Game of Thrones: The Longest Night
For a book fan, this episode sums up everything wrong with the direction the show has taken. For a casual show watcher, it was a thrilling ride. For everyone in between: well this is why you’re reading this, I hope.
Some will say that us book fans, or obsessed show fans who can’t let go, should shut up and let the people enjoy themselves. I disagree. Nitpicking about the flaws and imperfections of a movie or show is part of the enjoyment of watching. Let me explain.
A while back I was watching a movie – I don’t even remember what movie it was. It wasn’t a great movie. But it was a good movie. I enjoyed watching it. But I kept thinking about all the plot holes, and there were many. All the loose ends that never got wrapped up. And the things that could have been better. And I thought to myself, even though this movie wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t great, it succeeded at catching my attention and making me think about the plot. It entertained me for a couple hours, and stuck with me. For a few days, at least. The fact that I was still picking it over in my brain meant that something was right about it. There should be a term for a movie that does that.
That’s how I felt about this episode. It was enjoyable. It was thrilling. It was fun to watch. I would watch a sequel (and I guess that’s what the next three episodes are at this point). And I am going to complain about everything that could have been better.
Everything right about the episode: it was good action. Good battle movie. Dothraki lights out. Arya stabbing with the pointy end. Dragon action. Some satisfying deaths.
Everything wrong: it was a battle, not a war. Not enough deaths – none that felt unsettling. It’s becoming fan service. No character development. Arya stabbing with the pointy end. Too dark.
Let’s start with the title. The long night is supposed to take years, not hours. They didn’t even make it feel like days. The epic “long night” described in the Westerosi mythology lasted ten years. I don’t expect to have ten seasons of polar vortex (living in Chicago, one day of that IRL was plenty enough), but come on, the entire battle over in one night? It felt like a battle, not a war for civilization. The knight king never got further south than Canada.
Next, the character development. Or lack of it. Arya has spent half of her young life in training. (I’ll admit, I’m a little fuzzy about the ages in the show. But let’s assume she was about 10 at the beginning and ages a year each season. That makes her 18 now, which makes episode two a little less uncomfortable.) In training to be this super duper assassin. Instead she almost crumbled like a little girl. When she finally stabbed ther knight king it was most unsatisfying. She’s not doing anything more than what her water dancer instructor taught her in the the first season. Aside from the fact that now she is an adult (something made abundantly clear in episode two), she has seemingly learned nothing.
What happened to her Faceless Men training? When Gendry tells her that it’s “bad”, that it’s death, she replies that she knows death. That’s a euphemism for the fact that she’s a skilled necromancer. Yet she doesn’t make use of that skill when actually faced with the dead.
Just off the top of my head here are three scenarios where her necromancy helps her kill the Night King (NK).
- She somehow manages to steal the face of a wight and creeps up on him in that disguise.
- A little more dramatic: We see her sobbing over the body of Gendry. Maybe he started to rise and she stabs him, strips him and cuts his face off. Maybe she gets to him before. Then she creeps up on the NK with entrails leaking out and eyes semi closed. Genry/Arya gets up close to him. He drops his guts—it was random entrails picked up. He opens his eyes. They are normal blue eyes. Stab.
- Even more dramatic: We see Theon’s suicidal, quixotic mad dash towards the NK. The NK kills him and casually tosses him down. The NK starts his deliberate walk towards Bran the Three Eyed Raven. We see an undead Theon dragging himself behind. The NK looks back at undead Theon. Something resembling puzzlement passes over his cold zombie face. Theon reaches up and pull his face off. It’s Arya. Stab. (Of course, tactically it would be incredibly dumb to pull your face off before killing, but this is a show and people need the drama.)
It even makes sense for it to be Arya who kills the NK. She’s no Mary Sue. He can’t be an easy guy to kill. He’s survived for thousands of years. If he’s too easy to kill, then why not just have Bran sitting there with a crossbow in his lap and a handful of dragonglass arrows? Arya is special, she knows the secrets of death. It makes sense.
It’s not just Arya who seems like a character you could have taken better places in the show this season. Bran is the three-eyed raven, and he just sits there. Granted, that could be because the actor who plays him isn’t that good, but it seems like the show writers just don’t know what to do with that character.
Also gone is any pretense at trying to fulfill old prophesies like the Azor Ahai myths.
