Television Game of Thrones (TV) • The watch has ended

Kazi said:
He is the one true king. As soon as he said “They’ll bend the knee or I’ll destroy them”, I was sold.

Also, “thousands” may be the greatest single-word line in TV history.
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I was half expecting him to charge from the rear with his cavalry after the NK had reanimated the dead before jon snow.
 
VidaRed said:
I was half expecting him to charge from the rear with his cavalry after the NK had reanimated the dead before jon snow.
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Who are you guys talking about?

Also, NK got killed by someone who was a Virgin an hour ago... Clearly her will to live increased after a Gendry ploughing
 
Dirty Schwein said:
Who are you guys talking about?

Also, NK got killed by someone who was a Virgin an hour ago... Clearly her will to live increased after a Gendry ploughing
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Imagine her will if she was ploughed by Podrick :drool:
 
Dirty Schwein said:
Who are you guys talking about?

Also, NK got killed by someone who was a Virgin an hour ago... Clearly her will to live increased after a Gendry ploughing
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Imagine if pod had got to her ? :eek: (nuts too late)

Seriously though Arya had been my pick for the NK killer from a while back. Bran was supposed to represent the memory of life. The NK wanted to take that memory away by killing Bran. But Arya was the protégé of the face peeler. Where people willing offered their faces (souls?) after their death to be remembered forever. My prediction that she would imitate Bran and then jump up and kill the NK was ruined. Maybe the NK would have seen through the disguise much sooner?

However, I'm more interested in Bran and the tree. Yes that tree, with its children creating zombie monsters. After this episode half the population of the known planet is now dead. Thanos finger clicking style. The trees are safe again. Mission accomplished. Can't help thinking M Night Shamylam missed a trick.
 
I thought the Arya angle was quite good. It made enough sense to be passable, even down to her being able to pass as one of the dead and sneak up on the Knight King.

Just thought it could have been done a lot better. Everything else seemed a bit of a mess and the deaths were all fairly predictable middling characters. Although mainly it was just that I couldn't tell what was going on half the time due to half the episode being shot in pitch black, and the other half in the middle of a blinding blizzard, in the pitch black.

Also the entire army of the dead being dispatched in a single episode after seven and a half seasons of build up just seemed a little bit cheap. I was expecting an initial slaughter and bit of marauding through the countryside first.

Now we have three whole episodes of the mad queen and her annoying boat boyfriend.

Bran is funny "I'm going to go now"...they missed a chance for the greatest wind up moment in tv history by not having him then just get up off his wheel chair and walk off.
 
Just watched it. Not really impressed with Arya literally sucker punching the Night King. He withstands dragon flames and whatnot only to be outwitted by a kid...ok assassin kid, but still a kid, sexual experience or not. WTF. Totally unsatisfactory, should have atleast given him a combat scene.

And Bran was going full raven meme face throughout the whole episode and poor Theon's ordeal. Seriously, its' getting funny now.:lol:

But it is as I predicted, the big villain of the show is not Night King but Cersei. I thought this war would last a couple of episodes followed by the finale being a showdown with Cersei, but looks like they are giving 3 whole episodes to her. Which is good, the White Walkers strait-jacketed GoT into a typical good vs evil affair which became rather mundane. Now maybe they can show some interesting sides of Cersei's and Jaime's characters as it is clear either Jaime (or Tyrion) will kill her.

Credit to Alfie Allen, I thought he was the best actor in the episode. Emoted really well despite having fewer moments and looked the part of Theon's character come full circle.

shabadu84 said:
Have to agree on this. We're supposed to believe that the army and dragons which couldn't be stopped by the unstoppable force of nature that was the Night King (well except for his too-small breastplate) are going to crumble against Qyburn?
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Of course. Qyburn is too smart to be sucker punched by flying midgets with daggers.:)
 
Redlambs said:
Yep. Bran should have gone too.

Speaking of which, has he actually impacted the story at all? I struggle to think of anything that wouldn't have happened without him, sam would have figured Jon out and Arya would likely have got LF. Jaime is pointless at this point.

