The Long Night Finally Arrives On Game Of Thrones

Game of Thrones finally brings the Battle for the Dawn it teased since its first scene. Was it everything we hoped for?

This, as it turns out, was how it was always meant to lớn end, not the traditional hero of light vanquishing the champion of the dark. We are teased such an ending after Rhagael has to lớn shake off Jon Snow due to wounds sustained by Undead Viserion (it was, for the record, a missed opportunity that Daenerys did not visibly react khổng lồ her desecrated child’s body). Still, when Daenerys’ dragonfire unsurprisingly proves futile against a Night King who’s previously shown indifference to walking through normal flames, Jon attempts lớn sneak up on the adversary he’s always hated. & when the Night King hears his approach, Jon raises Longclaw to attempt the duel we all perhaps too eagerly predicted after his resurrection in season 6. Instead, the Night King reveals he likes khổng lồ play dirty by raising a new army of the dead, including sweet, sweet Lyanna, to vị his bidding.

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The sense of complete defeat on Jaime, Tormund, và Brienne’s faces as the dead rise is only dwarfed by how doomed Jon appears. While Dany bails him out—in spite of all the predictions she’d leave him to die this week—he is still unable to ever get within striking distance of the Night King. The onetime-King in the North played a mighty role in uniting Daenerys’ eastern forces và the Northern forces khổng lồ prepare for this night, but when that fateful dusk finally descended, he proved personally no more effective here than at Hardhome with traditional boyish heroics.

As he laid pinned down by Viserion’s blue flame, his sister Sansa Stark also was surrounded by a rude awakening. As it turns out, hiding among the crypts of Winterfell is not a winning strategy when your enemy can raise the dead. So it is that all the kings và queens, lord & ladies, of old rose from their slumber to lớn attack the living. It might’ve been too macabre, even for Game of Thrones, but if Sansa could’ve seen the headless, skeletal remains of Ned Stark climb from his tomb, it would’ve been golden-hued nightmare fuel. As it is, Sansa & Tyrion find themselves huddling from the same dead Starks. I imagine many shippers’ hearts were set aflutter by the tenderness between this unlikely pairing of a Stark and Lannister. Sansa accurately describes Tyrion as the best of her suitors—but that is not saying much when the others have been Joffrey, Ramsay, và Littlefinger.

It speaks much larger volumes when Tyrion steels a chaste kiss of his ex-wife’s hand. Similar lớn Dany and Jorah, this is not a romantic love, but it is a knowing kinship that might be as deep as any. There would’ve been worse ways for either khổng lồ die than in that dark moment together. Fortunately, it was not khổng lồ be.

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For in the godswood, the true final movements of the passion play reached their crescendo. Theon Greyjoy did the only thing Theon Greyjoy could ever hope khổng lồ do: reach toward the right thing. It was hardly enough as the Night King skewered him with something approximating a smile, but for Theon, it was monumental since he never has recovered from choosing to sack Winterfell và attempt to lớn kill Bran—before killing two other miller’s boys in Bran and Rickon’s place. Bran forgave Theon in his final moments, saying he was a good man, but Theon could only forgive himself as he lay on the ground suffering a fatal spear wound from the Night King. It lacks the fanfare of Lyanna or sweetness of Jorah’s deaths, but most do. His is a quiet, bitter affair where he dies as he lived: with the taste of failure on his lips và the shadow of the Starks’ trang chủ covering him whole.

Nonetheless, Westeros is spared, và Game of Thrones’ most cynical fans who hoped for a Night King victory are denied. As unforgiving as this sequence was lớn the armrests crushed beneath my hands, I knew that Arya Stark must’ve been hiding among the branches in the weirwood. The Night King and White Walkers had cut so clear a bloody path from the Wall to lớn Winterfell, they had long since stopped to lớn study the traps in the margins.

It is Arya’s iconoclastic bravery that proves better than any prophecy when she drops from behind the Night King with the same Valyrian dagger that began the War of the Five Kings; it is also the dagger that ends the Great War, as Arya drops it from the hand the Night King catches to lớn a miễn phí one that can stab at his magical, ice-cold ass.