Season 8 Episode 3 “The Long Night” review – Too big to comprehend

 

I think this is the first time that I’m at a total loss writing one of these reviews. We’re standing here, at what’s likely the apex of a development that speeded past us in the last half decade. If you had told me in 2014 that in 2019, we’d be watching a battle involving thousands of people on both sides, three dragons and a zombie giant IN THE MIDSEASON FINALE OF A TV SHOW, and that we’d complain about how much sense the battle tactics made, I’d have declared you a bit lucid. This a show that couldn’t scrape the money together to show more than two horses and twenty people for the Tourney of the Hand only seven years ago!

“Game of Thrones” let the charge of international geekdom, together with the MCU, into a total transformation of the media landscape in such a mind-boggling short timeframe that it’s still hard to comprehend. We have not even begun catching up on the contemporary importance of this popcultural shift. In that way, the episode is too big to comprehend.

However, even on its own terms, I struggle to put a finger on how to actually place it, though this is a temporary phenomenon. This is a weekly recap, after all, and it’s impossible to rate this episode and its impact without first seeing the next three episodes. The showrunners made one daring decision in here: They switched the major theme around. Instead of the Night King and the dreading apocalypse of the invasion of the dead, it’s Cersei and the Iron Throne after all. The show title kind of gave it away, to be honest, but I had willed myself into believing that it was the other way around, and that Jon and Dany were the ones to inevitably do it.

My intimate knowledge and relationship with the books preclude me from really grasping the finer webs of the plotting here. Did Benioff and Weiss really foreshadow that it would be Arya doing the killing in the end? Did the show ever mention the Azor Ahai myth, or is this just me, mindlessly parsing knowledge between mediums, unable to separate two different canons of lore? The very mechanism that allowed me to fill the blanks of nostalgia in the first two episodes of the season and enjoy the scenes for more than they were now works against me, like muscle memory itching after an amputation, making every move wrong. The show is too big to comprehend for me, and I’m awed and flattened by what’s happening.

Does this mean we’re watching a marvel of an episode, the best there ever was, topping last week’s episode? Hardly. What I’m saying is this: without having seen the last three episodes, it’s impossible to tell whether or not the focus switch (which almost surely won’t be in the books) to the Iron Throne and Cersei as the main objectives and the killing of all undead will work out or not. I’m doubtful about the premise, but a lot of stories make mediocre premises work, while a lot of other stories fail on killer premises. It’s all in the execution, and we don’t know yet where it points. We need to see said execution in order to pass judgement on what transpired there.

There are things we can infer from this, however. Like many people, I was surprised by the low death count. Grey Worm is still alive, for god’s sake! That’s not to say more people need to have died. The decision to make this battle episode three of six obviously means that for a lot of them, more is in store. All those who had nothing left are dead now. Let’s take a look at them for a second.

Theon dies protecting his home, being told be Bran that he’s a good man. It was the perfect culmination of his arc, in the perfect place, with a clear mission objective (protect Bran) executed well. He was the most likely death of the episode, and it totally makes sense.

He’s followed by the second on the list, Beric Dondarrion. His story arguably ended four seasons ago, so breathing second life into the character (see what I did there?) by letting him realize he was meant to be Arya’s bodyguard all along is a nice way. Well done there.

Then we have Dolorous Edd, who is number three only because Grey Worm for some reason escaped the Grim Reaper. Not much to say here: the Wall is down, the Watch is done, and it’s pretty much over for him. That he goes out saving Sam is also heavily foreshadowed.

Next in line is Jorah Mormont. He was Dany’s Queensguard, and he dies as such. His arc, never all that pronounced anyway, had been flat since his banishment by Dany way back when, and him going out like this makes a lot of sense.

Poor Lyanna Mormont also wasn’t a real surprise, unfortunately. The political conflict left resolves around King’s Landing, not Winterfell, so she had served her role, and got a badass send-off befitting her.

Qhono also died, but I know his name only because I looked it up. Did anyone expect the Dothraki to escape this?

