That was fucking awesome. Great ambience, best music ever, and an end I did not see coming.

You poor, poor motherfuckers that aren't programmed to just enjoy things.

 

Fuller review/breakdown.

As others have said, making it a night-time battle in blizzard conditions made it hard to tell what was going on at points. While having the battle be dark and chaotic was not a bad thing per se, there were some times when it was hard to tell what was going on. The dragon fights were a good example of this, since all three of the dragons look fairly similar in the middle of a dark and chaotic fight.

Aside from some Hollywood Tactics and the lighting, the battle itself was pretty solid. If you were expecting real and effective medieval battle tactics from Game of Thrones you haven't paid too much attention to the last several seasons. They did a very good job of building tension and having the dread mount.

The crypts thing was something everyone spotted a coming a mile away, but otherwise it was fine. Mildly disappointed they didn't bring back Sean Bean and stick him in wight makeup. They could've done something fun with that.

Really, my biggest concern/complaint is that this feels like it should be the finale, and instead we still have half a season left. Unless there's some sort of twist coming up, the battle against Cersei is going to take up the rest of the season, and it's hard for that to not feel like a real postscript after the Battle for Dawn.

 

Celestin, you're much better at this than I am. Still, I was right about Lyanna.

 

Wish I could have just enjoyed it.

Each individual scene was great, but at the end I was left feeling kinda cheated.

Best moment of the episode IMO was Tyrion's look off Sansa's "you were the best of them." I laughed. Talk about a low bar.

Maybe it was the TV I was watching it on, but I found most of the larger battle scenes pretty tough to follow.

I think the overall letdown I'm feeling stems from the fact that 1) Arya just feels so ham-fisted at this point. Like during the scene where she was sneaking around the library, I kept thinking to myself, "what is the point of this scene? She gets in here, she sneaks around, she leaves?" and then at the end, I thought, "oh, that was the point. It was to wrench the audience expectations with a cattle prod into accepting that she can basically teleport now."

And 2), I feel let down that for all the rhetoric and buildup about this huge, brutal threat being more important than anything else, that in the end it all does boil down to who sits on that fucking stupid chair. As if I actually gave a shit about that at this point.

Meh.

Like, looking back on it, it feels like the entire narrative point of the night king and the white walkers was to believably drain the "good guy combined forces" group of resources so that the "bad guys in King's Landing" group would be a believably strong threat for the last three episodes.

 

The Night King and his posse literally did a runway walk through the carnage of Winterfell followed by a slow motion music video walk up to Bran. Imagine how much they could’ve have accomplished with a little hustle!

Arya killing the Night King kinda makes sense if you consider GRRMs hard on for Tolkien. This is the series Eowyn vs Witch King moment. I could see him doing it in the books. Only instead of Arya jumping over the platoon of wights and white walkers like Michael Jordan she should’ve been wearing the face of a wight and got him Faceless Man style.

Also the problem with how this just went down is that it clear Arya can kill all her enemies in one episode. After what she just did you think she can’t put a knife in Cersei and Dany (if Dany threatens Jon)? Which means all the tension in the next three episodes will be forced if you got Deus ex Arya waiting in the wings doing nothing.

 

I kinda had to fast-forward through some parts. It wasn't just the worst sort of predictable, it was annoyingly so. Honestly, if this was a fanfic, we'd be complaining about Mary Sues and the sheer lack of deaths. The resolution of the tension in this episode was anti-climactic as fuck. To be honest I don't really know what they could have done to make it better, but I'm of the school of thought that the addition of magic to GOT dilutes the premise, as does the entire humanity vs white walkers shtick.

That ship has sailed, yes, but this episode, cloaked in darkness as it was, seems like perhaps the worst yet. I couldn't tell what was going on in parts, all the main characters survive, Arya's leap of faith seemed forced, and dafaq was Bran doing the entire time? Disappointed. Badly disappointed.

 

Christ that was badass. I feel like I need a cigarette

 

I kept expecting Jon to get the job done right up until Arya Superman'd her way into the Night King's clutches. I guess the takeaway here is that, much like GRRM is happy to defy expectations by killing off main characters, one should not put too much stock into a prophecy in his world. Look where that got Stannis, poor misguided sod.