Seems like the writer reject GRRM’s mythos almost entirely, except for the dragons. We like dragons. They are cool. Also, zombies. But only for a couple episodes, now on to Cersei.
We’ve also lost what was the hallmark of Game of Thrones: all men must die. Valar Morghulis. This is a show that told you it would kill off your favorite whenever it wants. That moment when Ned loses his head still puts chills down my back whenever I reread it or rewatch it. Yet now we’re surrounded by redshirts. Nobody important died in this major battle or war. Jorah Mormont? You knew he was going to die. He was living on borrowed time since he had rock-cancer. Little Leanna Mormont? Yes, it was a jolt, but if you think she was a major character you’re kidding yourself. Bran should have died in sacrificing himself as bait. Brienne would have been a major shock. Maybe even Dany? It seems at this point that almost all of the major characters have 29 lives.
Wait, Bran die? Isn’t he the memory of civilization? Well yes, but it would have brought home that the aftermath of victory over evil isn’t always paradise. It would have been a great segue for Sam to say something like “we can save our own memories if we choose to remember” or some similar pseudo-profundity and start writing his book, which is how we know the story. But that would require that this be the last episode, and it’s not. We still have to beat Cersei, which feels like going home to deal with Saruman after defeating Sauron.
Three more episodes.
I look forward to watching, enjoying, nitpicking, and enjoying nitpicking.
Welcome to the blog dude!
(It’s @DucksForDuckGod.)Report
Yeah, Arya should have had the face of a zombie when she killed him. And then had it flicker away to show her face.
That would have run with stuff from before.
What I’m irritated about is not even that they did stuff wrong. It’s that a 1 second change here, a changed facial expression there, a camera cut to seeing someone run across rooftops there…
We’re talking minimal changes to make the product measurably better.Report
Yes, but how could the directors and cameramen have made all those better scenes when they couldn’t even see where the actors were? We’re lucky they managed to get Team Dead and Team Alive to run into each other.
There’s a very entertaining look at the battle at Slate: Professional analysis of the battle from someone at the US Army War College
But back to the main point, the major hurdle for the episode was that nobody has ever made an interesting battle scene that went on that long. Maintaining the viewer’s attention without over saturation was probably the primary driver of everything they showed, so they had to divide the action up into very discrete and very different aspects and periods so it wasn’t just slash, slash, and slash some more.
Having Arya do her typical faceless attack probably have been too predictable because we’ve all seen it before. Having her continue to defeat all the undead she encountered in open battle would have turned into a boring Mary Sue meets Alita: Battle Angel production. Having Bran use a crossbow would have been both anti-climactic and something we’d think the Night King would have foreseen, which would also apply to a variety of clever tricks or booby traps such as having Bran’s wheelchair parked on a pole rising up from the bottom of a Burmese tiger trap filled with Valerian steel spikes. Falling for such a trick would make the Night King less formidable and competent, and thus the victory less heroic.
Letting the war drag on for years might seem like a good idea, but it has a major flaw for storytelling, in that the foe has no personality. The Army of the Dead exists, and the White Walkers and the Night King exist, but not as interesting characters in their own right. They don’t argue over strategy or even talk, or plot against each other, or have any kind of complex plans, logistics challenges, or internal dynamics. The only thing they eat is screen time.
The difference in Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis illustrates this problem. For most of its run, SG-1’s villains were the Go’uld, who were very complex and well-developed characters who fought among each other like a bitter, dysfunctional family. They were probably more interesting than the good guys. In contrast, Stargate Atlantis’s foe was a race of vampire creatures with a hive mind and virtually no personality or internal dynamics at all, and the result was about as interesting as watching an Orkin man fight termites. Battling the Army of the Dead would have been similar. The threat is vast, but it’s also like fighting Ebola, cancer, or killer bees. There’s no real story there. It would just devolve into a boring chronicle of marches, retreats, and supply problems until all the viewers fall asleep.
So we could view the whole Night King/White Walker story line as a simple plot device, somewhat like a MacGuffin. There’s some bigger threat that requires the characters to forge alliances they wouldn’t have otherwise needed, and to unify behind a particular set of leaders to fight for a goal other than simply squabbling over who sits in the big chair. Once that new structure is established, there’s no need to maintain a continued thread about the spooky army of undead, which, if continued, would actually detract from the central plot.Report
I was not impressed by the “Professional analysis” tendered on Slate by Mr. Farley; but thanks for the link.Report
Generally the Army War College or the DoD folks do much better shredding Star Wars operations, which are generally awful by any standards.
