Something that bothered me in concert with the named character armor was how the zombies are either fast or slow depending on what’s required at the moment from the plot. If the wights behaved the same inside the castle as they did outside, the episode would have been half as long and game over humanity. They show the castle swarmed with thousands of wights yet our heroes in any given room only have to deal with a few at a time. I know it’s fantasy but it is still a stronger story if one consistently follows the in-world rules.
Agree strongly that the characters alive at the end was too unrelated to the fighting they just showed us. Jaime, Brienne, Sam, everyone who was on the front lines outside the castle should have been dead by any normal world rules. Also, you apparently can stay up all night drunk but have unlimited stamina.
Wasn’t the death of the entire two dimensional and unnamed Dothraki horde and most of the two dimensional and unnamed Unsullied enough POC sacrificing themselves for the good of the White main protagonists enough already?
In every single ‘deadpool’ I’ve seen online, damn near everyone expected Greyworm to get killed; not just because of the “two weeks from retirement” rule, but because he’s one of only two characters of color with actual speaking roles… and therefore, he’s “expendable.”
My little headcanon for this is that the whole mass of undead aren’t free independent critters. They all stop and stand in a unified way, if the Night King is around, or, they all march in the same direction without anyone ordering them.
When he lets them wild off the leash, or pushes them to a specific group-task, or if his attention is occupied, they’d behave at different speeds, with different amounts of “individuality”.
I think it’s like running otherwise semi-autonomous drones that you can ignore, herd, or give identical directions to. Not plain old zombies, but networked drones or bots.
I was reading this, in which a Reddit user’s theory was mentioned…
My take is that when Bran looks the Night King up and down, at which the Night King seems to cock his head in puzzlement, he is somehow showing Arya what he sees so she has foreknowledge of where to aim her blow in order to avoid glancing off the king’s armor.
ETA I’m not in agreement with the Reddit user’s theory. In any case, Arya has been training to be badass for years.
While the episode was exciting in one sense the ending felt rather abrupt and anti climatic. I was much more invested in this fight with the undead than that of some rich folk fighting over a throne. We have enough of that in our own timeline.
I think it’s great that the night king was killed by Arya and don’t have any doubts she was capable of doing so with no ones help. I just wish there would have been more back and forth between the living and the dead over the course of several episodes. Let this back and forth battle drift father south and be a part of the resolution of the throne arc.
Totally opposite here.
I really enjoyed the first season because it heavily invested in politics, not battle. I can relate to that much more easily than to Zombie Apocalypse War stuff. Momentarily gripping, but boring at the same time, and in hindsight.
I want to be puzzled over people and their motives, not see violence and death.
I’m rather pleased that there are still some episode left which might lead to some new stories about characters, to, erm, flesh out their character.
The whole series has gradually built the undead threat from the very first glimpses of creepy things happening in the forest, and while all of the complex political intrigue and machinations and actual game-of-throning has been going on, there’s been “the real threat” approaching. Now that it’s all over with one kablooey stab, I think it’ll be clear that while monsters are scary, the fight for the kingdom is the real story. I wouldn’t watch 8 seasons of Medieval Walking Dead, but I’m fascinated by what Cersei has in store for the North and who will claim the throne after all this time.
I would even say the ones struggling for the the throne are - or mostly: were - more scary than the night king. They showed us our own dark side, while the ultimate evil of the undead is ‘just’ alien.
So many series release abbreviated final seasons where nothing happens except what is necessary to “wrap things up.”
It would have been better to stick with the original schedule all the way through, whatever it was. (Ten episodes per season, 55 minutes per episode, and a new season every year?)
And not everything has to be wrapped up neatly. Life goes on for everybody else in the kingdom even if Hero McNarrator is ticking off the last item on his bucket list.
Can you believe how stereotypical this is? How do they not realize they’ve killed off all the non-white people except the one who still has use to them (commander of an army)? This is 2019, and we might as well be watching any show from any period in history.
At this point, they might as well show Dany running away in panic, wearing high heel pumps. All the other stereotypes have been activated at this point.
Brienne’s reaction pissed me off too. I would have expected her to be more “Fucking men…you all suck”
That article is spot on about many things, but the most of those are how this is clearly a plot device to push Dany over the edge. They are using tropes and lazy writing to finish this out. Unless there is some major twist coming in the last 3 hours or so, this goes down IMO as the worst ending to a great series since LOST.
When he climbed up onto the beach and started screaming the name of the one character we were supposed to care about, instead of commanding his army, that shook my suspension of disbelief a bit.
oh george why couldn’t you finish that last goddamn book before the tv show got there
Yeah, that sure as shit ain’t the brienne i’ve gotten to know and enjoy watching since she was introduced. It seems strange there are some very vocal broflakes online complaining about arya killing the night king when the series (since it left the books behind) seems to be trying to bend over backwards to appeal to that audience.
What intrigues me is that I genuinely can’t predict, with two episodes left, who will sit on the throne. Jon’s the obvious choice; Dany as well. Which tells me it’ll be someone unexpected. Tyrion, perhaps, or Varys, for all I know.
