Game of Thrones S08E03 Review: Wrath of the Night King

Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 3: The Long Night

(Warning, this episode features heavy spoilers from the very plot-twist-y episode, and I'm not going to include any particularly spoiler-y images. Scroll down if you haven't watched this episode!)

So, to open up by acknowledging the episode's greatest strength... this is an amazing episode visually. As a visual spectacle, as someone who's interested in the logistics of filming and creating such an amazingly immersive episode where you truly feel the terror, dread and hopelessness as our heroes fight against the endless armies of the dead, and someone who admittedly loves visual spectacles... "The Long Night" is an amazing episode in that aspect. From the opening scene of slowly building up dread as we just slowly pan over some 15-20 characters as they await the incoming onrush of literal death, to fight for their lives and most likely die, to the opening salvo with Melisandre and the Dothraki, to the dreadful confusion in the darkness-enshrouded large wasteland, to around halfway through the episode where our main characters are trapped in the claustrophobic corridors of Winterfell... this episode is exceptionally well done, selling the horror of the episode, and raising the stakes compared to other "big battle" episodes in Game of Thrones.

Shame it's... it's a pretty difficult episode to visually watch. I genuinely get what they were going for, but if you haven't watched this episode, do yourself a favour and crank up any brightness and contrast setting to the absolute highest that you can on your television or computer. Because while the episode itself isn't as horrible as some people put it, you really do need to adjust some brightness settings to actually appreciate the episode. 

Yet, narratively... narratively, it's a bit of an odd meal that I'm never quite sure how to process. Throughout the 80-minute runtime of the episode I was constantly on the edge of my shit, going "HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT" every couple of seconds whenever something horrifying happens to one of our beloved characters, as we pan away from this character to that character to yet another character, and when the final and surprising climax of the episode happens, it was a huge "holy fuck. HOLY FUUUUUCK!!!!" moment. It was an amazing experience to live through.

The music in this episode is also spectacularly used, with some segments (the Arya one in the middle of the episode) using little to no background music, while the "darkest hour" segment near the end makes amazing use of a crescendo of nothing but piano. It's just amazing and sucks you in. 

Yet when the dust settles, and the spectacle is over, and I sit down to write the review of this behemoth of an episode... I'm genuinely baffled at the events that happened, and I'm genuinely not sure how much I like this narratively. And to reiterate what I said above -- the episode was certainly nothing short of a cinematic episode, and I was completely immersed in the horror and dread and awesome tension, and for an episode that's 90% "oh holy hell zombies", it never really got tiresome, something that genuinely surprised me. 

But also something that genuinely surprised me is... how little I actually like the ending now that I've had time to breathe and take stock of the events that happened. The subversion of an audience's expectation is a dangerous trick if it is done for just subversion's sake -- look at The Last Jedi for how utterly poorly-received the subversion of Snoke's importance ended up being. And Game of Thrones has made its mark by having its first season (and book) subverting some of the most prevalent tropes in fantasy setting, including killing off two of the main leads in not particularly honourable ways... yet still shaping the narrative and the fantasy of the world to revolve around them. 

And... and, well, the Night King and the oncoming army of the dead has been a plotline that has been foreshadowed literally from the very first scene of the TV series and the first chapter (or was it the second?) of the first book. It was the mythological plot, it was the Bigger Threat over this silly fight over who gets to rule what, and while the Night King is more of a force of nature than an actual character, and part of me is happy that a character I genuinely care about, Cersei, ends up essentially being the final boss, the ultimate, final big bad of the series... it's also kind of a cop-out that they solved complaints about how the Night King is a flat villain that only has vague motivations that was ever-so-slightly hinted at if you look really hard through Bran's Raven-visions back in season 6, as well as Bran's short analysis on his motivation last episode.

And while I certainly didn't expect the Night King to be anywhere as complex a character as many of the other characters in this sprawling show... it's sort of an anticlimax, y'know? I honestly don't mind the plot twist that he dies in this episode. I don't even mind the subversion that it isn't Jon or Daenerys that ended up dealing the killing blow and that it was Arya. I minded the fact that for all the oomph and the eight seasons' worth of buildup and all the awesome episodes like Hardhome, Eastwatch and the whole Three-Eyed Raven sequence... the Night King does scant little in his final episode, leaving the bulk of the fighting to the endless horde of wight-zombies, mostly just spending the episode riding around Viserion, raising the dead some more, and sort of stand around and look cool. None of the other White Walkers even do anything, despite the huge assembly of around a dozen or so at the end of the previous episode, and how they cluster around the Night King like the cover of an 80's metal band cover. Like, at least let some of our characters fight the nameless white walkers or some shit. 