 

Please don’t spoil endgame in this thread your 2 post made some points to it( I don’t think you spoiled anything yet, so please look on this in your next posts in this thread) not everyone yet watched avangers(I myself will go tommorow). Spoilers for game of thrones are fine here but not for anything else.

 

I dislike the smug "I pity the people who can't just enjoy something".
Because this episode requires you to straight up shut down your brain to not get hung up just a little on the details. I think it is very fair to come out with questions and annoyances.

I enjoyed a good part of this episode, but it just felt like no thought went into it except for "must subvert expectation" and "make it look cool".
The Dothraki charge was awesome and completely retarded. The volley of artillery looked cool, but the placement and usage of said artillery was stupid. The placement of the ditch was stupid. I would even argue that trying to fight in front of the walls makes no sense. No big pots of oil on the ramparts to burn the wights when they try to climb the walls. Not one of the tactical decisions seems smart.

There were so many cool shots soured by the stupidity of it.
Melisandre setting fire to the ditch because they can't signal Dany to do it. Cut straight to a shot of Jon sitting on his dragon observing it. Why couldn't he just do it?
Coming to rescue Jon on a dragon. Landing said dragon and waiting for the wights to have a chance of taking down the dragon. Again. It looks cool to have the wights zerg up on the dragon, but it's just so damn stupid.
Maybe 3-5 different shots of a character (or a few characters) being completely surrounded by wights, providing us with an awesome shot. But when we return to that same character, they have somehow gotten a little free and have plenty of space to move in. The wights were utilizing the perfectly good strategy of zerging, except all the times it would endanger the important people.
Hiding in the crypt, when quite a few people know for a fact that the Night King can resurrect the dead. At least empty the crypt and burn the bodies or something. It is very irritating when the show tries hard to argue that they have a lot of smart people, then goes to show those smart people what their enemy is capable of, and then they just ignore it.

I don't even mind Arya being the one to kill the Night King, but I would have liked there to be some explanation on how she got there and got through all the wights and the white walkers surrounding him. Some kind of disguise? A tree near enough. Something. If you look at the shot where Theon stands in the middle of all the bodies, and the camera zooms out, you can see the huge distance Arya would have to pass before being in jumping distance of the Night King.

These are just a few examples. There are many more.
I get that it looked cool and the music was good and so on. But how can anyone get through this episode without thinking: "That makes no sense at all" at least a few times.

All in all I'm conflicted. This episode was epic. But also very very stupid.
Edit:
If you can completely enjoy the episode despite the above, then good on you. But that doesn't invalidate any of it.

 

My overwhelming response to this episode was: meh. As predicted, it was a pure action episode. But worse than predicted, in fact, because they screwed it up as an action episode too.

Three basic requirements to make action good:

1. Good action choreography.

2. Moments of emotion.

3. Character-driven action.

This episode failed on all three.

Choreography

The action was so dark and edited so choppily that you didn't know what was happening.

The dragon fight was the worst offender here. It was impossible to tell which dragon was which, and who was winning. We still don't know if Jon's dragon is dead or not. But it wasn't just the dragons: I think I concluded that Brienne was dead about 3 or 4 times in the course of the episode as it appeared that she had become overrun. And then a few scenes later there she was again.

There were also lots of scenes that didn't make a lot of sense. Arya's sneaking around scene, for example - at that point, the defences had been completely overrun. There should have been so many zombies around that there was no scope to sneak. She would have been completely swamped.

If you're going for pure action, it has to be good action. And this just wasn't it. Hardhome and the Battle of the Bastards were both far better battles from a pure action perspective than this was.

Moments of Emotion

Game of Thrones needs to take a couple pages out of the Marvel playbook on this front. Tonally, the battle was entirely one note. There were no ups and downs. No structure. Just people swinging swords from beginning to end.

This was exacerbated by the poor action choreography. How are we supposed to have an emotional reaction if we don't know what's happened or why? When Jon's dragon landed, I was like... so, did it win the fight and is now resting from its wounds, so I should be happy? Or has it lost the fight and is dead and I should be sad? Or did it win the fight but gain mortal wounds in the process, so it should be bittersweet?

Even now, after the episode has ended, I still don't know what it is.

