The first two episodes of this season of Game of Thrones have been remarkably light on action. Tonight's episode in particular, "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," spends all its time processing the relationships and growth of the characters who are holed up in Winterfell, preparing to make their stand against the Army of the Dead.
Where even to begin?
Well, I don't think I'm going to hit every arc. But rather central to the episode is a scene in a hall that begins with the Lannister brothers reflecting on how their lives have changed. Jaime has gone from a vain and cruel incestuous brat to something of a man of honor, and Tyrion has gone from the family fuck-up to one of the respected great minds of the world. They've both gone through terrible pains to get to that point, but they can take some satisfaction that now, as death closes in on them, they can at least rightfully claim that they are better men than they once were.
Gradually, more and more people arrive in this room - Brienne and Podrick, Davos, and Tormund all wind up there.
The air is grim. Only Brienne views this as a standard battle, describing the troops under her command and the area she has been given to defend as being good terrain with a tactical advantage. She is fighting as a competent soldier, despite the fact that the foe is utterly different than anything most of the people there have ever faced.
Brienne is one of my favorite characters in the series. She is the exception to that proves the rule: namely, George R. R. Martin has made a major theme of the series the deconstruction of the "noble knight" archetype, showing that knights tend to be brutish murderers - the Hound never wanted to be one because if his brother, who is a monster (now literally,) could be one, then there was clearly no truth to the chivalric ideals they were meant to embody.
And yet, Brienne, despite not being a knight due to the fact that in a patriarchal society, they'd never even consider making her one, has embodied exactly the chivalric ideals that knights are supposed to represent. She has been true to her word, fiercely dedicated, and utterly competent. Even a figure like Barristan Selmy, a rare exemplar of such values, still found himself in the awkward position of having served an evil king.
Brienne has been trained never to expect recognition for her virtues, and so it is an immensely emotional moment when Jaime, whose redemption as a human being is largely thanks to Brienne's honor, follows Tormund's advice on fucking tradition and knights Brienne - this after he has offered to serve as her subordinate in battle.
It may have taken the end of the fucking world, but finally, a person who embodies exactly what a knight should be is recognized for those virtues.
Does that give us hope?
Hope is a tricky thing here. It's satisfying to see so many dangling plot threads resolved - from anything as simple as Jorah and Lyanna Mormont meeting again to Arya and Gendry consummating their relationship (though I'll leave it to you to interpret to what extent that was a real emotional connection and to what extent Arya just knew Gendry would be willing so she could cross that off her bucket list.)
The thing is, for anyone who knows narrative structure (particularly if you've ever watched a Joss Whedon show,) having a character resolve a long-running storyline is a really good sign that that character is going to die.
And the fact that the massive battle at Winterfell is going to start next episode, with more than half of the season to go, means that this battle ain't going to be pretty, and might even wind up being decisively lost.
One thing that sticks out like a red warning flag is that they've made it very clear that all the innocent people are being sent to the Winterfell Crypts. This is meant to seem like the caves beneath Helm's Deep, for us to watch the battle and know its stakes are high but still assume that if the heroes emerge victorious, all the innocents will be safe.
But this is Game of Thrones, guys. And you've got an Army of the Dead that can raise the dead, and you're putting a bunch of people down with a bunch of long-dead people? Really?
We have a structure to the battle now, with Bran serving as bait for the Night's King to come to the Godswood and hopefully be destroyed by either Dragonfire or Valyrian Steel.
But I do really wonder if that's going to happen at all.
We don't know how clever the Night's King is, and what kind of play he might make. Is he really just relying on all the magical advantages he has, or is he also a brilliantly clever campaigner, willing to win dirty like Tywin Lannister was?
Hell, maybe the army won't even attack Winterfell, letting a chain-reaction of undeath spill forth from the crypts. In fact, how fucking crazy would it be if the Army of the Dead just passed Winterfell entirely and then the people there had to rush and warn Cersei?
In a way, there are some characters who stand a better chance at survival just because there's unresolved issues:
First, (actually last in the episode,) Jon tells Daenerys what Bran and Sam have told him, that he's actually Aegon Targaryen, son of Rhaegar and Lyanna. Dany doesn't have time to really process this (I don't think either of them have stopped to consider that this makes them aunt and nephew,) when the horns blare three times, and we all know what three horns means.
Earlier, Dany and Sansa have a talk, as Dany tries to smooth things over, relating to Sansa on the way that both of them have been through some real shit and have struggled in a world that doesn't like women to hold power (indeed, Jon's claim on the throne offends her in part because it's some dude sweeping and and grabbing what she has fought for for years.) She and Sansa seem to arrive at a place where they like each other as people, but the political divide - that the Northerners are fucking done with answering to a monarch in King's Landing, and Dany's fear that without total control over the Seven Kingdoms, her position as Queen would be unstable and weak - means that there's still some delicate negotiation that needs to happen if they survive the battle.
It seems very unlikely we won't be losing a lot of character next episode. The real question I have is what the final few are going to look like. I see a couple possible scenarios:
1: The plan works, and at great cost, the Night's King is slain, and the Army of the Dead crumbles. But this leaves the good guys to face Cersei and the Golden Company as the true "final boss" of the series.
2: The battle at Winterfell is a disaster and the castle is lost, along with most of the people. The survivors must rush south and desperately try to convince Cersei to take this Army of the Dead seriously. (I think this one, or something similar, is the most likely.)
3: The Dead really do march past Winterfell in an attempt to conquer the south before coming back north, and somehow pin down the folks at Winterfell so that they will have a real struggle to do anything about it.
There are a few questions I have that remain:
First, is Melisandre really out of the picture here? She says she foresaw that she and Varys would die in Westeros. Could she pull the big damn heroes moment and save the day at some point, maybe sacrificing herself to do so?
Second: How accurate is Bran's assertion that the Night's King is going after him specifically? This seems like a very convenient way of funneling the battle into a single arena, which to be fair is a pretty common practice in action movies (think of that chapel in Avengers: Age of Ultron, or the Death Star trench in you goddamn know what movie.) It's actually something I always kind of respected about the big battles in Lord of the Rings - both Helm's Deep and Pelenor Fields were sieges that were not focused around a single location, but were about keeping a fortified location standing until the cavalry/army of the dead (good version this time) could get there. Granted, with an army that can grow over the course of a battle, it does make some sense for it to be less about endurance than taking decisive actions.
Third: Just how willing is the show (which has supposedly been working toward an ending Martin always had in mind) to subvert expectations? Would it go so far as to really let the Dead win? Could we see everyone wiped out? Or is it going to be less about letting the monsters win than making the establishment of peace following the war far more fraught and complicated than Aragorn's 400 years as a "just king?" In particular, I wonder how accurate my assertion that characters with unresolved stories are more likely to survive is - yes, Jon just broached a very complicated subject with Dany, and it seems like we ought to have them survive so that they can feel complicated about it, but maybe the battle will just kill one or both of them and make it a non-issue? (Please don't - I know that both of them suffer from Protagonists-are-the-Boring-Characters syndrome, but I don't want to see either of their stories just kind of fall apart as some shaggy dog.)
Anyway, we should be seeing some serious action next episode. Expect a lot of violence, a lot of death, and probably a lot of beloved characters biting the dust.
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