And while I was scared about all of the characters throughout the episode -- there were moments where characters I thought were safe like Tyrion and Arya seemed like they were straight-up going to die in one last blaze of glory -- the death tally for the episode ended up being surprisingly low. Sure, a lot of random nameless dudes, particularly the Dothraki and Unsullied, ended up dying, but as far as named characters go, it's a shockingly low amount of Edd, Beric, Melisandre, Jorah, Theon, Lyanna and that Dothraki leader dude. And maybe Ghost the dog and Rhaegal the dragon. Considering how much the previous episode scared the fandom and audiences in general by waving death-flags and tying up loose ends, it set up a notion that anyone except for maybe a couple of 'safe' characters are dead, but at the end of the day it's mostly just a bunch of genuine cannon fodder (albeit likable ones in terms of Edd and Lyanna) and a couple of characters who were pretty obviously going to do a redemption-by-death anyway, it's just a matter of which villain they die to. And, sure, maybe we're saving some of them to die in the series finale against Cersei's forces, but still. 

And while I adore the subversion that characters with very obvious death flag -- Gray Worm and Missandei -- actually did survive, as do all of the named characters in the crypt, it is honestly sort of ridiculous that we didn't have a higher body count after just how we keep cutting back and forth to show the people in the courtyard (Brienne, Jaime, Tormund, Grey Worm, Podrick and I think Gendry and Davos maybe?) just continually getting swarmed by zombies, getting back up, getting swarmed, getting back up again and so on. And I honestly do think that the courtyard battle where basically almost everyone somehow managed to survive felt frankly a wee bit ridiculous. 

And, again, don't get me wrong. The episode is a pretty badass action sequence all throughout with a lot of amazing set pieces. The opening of the episode is pretty amazing, from the slow buildup of our characters just sort of awaiting the dread, to Melisandre showing up with a horse and giving the pretty awesome visual spectacle of lighting the Dothraki's arakhs on flame, and the long viewpoint of having the entire Dothraki army with swords lit on fire in the dark charging towards the unknown darkness... only to be quite literally snuffed out within seconds. That was chilling, and while there are a lot of complaints about just how dark the episode was, particularly with the fog and blizzard that swirled around the battlefield, I felt like it added to the scariness of fighting an unknown horde of zombies in an icy land. 

The triumphant charge of everyone outside of Winterfell, ready to defend it and devolving into a chaotic melee, is also pretty well done, with the episode really focusing on either chaotic close shots or spectacular wide shots of the scale of the show, while we cut back and forth around a half-dozen characters we care about. And then Dolorous Edd gets impaled while rescuing Sam, and we get our first casualty. Oh no, a recurring and likable (if not particularly important) character gets killed! And then everyone retreats, with ambiguity if less important characters like Pod, Gray Worm and Beric will make it or not.

They all do, thanks in combination to the arrival of Daenerys and her dragon carpet-bombing the wights. And then a blizzard shows up, which is pretty badass as well, and we also have the spectacular showcase of Melisandre chanting and praying to the Lord of Light to light up the trenches and create, again, another visual spectacle of a wall of flames protecting Winterfell. Visually, it's striking, and it's a fun showcase of having a bit of a back-and-forth as our heroes start launching the big guns at the endless army of wights, with things like Melisandre lighting the Dothraki swords on fire, Drogon's arrival and the flaming trench tactic all seeming like legitimate ways for them to swing the tide of battle. 

And then, of course, the Night King arrives riding a dragon. And honestly, while it all boils down to "oh fuck our heroes are trying to survive against an endless tide of undead", the cinematography of the scene is pretty well done. The sensory-fuckery of never being quite sure which dragon is swooping around until it's too late, how Jon and Dany's senses are clouded by the blizzard, to the eventual 2-v-1 battle when Viserion the undead dragon starts to genuinely fight against Rhaegal and Drogon... it was definitely a far more extended fight than I thought we'd get, because I genuinely didn't expect CGI dragons fighting more than like five seconds, and it's amazing, including a particularly gorgeous shot of the dragons bursting out of the chaotic blizzard-filled clouds and into the calm night sky above. That is beautiful. 

The fact that zombie Viserion loses half his jaw and spends the rest of the episode bleeding blue flame from the side of his face and neck is also a pretty neat visual effect.