So him becoming the 3er and being bait, was there any real point?
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Well, he lured the Night King to his death. That's really it. This was his moment.

I think Jaime and Cersei have more character building coming up. Remember Jaime could be the one who kills Cersei, so he isn't a pointless character.
 
Kapardin said:
Just watched it. Not really impressed with Arya literally sucker punching the Night King. He withstands dragon flames and whatnot only to be outwitted by a kid...ok assassin kid, but still a kid, sexual experience or not. WTF. Totally unsatisfactory, should have atleast given him a combat scene.

And Bran was going full raven meme face throughout the whole episode and poor Theon's ordeal. Seriously, its' getting funny now.:lol:

But it is as I predicted, the big villain of the show is not Night King but Cersei. I thought this war would last a couple of episodes followed by the finale being a showdown with Cersei, but looks like they are giving 3 whole episodes to her. Which is good, the White Walkers strait-jacketed GoT into a typical good vs evil affair which became rather mundane. Now maybe they can show some interesting sides of Cersei's and Jaime's characters as it is clear either Jaime (or Tyrion) will kill her.

Credit to Alfie Allen, I thought he was the best actor in the episode. Emoted really well despite having fewer moments and looked the part of Theon's character come full circle.



Of course. Qyburn is too smart to be sucker punched by flying midgets with daggers.:)
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One of the best assassins in their world, trained over many years, armed with the ability to face change and carrying Dragonglass that we know kills whitewalkers? Who would have guessed?
 
Wibble said:
One of the best assassins in their world, trained over many years, armed with the ability to face change and carrying Dragonglass that we know kills whitewalkers? Who would have guessed?
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She didnt have dragonglass, she gave that dagger to Sansa, she had the Valyerian Steel Dagger. We dont even know if face changing even works on the undead so there's no way of actually proving thats what she did. Certainly not to a whitewalker at least. They kept it vague for a reason... :p
 
Redlambs said:
He saved both Sansa and Yara.

The latter could still be as big a deal as the former.
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He had already struck out with his past crimes and needed to pay the iron price. It's nice he tried to make amends but for me there was no coming back. His best bet was repent and die. Did not care for him living after what he did
 
RedSky said:
She didnt have dragonglass, she gave that dagger to Sansa, she had the Valyerian Steel Dagger. We dont even know if face changing even works on the undead so there's no way of actually proving thats what she did. Certainly not to a whitewalker at least. They kept it vague for a reason... :p
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But you need to over think it - actively seek potential problems - for there to be any issue with this part of the plot. Just enjoy it for what it is. Tits and dragons and magic and zombies etc
 
RedSky said:
The question is did they manage to get all the Dothraki and Unsullied from Dragonstone to Winterfell? Did they have enough boats? If they did, then thats the majority of the Dothraki dead as not many came back from the initial 'charge'. The majority of the Unsullied were dead too, i'd have to watch it again but Greyworm certainly sacrificed a number of them when he opened the 'trap' as they were on the other side of it. One whole column was 100% dead, I think from memory there were two columns of Unsullied though, so the question is did the undead already destroy the first column and smash into the 2nd, or was that all of them gone? Also when the wights were destroyed, there really weren't many people left standing on the zoomed out shots of Winterfell, so either that was bad editing and they simply didn't bother to add in the survivors or they were all toast.

I'd wager the Dothraki are no longer a fighting force and there's only a few units left of the Unsullied.
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They can give her a decent size army and adequately explain it with a bunch of soldiers being wounded or knocked unconscious during the battle. Not every casualty is a death.
 
Sorry if posted before. But I've been going around in circles trying to express how annoying I found that episode and how the show to me now is essentially finished/don't really care about the rest but will have to finish it now.

This review hits most my complaints on the head:

Review: Game Of Thrones Episode 3, Season 8 -- Subverting Expectations In The Worst Ways Possible

Through all the twists and turns over the last eight seasons, Game of Thrones has never been straightforward--until now. Season 8 Episode 3, "The Long Night," brought one of Game of Thrones' main storylines to its conclusion. The battle with the dead is over, the Night King is defeated, and the forces of the living are victorious. And it happened in the least inventive, most predictable way imaginable.

