Read the next entry in the series here.
8.3 “The Long Night”
Written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
Okay, well. Here we are on the other side of the great big battle against the Big Bad, and we all survived. Well, most of us survived.
This episode was visually and emotionally stunning. Once again, Ramin Djawadi does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to making the story compelling. And once again, the thematic unity of the series is all over the place.
The placement of this battle at all is kind of iffy to me, anyway. One of the underlying themes of the books is that the battle for the Iron Throne is a distraction, that politics and petty infighting are keeping everyone from realizing the true threat. “Who will sit the Iron Throne” isn’t the point of the series. Sure, somebody will at the end, but the point is pulling together to defend all of humanity from this huge, unstoppable threat, and the people who can’t or won’t do that die. So I’m not sure how I feel about having this battle first, before taking down Cersei, who’s actively working against unity. It seems to me that her demise should be a direct result of refusing to help, by having to face her choices and dying because of the White Walkers, not in an otherwise perfectly mundane battle for the throne.
Also, none of the choices she made affected this battle in any way. A few thousand more men wouldn’t have helped. Ships wouldn’t have helped. So “all” she did was break her promise, not cost the north this battle. Everyone will go south to fight her because she’s a tyrant and a terrible queen, but not because she actually crippled the armies of the north.
99% of the episode is fighting, and I’m not a tactician, so I won’t attempt to pick apart the battle itself. (We’ll leave that to Jeff “BryndenBFish.”)(Click through for thread.)
I woke up feeling much more mixed about this episode than I was feeling last night. Last week, I woke up with a smile stretching my perfect cheek muscles, satisfied with last night’s meal, excited to talk about it all day.— BryndenBFish (@BryndenBFish) April 29, 2019
Today? pic.twitter.com/PEKB5roWs1
Instead, let me focus on a few specific scenes or incidents, in more-or-less chronological order.
I was actually really glad to see Melisandre again; I love her character in the books and I wish the show had treated her better. I also like that she seems to have found her inner strength again and that she’s not attached to a man in order to have it. (The Arya thing is an entirely different matter and we’ll get to that closer to the end.) Instead of guiding some dude toward his destiny, she’s here on her own behalf to assist the armies of the living against the army of the dead. And her thing with the Dothraki arahks just looks cool. Of course, it’s also necessary, because it doesn’t look like the arahks are made of obsidian, which means they’re just regular steel. Why did nobody say anything about sending the Dothraki in to fight the dead with just regular steel?
In a meta-sense, it’s probably because they intended Mel to come in and do her fire trick anyway. In-universe, it’s ridiculous and makes it look even more like the Dothraki were expendable cannon fodder.
Which brings me to the Dothraki charge.
This show has never treated the Dothraki well. They went from “barbarian” to “noble savage” (admittedly a problem they inherited from the books), back to “barbarian” before Dany “tamed” them and bound the entire Dothraki nation to her cause. The idea of the Dothraki as “other” has never been interrogated or problematized. Few of them have been named, and most of those died or fell off the radar before we ever got here. So now we have a nameless horde of racially-otherized people being sent in as the first wave and getting utterly massacred. It felt very much like the first death in a horror movie, the one that’s supposed to show how serious everything is. It didn’t even have a last-stand, grand epic sacrifice kind of feeling. It just felt wasteful.
It did, however, give Dany a reason to throw the whole plan out the window and just take the dragons and charge in. Now, I’m not saying I necessarily disagree with her, especially her observation that “the dead are already here,” but it feels like either they needed to get there sooner and just open with the dragons rather than throwing thousands of Dothraki at the dead to make more corpses, or Dany needed to be able to see the bigger picture and stand her ground with regard for waiting for the Night King.
And then the dead reach the main force, and we get some fabulous face acting from Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm). I am so glad he survives this battle, though, again, that “let’s run away” scene was too sweet for both of them to survive the whole series. (I will be incredibly glad if they do, but I’m not holding my breath.) And everything is chaos, with a few standout moments. Brienne going down under a bunch of wights and screaming reminded me of her scene in A Feast for Crows when she’s fighting Rorge and Biter. Grey Worm is a big damn hero pretty much throughout, but especially when he’s guarding the retreat.