Meanwhile, after a sequence of Arya pulling off all the stops of her Faceless Man training and just slays her way through a fuck-ton of the dead, she, too gets overwhelmed, in no small part thanks to actually taking a hit and falling down the ramparts. We start getting things falling apart -- we get to see some of our heroes swarmed over by wights (although they mostly survive), we get to see the Hound in full PTSD mode, we get to see Sansa and Tyrion and the rest of the crypt cast in fear and huddling, we get to see the desperate last ring of defense that Theon has around Bran... and we get another death. It's Lyanna Mormont, the badass little child, surviving a first seemingly-fatal thrown-aside by an undead giant, before being grabbed and squeezed in a very painful-sounding crumple... but she manages to stab the undead giant in the eye and dust it just as she dies. 

It's just such a shame that not all of the action scenes are as visually striking and focus-driven as the dragon fight or the Lyanna scene -- so much of the fight against the zombies includes intentionally foggy or blurry shaky-cam camera. It does help to show just how horrifying things are from the point of view of the battlers, and while I get that, yes, a battle in Winterfell would be foggy and the Night King did seem to summon a blizzard early on, it doesn't make the episode feel as smoothly and as well choreographed as, say, The Watchers on the Wall. 

Again, case in point... the group in the courtyard -- Brienne, Jamie, Tormund, Pod, Gray Worm, Sam and maybe Gendry and Davos (the two are sort of missing) -- honestly don't do jack shit other than get overwhelmed, break free, get overwhelmed again, and break free again, and honestly it's sort of straining credibility that Sam and Davos, who aren't physical badasses, are somehow still alive after all that. 

But then we take a break from the huge dragon melee and the huge zombie swarm to follow Arya, and we get a pretty badass scene. It's certainly long, and probably an obvious "cheat" by the filmmakers to shoot a tense horror scene that didn't require as many extras as the elaborate exterior ones, but the horror of being trapped in a shadowy library as she tiptoes around, sneaks around bookshelves and Assassin's Creeds her way throughout the castle is, again, nothing short of breathtaking. The sequence highlighted in equal parts Arya's badassery (slashing that one wight in the chin mid-stride is awesome) while also making it clear that, shit, Arya's terrified out of her mind. 

And in a scene where we have so little dialogue, it's so amazing how Maisie Williams manages to convey both badassery and vulnerability at the same time. Of course, she ends up teaming up eventually with the Hound and Beric Dondarrion as more and more of the undead show up, and they end up basically taking turns rescuing each other until Beric manages to hold the line against a couple of wights, and survive just long enough to pass away in front of Arya. We then have Melisandre give some cryptic foreshadowing to a particular prophecy she said so long ago ("blue eyes"), as well as note Beric's prophesied role (both of which more casual audiences might be forgiven for forgetting) as being the herald of the Prince Who Was Promised... after a pretty awesome recalling of Arya's iconic exchange with Syrio way back in season one -- "what do we say to the god of death" -- and Arya basically disappears for the rest of the episode. Intentionally, and it's a pretty well-done misdirection, I must say. 

A good man.

And we do get the creepy scene at the crypt, where everyone and their mother called out that putting the refugees in a place where it's full of dead people is a bad idea. With Jon knocked off of Rhaegal (who literally disappears for the rest of the episode, and I'm not sure if Dracowight Viserion's mauling is lethal) and charging towards the Night King, he resurrects all of the dead in the now-memetic "come at me" pose, and that includes the dead in the crypt. Yet while we do get a pretty scary moment of Sansa and Tyrion about to do something potentially fatal with that dagger... none of the people in the crypt really ended up dying or even in a position where they're close to dying. Not Sansa, not Tyrion, not Varys, not Missandei, not Gilly. 

And, of course, while all of this is going on, we get a couple of pretty desperate scenes. It's kinda dumb for Dany and Drogon to stay rooted on the ground for too long, but this had the effect of Drogon being absolutely overwhelmed by the wights that swarm him like ticks, leaving Daenerys unprotected on the ground as Drogon flies off and tries to shake off the wights that are trying to kill him (a very awesome visual), leaving Daenerys at the mercy of the army of the dead... if not for Jorah Mormont's arrival.