It's possible that I've been immersed in the world of Game of Thrones theories, speculating, and prophecies for too long. But that's a huge part of the fun of being a Game of Thrones fan: The books, and sometimes the show, are crafted so densely, with layers on layers of meaning and allusion, that combing through line-by-line to suss out every last secret feels endlessly rewarding. Fan communities across the internet have been cranking out theories for literally decades, even as the pace of book releases slowed to a crawl (and apparently stopped altogether at some point).

All these years of deep-digging have sometimes made it hard to enjoy the show, which is (understandably) simplified compared with the source material. But it also gives the series' biggest fans a huge amount of perspective: We can see all the possibilities for which the groundwork has been expertly laid over the years. And in "The Long Night," those possibilities all amounted to basically nothing.

Where do I even start? I guess with the fact that it seems like Game of Thrones, the show, has just missed the point of the entire series: that the squabbles between the great houses of Westeros are nothing compared with the unstoppable force of nature slowly bearing down on them from the wintery north. Game of Thrones was never supposed to actually be about the battle for the throne--it's supposed to be about the characters coming together to realize what was really important. The quintessential human fallacy, according to the brain of George R.R. Martin, is believing with absolute certainty that your personal battles are the most important fights that exist. It's a failure of perspective.

Now, with three episodes left, the series' ultimate threat died with a whimper, and its most short-sighted characters turned out to be right, their selfishness justified. As we saw in the preview for next week's episode, the survivors are going right back to their squabbles. They won the great war, but lost the thematic throughline. Why did any of this matter? To give Arya a cool hero moment? So Bran could keep doing absolutely nothing? So Theon could die pointlessly?

The litany of "whys," "whats," and "wheres" won't stop marching through my mind: What has Melisandre been doing in Volantis since last season? Where was undead Rickon Stark (or any other recognizable character) when the Stark corpses came alive in the crypts? Why was there so much foreshadowing about the crypts if nobody important was going to die down there? Why does the show refuse to acknowledge Ghost or include the direwolf in any meaningful way? Why did Jon's revelation to Dany--one of the most important plotlines in the entire series--occur right before this battle if it wasn't going to have any bearing on the events of this episode?

There's no catharsis or payoff in anything that happened in "The Long Night." Yes, it was cool to see Jon and Dany tearing through the sky on their dragons laying waste to the army of the dead with massive gouts of flame. But this episode felt weirdly self-contained, like everything that's happened leading up to it didn't matter. Every fan theory I've seen about the battle with the dead--whether it's a theory from the books 20 years ago or from Reddit last week--is immeasurably more interesting than what actually happened.

One of my favorites until now was that the Night King wouldn't actually show up at this battle--that the attack on Winterfell was a feint, and he was flying to King's Landing to roast Cersei on her throne. There was a ton of evidence for it, but it still would have been a shock. And even better, it would have fit that ultimate series theme--that the fight for the throne was a petty squabble, and the people who failed to see the big picture (i.e. Cersei) would pay a price for it. Instead, the Night King took the bait at Winterfell and died like an idiot. He took his entire race with him, and we never learned anything about them besides "White Walkers=bad."

There are so, so many things that will just never be paid off now. Dany unified the Dothraki tribes and brought them to Westeros so they could die, one and all, in a single ill-conceived charge (seriously, what was the strategy there?). What was the point of Melisandre's entire storyline--the Lord of Light, the resurrections, the Prince that was Promised? Was it really all so she could light some swords on fire and tell Arya to go stab a dude?

Even within the confines of this episode's story--Night King is just a dumb Big Bad Guy after all, he comes to Winterfell, he gets killed--there are endless more rewarding ways it could have gone down. Remember when Dany magically survived Khal Drogo's funeral pyre in Season 1? Now imagine Jon hadn't told Dany about his true identity last season, and instead she had realized there was more to him than she thought when he stepped into her dragonfire, unharmed, and stabbed the Night King in the back. Or it's Arya--but instead of nonsensically jumping onto the Night King's back, she employs her Faceless Men magic to pose as Bran. Bran stabs the Night King, removes his face, bam, it's Arya.

