Thoughts on Game of Thrones S8E3: The Long Night

So I wasn't going to comment on this, but my twitter thoughts on last night's Game of Thrones, "The Long Night" were running a bit long, so I figured I'd do a short blog post on the episode.  Obviously, spoilers abound, so if you haven't watched the episode go no farther.  I'm also a book reader, although I haven't touched the books in a while, so spoilers there too I guess. 

In general, without spoiling, my thoughts on The Long Night is that it's an impressive way to fail at storytelling, a massive anticlimax without proper setup, with none of the character beats we're used to from this show/book.  For more details, see me after the jump:




The darkness of last night's episode has been well discussed, and I've seen some excusing it based upon the idea that it's a good image of the "fog of war", showing the chaos of what's happening to the audience. 

Here's the problem with that:  Game of Thrones, for all its occasional battle scenes, is not a series about the horrors of war.  Game of Thrones, and The Song of Ice and Fire (SoIaF) that it's based upon, is at its heart a story about characters, using an epic fantasy setting.  Hence why the show can have two episodes to start a six episode season that features no action and just characters talking, and have it totally work.  We care about these characters - we may want some to die and some to live, or just be interested in the fates either way of some of the rest, but we care.  And in the darkness of last night, in the chaos, it became incredibly hard to tell what was happening to many of them, diminishing any impact of the story from coming through. 

Moreover, in the attempt to be a grand epic battle scene, character beats were rushed or didn't make any sense, or felt like deus ex machinas, or just plain felt pointless.  Sam finds himself swarmed by zombies and Jon just...runs past him I guess?  For a book reader - and I try to separate out the book and show but it's hard - that was a truly bizarre and out of character choice of action for Jon to take (and I don't think it's that much better in the show).  It's made kind of worse by the fact that Sam apparently survives!  The same is true of quite a few other character beats (apparently Jaime and Brienne saved each other in the action I'm told but I missed it in the darkness!) 

And then there's Bran and the Night King and the conclusion of all of that.  Let's be clear here: The Night King might exist in some form in the books to come, but as he is here he is a show invention.  So the failure of the character, who's built up as this uber-powerful character but has no background of interest, no motivation that's ever explained, whatever, is entirely on the showrunners.  His connection to Bran is similarly completely unexplained, and why killing him would end the threat when he's not the only white walker is never explained.  Arya killing him is a successful end to Arya's plot arc (although she's not done with Cersei alive) but it's a failure of storytelling for seasons on end, as a character built up as a threat for multiple years is just wiped off the board without having done anything other than kill a few minor characters.

This is not to say that the episode needed a big body count.  It totally didn't!  But the darkness and time it spent never made me feel like any of the characters I cared about, except maybe Arya, were in danger, and the whole thing made seasons of build up feel like totally pointless.  It's as if the showrunners were embarrassed by the epic fantasy plot and just wanted to sweep it off the board so they could get back to the political stuff that the show has thrived on for years.  And listen, I like that political stuff, but they basically got ONE chance to show off the epic fantasy conflict that's been coming from the very beginning.  And instead we got:

A. A battle that we could barely see, killing only characters we generally had no interest in, where the bad guy had no character and was defeated with a single out of nowhere knife thrust.
B.  A bunch of prophecies which never paid off and will probably never be mentioned again - Azor Ahai?  Lightbringer?  Prince who was Promised?  Who cares!  Now the show has always tried to downplay prophecies (sidelining Quaithe as soon as possible, removing prophecies from the House of the Undying, etc.) but they've been unavoidable, and instead the show adapts one minor one about Arya instead.  And again, that's a fun payoff for Arya who totally deserves it, but just an anticlimax for everything else.
C.  Justifies a major character flaw of Cersei.  I've seen some people say how Cersei is a genius and this episode proves it, but the point of Cersei has always been, especially in the books but the show also, is that while she's manipulative and smart she has an incredibly bad sense of hubris, is incredibly impulsive toward making bad decisions, and tends to miss the big picture consequences of her actions (unleashing the high sparrow, for instance).  Ignoring the Night King was yet another example of this, but instead the show says "Haha, Cersei's hubris pays off totally!"  It's a rather dumb feedback loop. 

I'm looking forward to how this show ends, but man did it blow the character beats and buildup of prior seasons in The Long Night, and it's fairly disappointing.  There were so many ways it could've improved, but instead the show gave us a dark mess, satisfying only in one character's arc, and left the watchers to just enjoy the rest in shadow.