Every time a character seemed to die I was like "So... is that it? Are they dead then?" I was too confused to have an emotional reaction. And by the time I had been wrong several times about who was and wasn't dead, I just stopped caring.

Character driven action

Episode 2 had done a marvellous job of setting up all the character notes that needed to be hit upon in the battle for a fulfilling climax.

- Jon and Danaerys were going to be forced to sort out their differences under the pressure of imminent death.

- Tyrion, facing the accusation of being wrong too many times, was to have a chance to be clever once more.

- Sansa was going to finally realise the pointlessness of political scheming in the face of existential threat.

- Brienne's knighthood was going to take on a bittersweet aspect.

- Podrick, now a squire to a real knight, could be knighted on the battlefield.

- Grey Worm was going to have to sacrifice his dream of going to Narth with Missandei.

Etc.

None of this happened. The episode completely squandered all the careful set-up that had been put in place over the last two episodes. There wasn't a single meaningful character moment in the whole episode. It was action without agency - just hack and slash. Other than Arya choosing to run away, I don't think a character made a single meaningful decision in the fight.

----------

On top of all those failures as an episode, it also failed massively as a climax to the series as a whole. So many pieces of foreshadowing have been left dangling, now apparently little more than red herrings. Basically Jon's entire character arc has been turned into a question mark. Why did the Lord of Light bring him back, if he had no significant role to play in the defeat of the Others? Why did Melisandre think him the Prince Who was Promised?

And then there's the final resolution, which makes little sense. What was Bran doing the entire episode while he was warging? Just watching things through the eyes of crows? This episode was supposed to be the moment at which his importance as a character became apparent. Nothing happened. I was expecting him to fight the Night King for control of the army of the dead, or at least have some conversation with the Night King, or something. But nope, nothing.

And Arya's killing of the Night King... it's a poor ending on both a logical and thematic level.

Logically, there's the question of how she got there in the first place, with an army of the dead completely encircling Bran and the Night King. Further, how did a Valyrian steel dagger kill him, when the thing that makes Valyrian steel special was the fact that it was forged in dragonfire... the same dragonfire which was completely ineffective earlier in the episode.

Thematically, there were three other characters who had better "claim" to kill the Night King: Jon, Bran, and Danaerys. All three of them had encountered him before, and all three of them had a mythology surrounding them which had been foreshadowed and built up.

Jon: potentially the Prince Who Was Promised, resurrected from the dead for a purpose, ex-Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and the individual who had done the most to oppose the Night King. He is the Night King's material opponent.

Bran: the Three-Eyed Raven, a mystical being with a long history with the Night King and sharing a similar power of control over other beings. Previously encountered the Night King in dreams and in real life, when Hodor sacrificed himself to save Bran. He is the Night King's mystical opponent.

Danaerys: the dragon queen, the symbol of fire within the series, the counterpoint to the Night King's ice, potentially the Princess Who Was Promised due to a mistranslation. She is the Night King's elemental opponent.

But even if we accept that Arya should be the one to do it, the way in which it was done was thematically unsatisfying. She didn't use any of her Faceless man skills to do it, such as sneaking up on him with the face of a White Walker. There was no mystical aspect to what she did at all.

She just jumped and stabbed him. A lucky sucker punch, dull and meaningless.

It boggles my mind that with such a massive budget and team behind this series, they blew it as hard as they did. But then, they lost sight of what makes GoT good two seasons ago, so I shouldn't be too surprised.

---------------

I've always maintained, even before the show came out, that the really interesting part of Game of Thrones is the feudal politics and that the undead invasion was a regrettable distraction from what made the series great.

BUT if you're going to go that route and introduce a load of mystical mythology, you should at least make good on it. Given the routine way in which the Night King was defeated (apparently to have Cersei the final big bad), and the way in which all the mythology surrounding the White Walkers was completely ignored, the show would have been better off just removing the whole undead invasion plotline entirely and just focusing on the politics of the Seven Kingdoms.

 

I called the Night Kimg being defeated in episode 3 way back and I'm glad it worked out like this. Yeah, I get that Arya being the one to shank him isn't what we all expected but why not?

Now the show can get back to letting Dany and Jon defeat Cersei and/or each other.