That's payoff. This was boring.

The battle wasn't even that cool, for all the show's creators hyped it up. Long, yes, but much of it was so dark that it was hard to read the action and tell what was happening. And all their strategies were terrible: They wasted the Dothraki in a single pointless charge, Jon and Dany flew around in the clouds doing nothing for minutes on end, and they sent their most vulnerable people underground to the place with dozens of pre-packaged zombies just waiting for the Night King to pop them into the microwave. Dany sat on the ground for no reason and didn't notice the horde of undead crawling onto Drogon's back, and the Night King and all his generals didn't hear the young woman sneaking up on them through the snow. Every single character, living or dead, acted in the stupidest ways possible. It's incredible to me that this episode was written by showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, because it feels like it was written by somebody who's never seen the show before, much less has any understanding of the source material.

With three episodes left, Game of Thrones has pulled one of its final twists: It subverted all our expectations in the worst ways possible. We expected some real, impactful main character deaths in this episode, and it turned out the stakes weren't nearly as high as we thought. We expected some payoff for things Game of Thrones has spent seven seasons setting up, and the reality is much of it was simply pointless. And worst of all, we expected the culmination of Game of Thrones' most important storyline--the literal battle between life and death--to matter.

We expected Game of Thrones to be better. And unfortunately, the show did what it's done so many times before: It turned our expectations upside-down. But being surprised by Game of Thrones has never felt worse.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/review-game-of-thrones-episode-3-season-8-subverti/1100-6466520/
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RedSky said:
She didnt have dragonglass, she gave that dagger to Sansa, she had the Valyerian Steel Dagger. We dont even know if face changing even works on the undead so there's no way of actually proving thats what she did. Certainly not to a whitewalker at least. They kept it vague for a reason... :p
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In fairness, they did kind of cover the whether it works on the undead angle thing when the red woman made the blue eyes comment.

It leaves Jon's story short changed so I would guess/hope there is a twist or two to come.
 
Dirty Schwein said:
They should have had all them motherfeckers in the Crypt die. In that "safe" place. Then from under all the dead bodies, Tyrion climbs out. Man hides under dead bodies and survives using his brain as usual. Instead, we got people hiding behind pillars and nearly all surviving.
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Hide under the dead bodies that came alive?
 
LARulz said:
Sorry if posted before. But I've been going around in circles trying to express how annoying I found that episode and how the show to me now is essentially finished/don't really care about the rest but will have to finish it now.

This review hits most my complaints on the head:
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If my grandma had balls she would be my grandpa.

I watched the story they made and enjoyed it. If you want to change the story you might be better off playing RPG games.
 
Wibble said:
But you need to over think it - actively seek potential problems - for there to be any issue with this part of the plot. Just enjoy it for what it is. Tits and dragons and magic and zombies etc
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I just hold it to the standards of the first few seasons, probably wrongly at this point.
 
The idea that Cersei and Pugwash stand a chance against 2 dragons and Wong Fei Hung's shapeshifting sister is risible.

Which would make a Cersei win the perfect end to what long ago became such a dreadfully written show.
 
Wibble said:
If my grandma had balls she would be my grandpa.

I watched the story they made and enjoyed it. If you want to change the story you might be better off playing RPG games.
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So it's wrong to be annoyed about the direction/drop in quality the show has taken in the last few years after it ran out of book? I should just accept what I'm given after investing hours watching in the past?
 
LARulz said:
So it's wrong to be annoyed about the direction/drop in quality the show has taken in the last few years after it ran out of book? I should just accept what I'm given after investing hours watching in the past?
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Yes because there is no justification to be annoyed. Dragons and gods and zombies and other supernatural stuff and people end up arguing that minor plot points are unbelievable largely based on the fact they can think of other alternatives. It is fun throwaway nonsense and should just be enjoyed as such.

