The Long Night

It's been a few days since the third episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, the best TV show ever made, and a lot of people have a lot of things to say about it.

I mostly enjoyed the episode, even though it was way too dark.  I even had the lights turned off and the blinds closed, and I still couldn't see anything.  Plus, the power went out right in the middle of the episode, but came back on (thankfully).

Now, there's going to be spoilers, obviously.

The ending surprised me.  I did not think the Night King was actually going to win in this episode, and I didn't think that whole storyline would be resolved in this episode.  There's three episodes left in this season, and the biggest threat has already been dealt with.  Now it'll be the heroes trying to win the throne from the Incest Queen.

I wish the Long Night had actually been spread out over two episodes - the third and the fourth.  Then the final two can be about marching to King's Landing to finally rid the world of the Incest Queen.

Anyway, about the end...Arya Stark killed the Night King, and people are calling her a Mary Sue for it.

Did they watch the episode?  Arya is not a Mary Sue.  Not in that singular episode and certainly not throughout the show.

A great deal of the episode involves Arya running from the wights.  She's scared, and a couple of times she has to be saved by two other guys, one of which loses his life (although, according to Melisandre, it was fate and stuff).

Arya's a good fighter and a skilled assassin, thanks to her training with the Many-Faced God, but she's not invincible.  Mary Sues don't need anyone's help, and they're never scared.

I will agree that the way she killed the Night King was partly luck, though.  But also skill - she managed to evade the zombies while in the library, and it's not too much of a stretch that she evaded the Night King's generals too.  Unfortunately, we, the audience, didn't see her sneak past them.  Maybe that's the problem.

So, we see her basically leap out of nowhere, and the Night King catches her by the throat.  He holds her up and stares at her, still feeling arrogant, smug, confident and triumphant.  The dagger she has falls out of her hand, as she had it raised, ready to stab him with it...but instead, she lets it fall into her other hand, of which is lowered.  Then she stabs him in the gut with it, and he shatters into pieces.

A really cool scene, but also anti-climactic, given that we've been building up to this moment since 2011, when the series began its run.

So anyway, the Night King shatters into shards of ice, and so do his generals.  The zombies he raised fall dead, including the dragon he stole from Daenerys.  People are upset about that too, but don't they remember what they were all talking about in the previous episode?  Everyone was gathered at the war table and basically said that they couldn't take on the entire army of the dead - they were woefully outnumbered.  But they realized that all they really needed was to eliminate the Night King himself, and that the entire army would fall.

Standard zombie trope, really - kill the creator of the zombies, or patient zero, and the rest will be taken care of.  Same thing would have happened no matter who killed the Night King.

I also get the criticism of the Dothraki horde charging forward with their blazing spears, only to be totally annihilated.  It looked amazing and was an effective scene (so creepy; started out super awesome and then despair set in as those flames were extinguished one by one...some seriously good filmmaking right there).  Yeah, that was a really bad tactic, especially if Dany actually had any plans of marching south to King's Landing.  Now a huge chunk of her forces is gone.  Plus, she's still down by one dragon and it looks like another one was seriously injured.  We won't know until this weekend's episode.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but I still liked it a lot.  Just wish it had been a bit brighter.

Arya is not a Mary Sue, though.  No way.  She's earned her reputation as a formidable assassin.  She's put in the work, she's seriously grown as a character.  I also didn't have a problem with the (very tame, by this show's standards) sex scene she had in the previous episode.  It was just some side-boob and a little bit of ass.  That's all.  It even cut to another scene right after she kissed Gendry.  We didn't even actually see them have sex.  I kind of understand that some people might be skeeved out because the actress, Maisie Williams, is short and still very young-looking.  She is 22, however.  Arya is 18.

I am definitely looking forward to the rest of the season, even though I am bummed that the Night King/Long Night storyline is effectively over.  I hope we at least get Clegane Bowl.