The Long Night

On this, the third episode of Game of Thrones' final season, we come to what the show has pretty much been building toward for its entire run. Winterfell is besieged by the Army of the Dead, and the fate of humanity and all the characters we care about rests in the balance.

Naturally, any episode this big is going to be big on spoilers, so I'm going to put the cut pretty early here.

As in now.


The Long Night is one of Game of Thrones' great battle episodes, like Blackwater, the Watchers on the Wall, and the Battle of the Bastards before it. And like those, except maybe Blackwater, when we were rooting for people on both sides, the good guys ultimately win, even if it's at great cost (to be fair, you could also argue, given their motivations, that the Wildlings in Watchers on the Wall were also "good guys," though we were clearly meant to be on the Night's Watch's side in that episode.)

If there's anything really shocking about this episode, it's that the good guys - as in, the living - win decisively. Even though it looks really bad right toward the end, the pyramid-scheme nature of the Army of the Dead means that the final moment, in which Arya stabs the Night King with a Valyrian steel dagger (I believe it's the one Joffrey armed the assassin with in episode two, actually,) we see every single monster - White Walker and Wight alike - fall dead. This threat, which has been haunting us for the whole series, is over.

In a lot of ways, this feels like the Episode Nine of the series - in previous years, particularly in the first four seasons, we'd get either massive battles or shocking deaths in the penultimate episode of the season, with an episode at the end to serve as denouement.

To me, the shocking thing is that the Army of the Dead story - indeed, the most mystical, supernatural threat, is no longer an issue, meaning that Cersei really is the final boss of the series.

After a fight like this, does that feel anticlimactic? Perhaps. Lord of the Rings (the books, obviously not the movies) ends with a weird story of Saruman, now no longer magically powerful, having taken over the Shire with a group of thugs that the Hobbits need to fight off - a strangely low-stakes conflict given how big the stakes of the rest of the series had been. Cersei's terrible, and her victory would mean a really shitty time for Westeros (as if it hasn't had a really shitty time for a while now) but it's nowhere near as bad as literally everyone dying.

I suppose there's an element here of saying "ok, well, once the big fight against the ice demons is done, what must be done to actually ensure a better tomorrow?" It's something that Martin felt unsatisfied with in Lord of the Rings. Indeed, I don't know how Sansa and Daenerys, for example, will deal with one another once the dust settles and the question of the North's sovereignty comes up again.

But let's wait to see what the remaining episodes of the season look like. Let's talk this battle.

To be honest, the count of named-character deaths was actually lower than I expected. Let's go through them:

Dolorous Edd - given that the whole point of the Night's Watch was to protect against these guys, it's perhaps fitting that our most prominent standard Night's Watch member (and acting Lord Commander, I think?) should be the first named character to die. To a large extent his death shows us how much in danger Sam, a character we care more about, is. Still, Edd was always likable, and it's sad to see him go.

Then we get Lyanna Mormont - the most badass preteen in Westeros. While it's sad to see someone so young go down, she dies like a badass, stabbing the undead giant that's crushing her to death in the eye with a dragonglass blade.

Beric Dondarion goes out as the Hound and Arya flee a group of Wights that have made it into the castle proper. He's been dead in the books for a while, and as someone who died many times before, at least he has experience with it (though he's presumably not coming back this time.)

Theon Greyjoy dies to the Night King, after all seems lost and the Night King is coming for Bran. There's no real hope in his final charge, but he does the one thing he can do, and while he fails to strike a blow against the Night King, and dies for it, at least he died protecting the person and the place he betrayed. It's a redemption.

Of course, then we get the Night King himself. In a lot of ways, Arya has just become the greatest assassin in that world's history, striking a blow against the hardest target there is. We get a little fake-out, when the Night King catches her by the throat and makes her drop her blade, but she then just catches it with the other hand and, well, sticks the Night King with the pointy end. Like a shockwave, the other White Walkers explode and all the Wights (including some of the aforementioned) fall, truly dead.

Jorah Mormont dies precisely as I expected him to - after Daenerys is thrown from Drogon when he's being swarmed by Wights, Jorah leaps to her defense and takes several blows, including a stab through the gut, but keeps fighting. It's only when the battle is over and the undead are now just dead that Jorah falls, dying exactly the way he clearly always meant to - defending the woman he loves and respects.

Finally, after her work is done, Melisandre takes off the jewel that has kept her youthful from and wanders out into the snow, where she drops dead presumably of old age.

All in all, to be frank, it was fewer deaths than I predicted. I had thought Gendry, Grey Worm, Tormund, possibly someone in the crypts (especially given that, just as predicted, the ancient dead Starks did get raised by the Night King) and Podrick were in a lot of danger, and I figured that there were several others I was worried for.

Granted, plenty more could die to Cersei's machinations, and I think we've still got a lot of potential plot to go through, but if there was going to be a massive cull of the cast, I'd have assumed it would be this episode. For a show this huge, seven characters (including the Night King himself) is a rather low price for seeing the most terrifying threat in the series defeated so conclusively.

Obviously, the battle was devastating - Dany's loyal Dothraki were basically wiped out, as were a lot of the Unsullied. While no one we knew died in the crypts, it's clear that plenty of people in there were killed. Having a war with Cersei to look forward to is pretty insane. On the other hand, saving the world has got to count for something diplomatically - not to Cersei, of course, but possibly to bring in new allies.

With three episodes, there's definitely a lot of ground to cover, but it's also kind of amazing that we're going to be in a Game of Thrones that doesn't have the dark cloud of the undead hovering over it.