One thing I’d comment on is that flaming arrows are actually pretty useless for anything except sending a signal. The tiny bit of fire doesn’t seem to do anything to the undead, as the killing is done by the obsidian arrowhead. All the fire does is keep the archer from being able to see his target in the dark because he’s got a big burning flame right in his sight line that blinds him to everything.
Another piece of bad writing was having to use a witch to light a fire in a trench that was meant to be lit on fire, while flames and torches were in open abundance all around the trench. Just holler down at somebody. “Hey, Unsullied guy in the helmet! Yes, you! Would you mind lighting that trench for us? Thank you.” You think that would’ve been part of the whole prepared plan of falling back behind the walls, but somehow nobody thought of mentioning it to anyone.
Another problem is that since the Night King turns out to be vulnerable to conventional weapons, arrows would’ve worked fine against him as he waltzed through the castle. Anybody could have taken him out.Report
The analysis fell apart in two strokes… the dead don’t have to attack, and the Cavalry charge doesn’t require a counter attack nor would it in any inspire one under ordinary circumstances, these are not ordinary circumstances, see phrase #1.
Admittedly… a siege of Winterfell would be an impossible plot to envision… but then they had to build a plot that introduces some sort of urgency on the Winter King.
A simple example would have been Bran having some sort of long weirwood ritual that could counter the army of the dead… which would have switched the urgency from the besieged to the besiegers… Thus also exposing Bran… with the gamble being worth the risk… and the (shhh) secret plan of luring the Night King to the Weirwood and away from his army. There… almost no extra scenes.
And, no unsupported shock cavalry charge in the dark against unshockable undead infantry.Report
Yeah I was wondering that on the analysis. Why charge into the dead? Just scythe in.. chop chop a bit then ride away-repeat. The Dothraki in the books weren’t even shock cavalry to begin with; they were mongol/hunnic style harassers and mounted archers.Report
Before carrying on, it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge that no matter how stupid the Dothraki charge might have been, it was beautifully filmed and scored. So much so, that I’m rather sure the idea of the cinematography is what drove the battle plan.
And part of me thinks that’s a pretty good way to devise a hopeless order of battle, by making sound aesthetic decisions.Report
I agree, they should have built in a reason why the Night King had to adhere to some sort of tight schedule or why he had to take Winterfell quickly, as opposed to besieging it for weeks while they ran out of food. Earlier episodes had already touched on the winter food rations in Winterfell, but there was no corresponding reason given for the Night King to be hurried or desperate. Their winter last years, so he could afford to be patient.
Adding such an element would have been trivial. “He has to acquire the +3 Raybans of Coolness buried in crypt before the new moon rises or he gets hit with an enormous tax penalty for the prior fiscal year, so he has to attack tonight.”Report
Well, I thought I just laid out a trivial element above… but I like where this is going; let’s keep accounting irregularities in the mix.Report
Face time on screen. Final season and the budget only stretches to six episodes (reportedly, Ep3 required 55 nights of shooting — not cheap). So, no masks or helmets for the major characters this year. The other big consequence… could only afford one episode finishing off most of the existential threats to Westeros — the Night King, the Dothraki, and the Unsullied are all off the board.
Are we still doing predictions? The dragons are not decisive, the odds at the moment are too lopsided, so the game gets “won” by trickery, treachery, and tragedy. My money’s still on Tyrion getting stuck with the throne.Report
I’ve read about the Sansa/Tyrion scenes and for some reason they really rankle me. Her telling him he was the best husband she had? I mean talk about rubbing salt in the wounds film makers. Admissibly the bar on Sansa’s husbands is so love you’d need to excavate to go under it but frankly I’d have liked it better if she’d shot him with a crossbow.Report
Tyrion has matured and mellowed a whole lot since she ran off on him. They’d make a wonderful couple now. It’s not like there are many eligible bachelors left after the Battle of Winterfell, and she’s not getting any younger.Report
I think he’d need to start offering some winning advice sometime soon and be willing to agree to a matrilineal marriage before she should even consider the possibility.Report
Why would Sansa want to shoot him with a crossbow? Its been so long since the books and season two that perhaps I’m forgetting some depravity… but my recollection is that he forbore his marital obligations owing to her age and sensitivities as well as providing some bulwark against the mechinations of Cersei until she absconded with Littlefinger in the confusion of the Purple Wedding. Perhaps as a Proxy for all things Lanister? But at this point in the story its hard to fathom Tyrion as a Lanister in anything but heredity
Unless the great reveal when Tyrion becomes King is that he’s the third Targaryen and assumes the throne after Jon (Aegon) and Danaery’s (heroic?) deaths. In which case, he marries Sansa and she becomes Queen just as she always wanted from episode #1. Full circle, fade to black.
