Loved the execution of the visuals. Definitely felt like yup thats exactly what it would be like to fight a hopeless battle with an endless army of zombies.

I feel very conflicted about the night king though. There are some building blocks of a really interesting antagonist. He's exceedingly cautious and calculating, never once engaging in an actual sword fight where he stands even the remote chance of dying. He also has a somewhat sympathetic origin story but the whole mute thing and complete lack of relatable or empathetic goals just falls flat.

Perhaps the whole point is that he became this somewhat alien entity, but I don't think the characterisation was strong or innovative enough pull that off, so he felt more like a plot device in the end than an actual complex individual like the rest of the cast of characters.

 

It was anticlimactic. The rest is nitpicking. Some of it is good nitpicking, like a complete lack of clarity and sense of who was who in the dragon fight, but then you have nerds on the internet being nerds on the internet.

But this is it? I'm one of those people who thinks that the Long Night is a complete distraction from the meat of the series - the fight for the Iron Throne - but if you're going to build it up like this then you need to treat it accordingly. There are different ways they could've accomplished this. The invasion could've gone on for longer with more battles south of the Wall. More characters could've died (that Grey Worm survived still perplexes me). In general, the Others/White Walkers needed to do more damage to Westeros and our cast. But they didn't. They were certainly a great threat prior to this and even for much of the battle. This battle was a hopeless one all the way through. That's the call the showrunners made and it's honestly an appropriate one... they just needed to follow through because in the end it somehow turned out pretty okay.

Then there's Arya getting to kill the Night King. Of all the major characters, she's surprisingly unfitting. You don't want it to be Jon or Dany. Fine, I can deal with that, but there are other characters with arcs that can naturally end with them snuffing out the Night King. Jaime, Brienne, Theon, hell even Sansa might work. Arya is a character whose arc is just kinda completed. She became this elite killer she wanted to be. There's an arc of her dealing with her revenge obsession and whatnot, but this doesn't fit with that. The only advantage she has is that it's plausible that an assassin could sneak her way into the godswood and pull that bit of it off, but that can be rectified by a matter of scene construction. And even then, there are ways to make the Arya kill work. Have a more appropriate character involved before giving Arya the final blow. She gets there only after he axes Bran. A better display of other characters trying and failing (let Jon actually cross swords with the guy). Fix that anticlimactic problem and it certainly becomes forgivable.

Overall, I was feeling this episode most of the way through. It had some problems and it wasn't as good as Battle of the Bastards or Hardhome, but it was solid enough. But the resolution just sucked. Left a bad taste in my mouth that soured the whole thing. Here's hoping the last three episodes tie things off right.

 

At this point, I will not be surprised if Sansa gets the chair and ends up married to Bronn. Nothing makes sense anyway.

 

I actually really like Arya being the one to land the killing blow. Definitely would've been nice to have Jon fight and barely survive the Night King somehow, but I have no problems with the death going as it did.

 

Yeah people would definitely look on the ending more favourably if Jon fought the night king or killed Viserion and maybe Grey Worm, Missandei, Brienne died too. Then you could have Arya land the killing blow saving Jon's like in a moment where Bran distracts the night king.

Also they never should have scrapped the scene where Tyrion and Sansa fight the wights in the crypts.

 

Wait, did they actually film that scene? Did they come up with a scene where those crypt wights could actually do something to named characters, and give Tyrion and Sansa a potentially badass scene, only to get rid of it and replace it with that dumb "Arya in the library" bit?

Now I'm extra mad at the episode.

 

One thing that might redeem this episode in my eyes is if they show what Bran was doing the whole time in the next episode. We only got that one scene of him seeing the NK in the sky via Ravens. Did Bran play a part orchestrating all the factors that went into Arya's successful sneak attack? Otherwise where was he warging the whole time?

I was also really disappointed with the Bran/NK interaction. We got no dialogue and blank staring back and forth. For a brief second I thought the NK was going to kneel before Bran or do something totally unexpected. Now we'll probably end up not exploring the WW or NK any further and turn solely to Cersei.

 

Around minute 19.

They filmed a sequence where Sansa and Tyrion go wight killing. There are more gifs of the footage floating around the internet.

 

They do a decent job defending the choices of the living, but I'm not convinced laying bait outside the walls was necessary to bring the dead in. They've Zerg rushed every target they've ever had. Even if bait was necessary, the bulk of their army should've been in the walls.

Still, was interesting to see a more formal analysis of tactics on both sides.

 

Just gonna leave this here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/c..._this_is_comedy_gold/?st=jv9vmusy&sh=eed67904

 

I... I don't know what to say.

 

Code:

https://youtu.be/lUyvna1vvPQ?t=286 

I want to show just a certain timestamp, DLP keeps giving me the whole video.

 

After an extra security for the episode 3, including delaying it in some countries by one hour, it appears that GoT is back to usual tradition of leaking early.

 

Spoiler: Leaked content

Rhaegal killed by Euron's super ballista


Missandei killed by the Mountain right infront of Greyworm.

 

do you have a link for the leaked episode?

 

Nope. Nobody seems to have it as of yet. Those clips are from an early release coming from Thailand.

Considering the truthfulness so far of nearly all predictions from the leaks posted in r/freefolk, D&D are going to completely mangle all character arcs just for shocking the audience.

More spoilers :

Spoiler

 

Son of a bitch.
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