Likewise, the Godswood is breached by the army of the dead, and Theon Greyjoy and his Ironborn end up being the last line of defense against Bran and held their ground way longer than I gave them credit for, being genuinely impressive. Jon Snow, meanwhile, while managing to at least last against the wights, ends up being trapped in a courtyard with a rampaging zombie Viserion, and unable to really stand up against him. The Dovahkiin he ain't, and there was a particularly hilarious scene where he tries to charge Viserion, only for the undead dragon to turn his head and he runs an immediate 180 and takes cover behind some conveniently blue-dragonfire-proof rubble. 

And, of course... Theon and Jorah both have their respective redemption-equals-death moments. Jorah's was a bit less spectacular, even if dying while fighting back-to-back with her queen is pretty badass and that's basically the ideal death for Jorah, dying as a shield for her queen. Theon, meanwhile, ends up actually standing his ground and fighting against all of the wights until the Night King and his walking-metal-album-cover entourage shows up, and we get one last line from Bran-Raven thanking Theon and saying he's a good man, before Theon charges in. No longer is he the man who betrays the Starks, no longer is he the meek Reek who can't stand up to Ramsay Bolton, no longer is he the dumbass who jumped off a ship and abandons his sister. He charges the Night King and gets the manliest death in this episode. It's impressive, genuinely, how the show has gotten me to go from "fuck Theon!" to "fuck, Theon." to "FUCK YEA THEON". 

And as Theon dies, as Jorah dies, as Brienne and Jaime and the rest of the courtyard squad gets overwhelmed by wights for the umpteenth time, as Jon Snow tries a suicidal screaming competition against the undead dragon... we get a crescendo of music as the Night King and Bran stare face to face... only for motherfucking Arya Stark to jump out of the fog and try and stab the Night King in the face, leading to a very awesome and smooth sequence of the Night King catching Arya, her dropping the blade and then stabbing it straight in the Night King's heart... dusting the ENTIRE ARMY. Including the undead dragon, cockblocking Jon Snow of the badassery of potentially killing an undead dragon. 

With everyone victorious, Melisandre's job is done and she drops her magic necklace and walks into the snow to die in her true self, the final casualty of this episode. Which is more cathartic than shocking or dramatic, admittedly. 

And... and I don't necessarily have a problem with it being Arya Stark that killed the Night King. It's foreshadowed in the series proper, even if it's not particularly memorable foreshadowing and I only remember it thanks to Melisandre reminding us. And I do like the subversion that Jon isn't the one to deal the killing blow. But... y'know what? It's still ultimately an unsatisfying narrative ending for the undead army plot even if in the moment it's a great holy-shit-oh-no-HOLYSHIT segment. I mean, sure, again, I'm not expecting a whole ton from the Night King as a character at this point, but I genuinely felt like we could've found out more about him. And even as a visual spectacle, the Night King is genuinely off-screen or on a dragon for the most part of the episode, with his contributions basically surviving Drogon's dracarys attack, lobbing a javelin (which missed), raising the dead (again) and killing Theon.

And considering the fact that this was the last hurrah for the white walkers and wights anyway... the white walkers really did jack-shit and even less than the night king, huh? We couldn't have the last boss that Jorah fight be a white walker? We couldn't have one of those bearded dudes lobbing lances at the defenders? Or have the Courtyard Squad fight one of them? Or have Arya, Hound and Beric team up against a white walker? I dunno. Sure, the huge zombie hordes and the huge zombie dragon was impressive, but I genuinely expected... more than just "ZOMBIES MORE ZOMBIES EVEN MORE ZOMBIES". Hell, we didn't even get a single scene of a character having to put down the zombie of one of his friends or something. Sam and Edd? Jon and Benjen? Tormund and one of those Wildlings from Hardhome? The headless zombie of Ned Stark? Grey Worm against a battalion of zombie Unsullied? Come on, if you're going to do zombies for most of the cast, at least make some of it interesting. 

Overall... I still immensely enjoyed this episode (and I genuinely feel bad that I ended up being so critical of an episode I was genuinely glued to the screen while watching), and it's undeniably impressive visually, and an amazing and tense watching experience. The individual death scenes that we focus on (Theon, Jorah and Lyanna in particular) are all done pretty well, too. And I will hold judgement on how much I like it based on how the remaining three episodes pan out. And it could definitely stand to be visually more distinct and clearer. But narratively and as an overall piece of the story... it's definitely leaves a bit of a mixed taste in your mouth, particularly how the white walkers are handled and ultimately concluded. I've seen someone comparing this to a nightmare -- very scary and will freeze you and make you feel very into it while trapped in the nightmare, but once you wake up and think about it, the scariness of the nightmare you had isn't that impressive.