And then we have Viserion and the Night’s King. Honestly, I didn’t expect the show to play it as straight as they did, but Viserion battling Jon in the yard and the Night King dying in the same spot he was created were perfectly fitting.

Surviving, on the other hand, are both Jaime and Brienne, which points to them playing a role with Cersei’s resolution. Tormund lives, for some reason, as do Podrick and Gendry. I don’t expect them to do much more than be glorified extras until they get a farewell scene in the last episode. Yohn Royce still lives, but for him, the same applies. Ghost is still alive, as are the dragons. This is significant; I guess they’re only alive because Dany is nothing without dragons and if Jon had lost his, the conflict over his parentage coming would be rather lopsided. Sandor is still alive, as is Missandei. I don’t see huge roles for them either. But for all of them, dying in Winterfell wouldn’t have carried much meaning, so their deaths would have been needless cruelty. None of this is meant as a critique.

I’m dancing around the issue, I know. Is this a good episode or not?

It’s frivolous to even ask. Of course it is. The sheer level of artisanry on display is breathtaking, but it has always been on “Game of Thrones”. This show can never be not “good”. Even while watching the Dornish plot of season 5, you get great costumes, the best actors that could be casted for the role, meticulous lighting, near perfect blocking (let’s ignore that fight scene…) and astute camerawork.

It’s the same here. The staging is magnificent. Let me give you a short highlight reel.

There’s a scene in which hundreds of Dothraki with burning arakhs are riding into the night, and with one of the best pieces of sound design ever, they get extinguished one by one.

There’s a scene in which dragons brave a blizzard, soar out of it over a star-speckled night sky, have a moment of magnificence and are then attacked by an ice dragon shooting at them from the Blizzard below, before they dive back into the maelstrom again.

There’s a scene in which ice zombies and skeletons are overrunning the walls of Winterfell in several places at once.

We watch a zombie giant break through the gate, smashing people left and right and then getting killed by Lyanna Mormont. Seriously, you said they’ve got a cave troll? Pfffff, I say.

There’s an ice dragon descending on the Yard of Winterfell, clawing at the stones and blocking Jon Snow from entering the godswood.

There’s a scene in which Arya traverses the Winterfell library in a deadly cat-and-mouse-game, combined with a scene in which the Hound and Berric race to get through her, all the while trying not to rouse the zombies shuffling around.

The Night King raises all the dead to contemptuously block Jon, and the dead Starks in the Winterfell crypts (“we’ll be safe here”) rise up and threaten everyone.

Theon and his Ironborn hold the line firing fire arrows into the godswood like machine gun emplacements at Vietcong coming out of the jungle.

I could go on and on. The sheer level of spectacle on display here is awesome to behold, in the literal sense of the word. Spectacle is a lot of what “Game of Thrones” has been about since at least season 5, so this is warranted for its finale. Like a lot of its characters, the show is going out in a blaze of glory.

However.

However.

I have issues. For much of the larger plot, I’m reserving judgement because it’s too dependent on the choices that are going to come. Viewed in isolation, Arya killing the Night King is perfectly fine. Concentrating on Dany and Jon and Bran so much was a perfect bait and switch for it, the scene worked well, everything’s good. The burden now lies on the execution going forward.

But we are able to judge some elements of the episodes on their own merits. First, the lighting. Especially the first encounter is just too damn dark. It’s really, really hard to see what’s going on, and the quick, frenzy-cut shots of zombies overrunning someone get stale rather fast because too little is discernible. This issue gets markedly better once everyone is within Winterfell.

And that leads to the biggest issue with the whole episode, and that’s the chaos. It’s no problem of having a battle that’s chaotic. If chaos is what you intend, you can shoot chaos. But in this case, it doesn’t really seem the case. What’s missing here is clear geography. In episode 2, I thought the battle plan sounded rather sensible, and in its abbreviated form, it did. Not so much in the episode.

