was the way to go and the *girl* who’d once been “No One”, who’d carried a list of those she’d kill, who’d reasserted herself when she said, “A girl is Arya Stark, and I’m going home” was the one to carry it out.
No matter your opinion on how it all shook out, I think you have to view “The Long Night” as a feat of television production. The moment the Dothraki ride, arakhs-a-flre, into the cold dead abyss only to be extinguished with nary a sound was among the most tension-filled moments I can ever remember watching ever.
Melisandre lighting the trench at the last moment was beautiful. That it mattered not, was tragic.
Beric Dondorrian using his last life to save Arya and allowing Sandor Clegane to (nearly) fully complete his character’s arc (he’s got one more showdown to come with his half-dead bro) was gut-wrenching.
Sansa and Tyrion accepting their fate in the crypts as those who had hid away from the battle, those who had probably been pretty good for each other and those who would now probably die together was a beautiful moment.
The episode had so much like this that, in my mind, it made up for the uneven nature of the battle. It made up for the nonsensical moments like Arya hiding in the castle which somehow, with like World War 3 happening outside, was a quiet room.
If I had one (somewhat) major complaint to file it’s that the writers couldn’t pull the trigger on having this be more characters’ endpoints. For a show that never pulled punches on icing a main character when the time was right, they got soft in this episode. Characters like Grey Worm, Brienne, Tormund, Podrick and Gentry saw rather fitting narrative culminations last episode. This would have been a time to, sadly, let them go. There’s some credibility lost by having them all march fit and fiddle down to King’s Landing. This hasn’t been a show built on many happy endings. If they are saving all these characters to walk hand in hand into the sunset together it just wouldn’t fit at all with the previous seasons (or books).
But all in all, I found myself oddly satisfied with The Long Night. These are usually the kind of deus ex machina solutions that drive me nuts. This one didn’t and now we march south take out an even bigger bad.
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