To those saying there should have been lots more deaths... I'm not sure. Yeah I expected a couple more but we have to be left with some characters to finish out the series.

The North has to be majorly depopulated right now. What's left south of Winterfell, Torrehen's Square, White Harbour, The Barrowlands and The Neck? Winterfell is a ruin and essentially every lay person is dead if you buy that they fit the entire refugee population in the crypts.

This isnt surprising because the show fucked up Winterfell really early on by making it so small. The titular and spiritual capital of a kingdom for thousands of years and it's not much bigger than a random castle near me.

 

For the time and money spent on the purely mystical plot up North D&D could have had an unfucked Dorne, not meme-tier Iron Islands and brought Daenerys/FAegon plotlines into Westeros.

 

After watching Ep3 one question still needs to be answered: Is D.B Weiss Serpentguy?

Because the gripes I have with the show are becoming more and more congruent with the gripes I had for Dragons of Ice and Fire.

 

Right. Just watched. And for once I'm on the side of the people who didn't love it. Normally I'm very much a "shut up and just enjoy things" sorta guy, but I just can't in this one.

First and biggest problem is the lighting and cuts. I had to turn my laptop up to maximum brightness to be able to see what was going on, and at that point the contrast was really bad and very noticeable throughout. Was impossible to find a nice middle ground. The cuts in a lot of scenes were also very abrupt and jerky, with the worst offender being the dragon duel. It was a really cool scene, but I had a lot of trouble distinguishing between dragons.

A second problem was the battle strategy. I know that since the books ended we've started going more Hollywood for all the battles, but come on. Why would you not use your catapults/trebuchets/whatever-they-were before sending your cavalry forward. And speaking of, why the fuck did they send the Dothraki and Ghost off to die like that? The reason a cavalry charge was effective was to flank an enemy force, and the morale hit of having them come in, murder a bunch of you, and wheel off before they could be turned against. Then they'd do it again. And again. And again. All the while your frontlines are still being savaged by their infantry. Less disciplined armies tended to just break, even if the losses sustained weren't massive.

The problem? None of that applies against an army of the fucking dead. To make it worse the horses trampling them doesn't actually take the dead out of the picture entirely. The Dothraki really should've been kept in reserve for future battles, or at least kept off to the side and have them charge in to save the retreat from becoming a route or something.

This leads to the next problem with their strategy, why the fuck was anyone outside the walls in the first place? Can you imagine how much more effective they would've been if they'd fought from the walls the entire time? At most, they should've had a token force outside to lure the dead in, but I don't see what was to be gained by putting all your guys in easy reach of the armies of the dead like that when you have a perfectly good fucking castle with giant stone walls behind them. Could've even had the Night King's entrance be flying in through the blizzard unseen to shatter the walls just as it feels like they just might hold out.

Third problem with the episode, characters in general were misused imo. Biggest offender was Melisandre. Her moment with Arya was unnecessary, and I think we would've been a lot better off is she'd stabbed herself into the trench to make the spell work. Would've been a nice redemption moment, and overall given a lot more 'oomph' to the scene. Fully thought that that's what they were building towards with the dead closing in from both sides and that last one jumping at her, and was disappointed when the spell just worked and she retreated in good order.

I'd say Grey Worm was another. Really expected a Big Goddamn Hero moment from him, potentially pulling a Helm's Deep to light the trench. He's more of a broader trend of no sacrificial plays though. I honestly expected a lot more second tier characters to be forced to give their lives to let the defenders last just a little longer.

Big exception to this was Lyanna Mormont. That little girl showed absolutely everyone up. Gets arm-slapped by a fucking undead giant. Gets back up. Charges. Gets caught, is being crushed, and keeps her cool enough to stab it in the fucking eye with a dragonglass dagger. What a fucking legend. One of the standout moments from the episode by far.

There were just a lot of moments where I thought someone was gonna die b/c they were beyond overrun, and they just somehow kept surviving... and surviving... and surviving... and surviving... just long enough for the Night King to get shanked. Worst offender was Sam. He was 100% at the bottom of a pile of undead, and it doesn't make any sense for them not to have torn him to shreds between Jon passing by him and Arya shanking the NK 10 minutes later.