What the plot is really missing is some internal logic. I’m not talking about the questions of what would be realistic. Currently, Twitter is awash in people that argue, as my illustrious co-host Sean T. Collins succinctly put it, that the eagles should have dropped the ring in the volcano. The Dothraki charging doesn’t make much sense, but it’s an awesome scene. What’s lacking is some rationale; what the characters are lacking are mission statements.

I think a lot of the bad criticism stems from this problem. People are discussing why there weren’t nigthfires and staggered battle lines and horse archery and stuff like this because the show didn’t provide a framework to understand the battle. Stuff just happened. The Dothraki rode, catapults fired, then everyone fell back, which may or may not have been part of the plan, then the walls were manned, which may or may not have been part of the plan, and from then on, it was pure chaos. Brienne and Jaime were surrounded at three different indistinct locations three times, and we never saw how they got out. So what does it stick out like a sore, whereas no one bats on eye on Aragorn throwing Gimli onto the bridge? It’s not like “The Two Towers” killed a lot of major characters or showed staggered battle lines or some such nonsense.

The show missed mission statements. Lyanna Mormont seemed to be holding the yard? Grey Worm protected the retreat, but the retreat came because some original plan failed. The Dothraki charged, but to achieve what end? Jaime and Brienne fought, as did many others, to achieve what? Let’s quickly scheme this out with the material we have so you can see what I mean:

Knowing from Hardhome that the Undead charge in an unrelenting wave, the Dothraki are commanded to break up that wave by charging in, disengaging and returning, goading them into an early attack and harrying the undead in the wings. The catapults, in the meantime, further break up the enemy’s pathway, lighting the battlefield and blunting the edge while allowing the Dothraki’s superior mobility to work out. The whights are not smart, so this should work. Of course, it really doesn’t, but we don’t know why. We only see the result, which is perfectly fine. But now I have context. Maybe the Dothraki got cocky with their newly flaming arakhs.

The next phase of the plan is to lure the dead into the trenches and then light them with the dragons while army retreats to Winterfell in orderly fashion. This way, a lot of dead meat gets killed. We saw this can work beyond the Wall, when Viserion was killed. Makes sense enough, and again, gets horribly wrong because the charge is much more forceful and numerous than envisioned even in the worst-case scenarios.

But, thanks to quick thinking Grey Worm, who is tasked with this important part of the battle, most people make it back (cue to Melisandre’s rescue). In the castle, Lyanna is holding the courtyard (as she does in the show), coordinating the retreating troops. Fine. Arya commands the archers for supporting fire. Also fine. It’s all there, but it’s pure congestion by me. The show doesn’t communicate it, and therefore, a lot of fight scenes are random (leading to the chaotic impression). Too many characters still don’t have mission statements. What do Brienne and Jaime do? What constitutes success, what failure? What’s Jorah’s job? He ends up protecting Dany, but if that was his mission (which it should have been!), him riding with the Dothraki was a dumb idea. What was Edd’s job? What did Sam do in this battle, other than giving Jon a really cool reaction shot when he decided to let his friend die for the good of mankind?

But again, if that is the extent of the criticism you can bring forward (the next three weeks will decide the rest), then what are we doing here, exactly? I admit that I lost the thread completely mid-battle. When Arya suddenly entered her personal horror movie in the Winterfell library, I was totally confused. What was going on? Was the rest dead? But I quickly decided to just wing it. I was watching a great little horror movie, and it was engrossing and exciting, and that was all.

It has always been the strength of the showrunners. Benioff and Weiss are uniquely talented into making big, cool, awesome and inspiring scenes. They’re less good in meaningfully connecting them, where it’s more hit and miss. But shit, to hear some people talk, this is like the worst offense next to shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. And that’s ludicrous. We got the greatest spectacle ever put to TV screen, finishing the most beloved story. You can despair over the idea that this may be the only ending to the Song of Ice and Fire that we’re ever gonna get and wade deep in the misery, but I much prefer to see the bright side of it and enjoy this show.