Like any good epic poem we have to have death pairs… my guesses as of now are:
Jon kills Danaerys kills Jon
Jaime kills Cersei
Ser Brienne kills Mountain kills Hound (the big surprise, like the Dornish Prince)
Gendry kills Ser Ilyn Paine (last on Arya’s list) marries Arya and revives house Baratheon.Report
Well for one thing it’d free her up to marry someone else. Also, since- as I understand it- Tyrion hasn’t provided any useful council for something like four seasons, offing him wouldn’t cost her much.
I grant that as Lannisters go he’s the most decent one in the bunch which is much like saying he’s the least rabid rat in the rabid rat pack. That’s still not much of a reason to take him as a husband.
Finally, if she wants her house to survive- which clearly she does- Sansa needs to find a tolerable younger non-inheriting son who’s family is willing to wed him off matrilineal otherwise the Starks will be defunct. Rickon and Rob are dead; Jon is either a Snow or a Tagaryen; Bran is… ummm.. not fathering any kids and Arya patently won’t give a damn.
Admiteddly I just also am contrary. I never was deeply fond of Tyrion as a PoV character because Martin was so overweeningly fond of him (like Arya and Jon) but at least book Tyrion was funny and clever whereas TV Tyrion seems to be only mopey and incompetent. Frankly I think my gal Sansa should try to do better.Report
Thanks, I just wanted to make you type “I hate Tyrion Lanister.”
Though if I think seriously for a moment about what might be “better” for Sansa, I confess that I’m not sure we’ve met such a character who could help heal her wounds… I go back and forth between wanting her to have a fairy tale ending and wondering when she murders everyone in their sleep.Report
Yes, frankly the most unforgivable sins of the TV adaptation were their changes around Sansa and Ramsay. It was horrific.Report
On death pairs, I’m rootin for Dany and Jon to somehow die and Westeros turns back into seven Kingdoms again.
Or better yet! Something so Hollywood horrible that Martin goes “Holy Hell! I can’t let this ending stand! I have to finish my books to correct this abomination!! To the typewriter!!!”Report
I know broadly how I’d end it from where the writers have put us. Dany and Jon definitely have to go. Brienne is the only one who winds up happy.Report
Heh, GRRM cannot believe how fucking lucky he got that we’re all going to blame the shitty ending on the TV show and in our mind palaces construct a fantasy where he figured out how not to crash the landing.
This is the most meta deus ex machina ever.Report
You know what? You might be right about that. “I don’t know how to bring this spruce goose in for a coherent landing… wait, I just sell the whole thing to HBO and then the fans will blame them for crashing it! And I get rich!!”
Viewed from that angle it’s rather brilliant!Report
Amen… Seven Kingdoms for reelz this time.
Oh wait, wrong thread.Report
In other news, Sophie Turner just married Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers in the Las Vegas Elvis wedding chapel. (Daily Mail story)
Priyanka Chopra, married to Nick Jonas last year, was her maid of honor.Report
Well good for her! Getting to play Jean Grey and marrying a Jonas brother? My geeky gay social circles would agree that’s a good years work.Report
It also lets us freely speculate that it was an arranged dynastic marriage, uniting the movie industries of the United States and India with that of the United Kingdom, undoubtedly as part of some grand scheme.
Will Priyanka contribute tens of thousands of Bollywood back up dancers to the army of House Jonas and lay siege to Hollywood? Is Sophie already plotting to marry her firstborn daughter to Prince George of England?Report
I loved this episode, disagree with most of your analysis, and yet I relished your post enormously.
So, agreed re the joys of enjoying AND nitpicking.Report