That was one of the parts I actually liked. It was a nice continuation of Arya's storyline as the ultimate assassin, "Not today" was a wonderful line, and I liked the subversion of Jon not being the one to land the final blow. I did think he lost out on a triumphant moment though. Two possibilities for me were to have him be completely overrun Battle of the Bastards style, and Dany puts her trust in his Targaryen blood and flames him, killing all the dead and leaving him unharmed. The other was to have him jump out and actually put down the undead dragon before the NK dies to Arya. Would've been a satisfying moment, and could've been played as the NK getting distracted by the death of his most powerful tool and giving Arya the split second she needed to carry out the kill.

In response to @Taure , there's actually no concrete info on how Valyrian steel was made. It's thought that dragonfire was part of the process, but magic spells have also been suggested as part of it. So there's nothing contradictory with the NK being immune to the fire but weak to the steel. Especially as we've already seen that the rest of the White Walkers are vulnerable to them. Having the NK be immune would've been a bit of an impossible situation because then how can he die? Anything else would've felt like a cop out at that point imo.

I'm actually among those who didn't think of the dead in the crypts being raised until someone else pointed out the possibility, so I didn't mind that twist being unforeseen by the characters. The crypts have always been House Stark's last stronghold, I'm fine with them overlooking the dead in them due to literally thousands of years of safety being associated with them.

Theon went out like a champ. That was the other death I really enjoyed. The Ironborn as a whole held off the dead incredibly well, and actually just goes to show how much more effective the defense would've been had it been centered around using dragonglass arrows to hold off the dead from the walls.

No idea what the fuck Bran was doing though. If he'd just sat there it would've been fine, but he warged and seemed to accomplish nothing, so I kept waiting for the crows to play a role somehow and they never really did. Best I can guess is that he was 'accidentally' giving the NK his location, but it was established that the mark already did that so no idea what was up there.

Overall I'm okay with the army of the dead being defeated here and the rest being the war for the throne, as that's always been the focus, but I do feel like the execution was lackluster in a number of key places.

 

Well that was extremely disappointing.

Characters survived situations they had no right surviving.

Seriously why is Sam still alive. (I love that Jon chose to ignore him though).

I really expected the castle to be better defended. Especially the walls. They just poked at the dead skeletons, and somehow that was supposed to be a defense.

What was Bran doing the whole time? Why would Jon allow the innocent people to be put in a crypt full of dead people, after he has had multiple examples that the Night King can raise the dead? All those bodies should have been burned.

Why were the Dothraki undead attacking One by one. and ignoring Dany? She should have been dead ten times over.

Arya literally teleported behind The Night King. With an anime wind effect for good measure. Just in case you thought this was still a good show.

House Mormont is dead and gone.

So there is nothing more to learn about the Night King? really? Damn, what a disappointment.

Martin will sell a tonne of books when he finishes. If he's smart, he should publish the next book this year.

 

He is smart and I fully believe he was eager to get the show out of the way, see what people liked and didn't then tweaked his overarching plot on the fly.

I loved it as an episode of the show even though it had a lot of glaring holes. Like if the weights were strong enough to burst out of their stone tombs then why wasn't the whole exercise doomed from the start? Also the lighting was so bad I have no idea wtf happened to Rhaegal.

Jon not killing Viserion feels like a missed opportunity. If Lyanna can kill a giant and Arya can kill the NK then they could have summoned enough fuckery for dragonslayer!Jon.

 

The actual episode, if you think of it as a standalone movie, was decent enough. Sure, some stupid military tactics but that's to be expected from Hollywood these days. The episode was, as usual, far to dark but I managed to bump up the brightness in VLC. I can understand wanting to have a dark theme to the show, but when I can't make out which characters are on screen it's a bit to much.
Anyway, it was fine and I was on the edge of my seat for most of it.

Was it a fitting conclusion to one of TV's most hyped arcs, going on close to a decade at this point? Most definitely not.

Game of Thrones was at it's best when it dealt with feudal politics though, so we'll see if they can pull a rabbit out of the hat in the last few episodes. My guess is that they will just continue hammering the "good vs evil" angle and it will be thoroughly unsatisfying.

 

He is not dead.
https://i.redd.it/4ga9wvi164v21.jpg