And then we have the dead World War Z-ing over the walls, and the Stark dead rising in the crypts (which every single Game of Thrones watcher I follow on Twitter totally called). I don’t quite buy it? Mostly because the last person to be buried down there was Lyanna, roughly 20 years ago, and the books talk a lot about how only their bones were left to be interred (because they don’t have the tech to preserve the bodies for a trip from King’s Landing or the Tower of Joy to Winterfell), so honestly there shouldn’t be enough left of any of the Stark dead to actually make a walking corpse. But I’m just glad they didn’t surprise us with a Sean Bean cameo (I wouldn’t have put it past them to “forget” that Ned was reduced to bones to be sent north).
This is where we give props to Ramin Djawadi again for the soundtrack, and whoever the sound mixer is who handled the post-dragon fight scene, because the choice to dampen the battle noises and have the piano line over it was genius. I do think it went on maybe a bit too long? But it was really pretty anyway. Also, you can very much hear that Djawadi also does the Westworld soundtrack in “The Night King,” which is the piano piece here.
I do wonder what Jon thought he was going to accomplish by standing in the open and screaming at Viserion.
The last 20 minutes or so show what I mean about shaky thematic and narrative flow. Jorah dies protecting Dany, which is absolutely appropriate considering his entire story arc. There was no other way for him to go out (even if it did mean he had to retreat and abandon the Dothraki during their charge).
But. It makes no thematic sense that Arya’s the one to take out the Night King. There has been exactly one vague hint in that direction—Bran giving her the Valyrian steel dagger. Yes, I know they retconned Melisandre’s prophecy to fit this. No, it still doesn’t make sense. If Jon’s purpose isn’t to take down the Night King, why did he come back to life? Why didn’t dragon fire hurt the Night King? During the “Inside the Episode” follow-up, Weiss says that they knew for “about three years now” that Arya would be the one to kill the Night King, which would put that decision happening around 2016, probably when they were writing season seven. Which means that they had no way of seeding that in or making it work thematically before that. I think they decided on Arya because a) they wanted a Stark to do it; but b) they wanted to create a surprise for the audience. But that’s a failure of storytelling, and one that Game of Thrones is particularly prone to; they throw in twists and shocks for the sake of twists and shocks, not because they’ve managed to very carefully seed and hint and misdirect and then everything comes together and it’s obvious this is what was meant to happen all along.
(Also, their claim that this was a decision they made three years ago indicates that this isn't how the battle against the Others will go in the books. For one thing, there is no Night King in the books, and for another, if Arya was to be the one to strike the final blow against whatever needs killing, that would obviously be something Martin would have told them in that infamous hotel meeting.)
Don't get me wrong; aesthetically I thought the scene was really cool, and I like that Arya got to be this level of badass. Her character arc and training storyline even make sense for it, taken in isolation. But she’s not in isolation; she’s part of a larger story, and that story didn’t effectively seed or foreshadow or prophesy (retconning notwithstanding) that Arya would be the one to effectively save the world. For such a buildup to taking out the White Walkers once and for all, I feel like the story needed to be there, and it wasn't. I'll probably take a lot of crap for this; I see lots of people online already who love this scene and are calling people who didn't sexist. But I stand by my opinion: cool does not outweigh a thematic through line.
Then we’re back on thematic unity with Melisandre dying now that she’s completed her life’s work. What she said about Beric—that the Lord of Light brought him back for a purpose and that purpose was fulfilled—holds true for her, as well. (And draws attention to the fact that it doesn’t seem to hold true for Jon.) Mel has lived for a very long time, she’s made some mistakes, she’s backed the wrong horse over and over, but she was instrumental in helping to defeat the Long Night, and now her watch has ended.
Next week: the war for the Iron Throne begins.
Deaths:
The Dothraki
Edd
Lyanna Mormont
Beric Dondarrion
Theon Greyjoy
Jorah Mormont
The Night King
All the White Walkers
Viserion (again)
Melisandre
Scores and scores of extras
No comments:
Post a Comment