An absolutely awful Game of Thrones episode, but if you ignore what the show has been in the past and could have been with good directors/writers, it was pretty good.
However, that ending was fucking stupid. One of the most anti-climatic endings ever, with Arya magically teleporting past hundreds of undead after failing to sneak past a few in a library. Not to mention how anti-climatic of an ending that was for the Night King arc. This is the ultimate threat for like 5 seasons, the Mega Bad Guy, unstoppable, etc., etc. And what happens? He just instantly dies, as does his entire army, with no explanation for his motives, no spoken dialogue, no telepathic conversation with Bran, absolutely nothing. Big threat, then just gone from one dagger stab. Plot over. Completely rushed and unsatisfying, pretty much exactly what I expected from them leaving this many plots unresolved so late into the last season. Up until the final moment, I was actually kind of interested to see what would happen in the next episodes, what with the Good Guys being defeated so thoroughly, but nah. The Night King held the Idiot Ball (I was expecting Bran to stab him because he decided to slowly walk right in front of him, but instead he decided to rape choke Arya to earn his death) and that was that.
Then we have the absolutely ridiculous plot armor of all the main characters. About fifteen people survive, all the main characters, and we only lose a couple mostly meaningless side characters as well. I was hoping to see at least one or two random, shit-luck deaths in the battle outside the castle, you know, show that battle is chaotic and not all that much fun, but nope, the show is a clichéd traditional fantasy show now.
Other dumb things include:
- What the actual fuck was that use of cavalry? They literally couldn't have utilized the cavalry worse. Let's just put all of it in front of our infantry, then blindly charge them into the night, so that even in the best case scenario our cavalry and infantry fight an entirely separate battle, and the cavalry never gets to do what it does best, charge at flanks.
- The battle formation, what was going on with all these undisturbed, organized, untouched Unsullied formations while everyone else was panicking and running away? Did they just have the Unsullied sit back and relax while having some random peasants fight in the front lines?
- That little Mormont girl killing the giant was so stupid and cliche it was cringy. I think everyone knew exactly what would happen when the giant, for reasons best known to itself, decided to lift her right next to his eye so that her 5 inch arm and 1 inch knife could reach his eye and instantly kill him.
- Arya acting like a scared little girl in the library suddenly, that was just weirdly out of character. She'd just got done killing dozens of the undead effortlessly, then she's acting like it's a horror movie and she's a defenseless little girl.
- The entire battle plan made absolutely no sense. They knew the Night King can raise the undead, yet their plan did nothing to take that into account. They didn't try to burn the dead, they were happy to (and planning to...) abandon their positions in the open and retreat, thus giving the Night King even more soldiers... and they seemingly didn't account for that at all. Why didn't they build fortifications outside the castle if they couldn't all fit inside? They had plenty of wood from the nearby forest. Yet they just chose to stand there, then run away. Why didn't they build a ton of fires everywhere? Bonfires every 5 meters with torches next to them, ready to be used both as weapons and to burn the dead? SOMETHING like that?
- They were putting all their eggs in the "kill the Night King" basket, yet had no actual plan to do so. Their assassin task force consisted of Daenerys and Jon. Why, when it was so important? Imagine if you had, say, thousands of the finest cavalry in the known world. You could form a dozen hundred-strong groups that were ready to react wherever the Night King turned up, and try to kill him. At a minimum. Oh, but they had a redundancy, you say. They had Theon Greyjoy and a couple seamen protecting Bran, and they knew the Night King wanted him. Brilliant. The greatest warrior in all the lands, Theon Greyjoy! In a place that, if the Night King reached it, would mean the castle would be overrun anyway and Theon would have no chance of doing shit. Not that he could beat the Night King in a 1v1 anyway.
In other words, all the planning in the episode was the kind of shit that no actual semi-intelligent human would come up with and think "yeah, this is good." Because the show right now is mainstream and the writers cant write
intelligent characters that seem like they have an actual inner life instead of just being cheap 2D cardboard cut-outs that the writers use to move from one cliche to another.
- How did Jorah Mormont teleport outside the castle to save Daenerys? The walls were lost, there were a dozen defenders left alive, fighting for their life against thousands of undead. How did Jorah get outside? How did Jorah know Daenerys was in trouble? Where did Jorah learn teleportation? Did Varys teach it to him?
- I want to underline again how stupid and against everything GoT used to be it is for all the main characters to survive 50 hopeless situations like that when literally everyone dies. That was, dare I say it, some
superhero movie shit.
- Obviously the only reason things lasted as long as they did, and it looked even remotely plausible for the main characters to survive, is because of the plot armor and the undead tsunami thinning into retarded 3-4 undead at a time whenever there was a main character nearby. They were constantly in situations where they were surrounded by practically infinite undead, yet they inexplicably always end up only fighting a few, even if everyone else is dead. The length of the battle made no sense.
Other than though the episode was visually pleasing and a fun watch.
4.5/5 stars.
