War has come to Winterfell... again. I swear this is the last time. There's a big fight, the living are eventually all but defeated, but Bran sits motionless for hours, which manages to bait the Night King into coming after him. When all seems lost and the last male Stark is about to get the chop, Arya leaps out of nowhere and stabs ol' frosty in the chest, and all the dead drop dead-er.
What I Liked
-The shot of the dragons flying above the clouds is fantastic.
What I Hated
-The night is dark and full of dark. Also, there's more dark with a side of dark. It was partially the fault of the compression on the stream from the HBO website, but even on cable it was pretty dark and I had to crank up the brightness on my TV to see anything.
-Even with enough brightness, the action is really hard to follow. People and zombies die, we know that much, but who, when, and how is nearly impossible to discern.
-Arya plays a quick game of The Last of Us. The whole situation in the library was ridiculous. There's a massive battle raging all over, but somehow ten wights sneak inside and Arya evades them by hiding behind bookcases and under a table in almost total silence.
-Everyone's battle tactics. We don't know much about the Night King, so he may just be some goof with magic powers who doesn't know anything, but there must have been at least one halfway competent commander on the side of the living who could've helped them plan things out a bit better.
-Beric basically dies the same way as Hodor. The major purpose of two characters' lives was to slightly delay some zombies. That's how you know the writers have run out of material.
Final Thoughts
There really isn't a lot to say about the plot of this episode, because it basically has no plot. It's essentially one long battle with very little time devoted to actual story advancement. Which is not to say that the story doesn't advance. A whole crapton of people die, including Edd, Lyanna Mormont, Beric Dondarrion, Theon, Jorah, the Night King, Melisandre, all the undead, all the Dothraki, most of the Unsullied, and most of the rest of the army of the living. When the battle's finally over, all those people's storylines are pretty much wrapped up... 'cause they're dead. It's kinda like how they wrapped up the whole Faith Militant thing at the end of season six: And then they all died. The end.
Where the hell was Lord Royce? What was Bran doing all episode? Is there anyone even left alive in the North at this point?
We'll have to wait for the next episode to find out, but it really seems like literally all the Dothraki in Westeros are now dead, and that was a fairly substantial portion of their total number. Thanks to Daenerys, an entire civilization has been nearly annihilated. A super-rapey, murdery civilization, but a civilization nonetheless.
I have no problem with Arya killing the Night King, I just wish there had been a bit more build up to it. He chucks an off-balance javelin or two, but at no point does he even draw his sword, and that's just disappointing. You want your big evil to do at least a little fighting to justify their big evilness.
So, we probably know about as much about the white walkers as we ever will (at least until that prequel series starts or Martin finishes another book), which isn't a whole heck of a lot. Their sole motivation seems to be "Kill all humans!" although that seems a bit self-defeating, since their method of reproducing involves human babies. Unfortunately, they needed to wrap up their part of the story since it was made abundantly clear that Cersei was never going to give a shit about them. 100,000 zombies could've laid siege to King's Landing and she still would've cared more about killing Tyrion. That's the problem with having so many dangling plot threads in the last season: sometimes you have to snip them off in an unsatisfying manner.
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