Film/tv narratives have to be streamlined but people seem to want the complexity you can build into a multi book series that will be well over 10000 pages bybthe time it is finished.
 
LARulz said:
Sorry if posted before. But I've been going around in circles trying to express how annoying I found that episode and how the show to me now is essentially finished/don't really care about the rest but will have to finish it now.

This review hits most my complaints on the head:
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Some points I actually agree with but a few things by the reviewer were silly, e.g, Arya wearing Brans face isn't possible, she'd have to physically cut the thing off first :lol: Also 'roasting Cersei' would invalidate the prophecy of her death.

I think there kind of was a cathartic moment when Arya did what she did and even if you disagree with it now I bet most people were absolutely immersed when watching it and took a deep breath when the credits rolled. The whole episode was fantastic in terms of the suspense and tension generated at the time. It's just after a few hours when you start to think about certain points you begin to get more cynical.

I'm hoping maybe the final few episodes won't just rest on the battle with Cersei and there's more to Bran's arc than this though.
 
Redlambs said:
:lol: Yeah man, I can get behind that. Not for me, but great to see people enjoying moments like that.
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SilentWitness said:
Don’t get this. It’s as weird as people clapping at the cinema.
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Pogue Mahone said:
:lol: That bit was deadly tbf. Rewatched it a few times myself.

Please god don’t let that shrieking and hollering at the screen during films thing cross the pond though. That would be the end of my cinema going days immediately.
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MadMike said:
England flags everywhere, a pub with a giant tv screen, blokes tossing beer in the air in excitement. Don’t need to be a fecking Clouseau to put two and two together.
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:lol::lol: How the hell did that blatant edit fool so many people. Hilarious.
 
Wibble said:
Yes because there is no justification to be annoyed. Dragons and gods and zombies and other supernatural stuff and people end up arguing that minor plot points are unbelievable largely based on the fact they can think of other alternatives. It is fun throwaway nonsense and should just be enjoyed as such.

Film/tv narratives have to be streamlined but people seem to want the complexity you can build into a multi book series that will be well over 10000 pages bybthe time it is finished.
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If the show was this shit from the start it would have been nowhere near as successful. The reason the show was great was because of the complexity and storytelling. There was no obvious good and bad. The Lannisters were the obvious bad guys and Tywin the leader, but when we had his scenes explaining his motives etc. it was all logical from their point of view. It was a game of survival and their actions mostly made sense. After the show passed the books it became fan fic mostly with fan favourites getting together, doing things with no consequence cos they can't die etc.

The WW on the show were preview ed as the big threat. They made it seem non stop that the thrown was the smaller battle - it ultimately doesn't matter who sits there when there is a bigger threat looming. Jon's entire existence in the show has been to get everyone to realise this first. If the WW had no leader/face/focal point then whatever. But the writers have it a face, leader and made him out to be untouchable. They clearly put themselves in a corner over the years and looked for a quick fix.

And minor plot line quibbles? No, the main annoyance for me and I have said this from the start is the show lost what made it good. By giving no actual backstory to why the NK decided after 10k years he marched etc. they made him out to be a mindless zombie.

The show went from well written and thought out stories/characters to basically "people like those characters so they can do what they like". Look at how shit Tyrian, Vary's and co became once the books disappeared. If the show was about political intrigue then they would have been important now but aren't. So the show moved to more fantasy elements in the last year's when writers realised they can't write characters like Tywin, Tyrion, Vary's and Little finger. But then if you go into the fantasy realms, explain the stuff and the significance of characters, religions etc.

The show became neither a political battle or a proper fantasy. It literally fell in the middle because of poor storytelling. Visually yeah great, but story? The last few seasons are nothing compared to the first.

Of course people have a right to be pissed. The show started great and then became a caricature of itself. You become commited, spend hours watching and invest time. To say you should not have the right to complain about something which has made you spend time is ridiculous.

May as well never complain about football or anything for that matter if it was good for a bit in the past but shit now.
 
Irwin99 said:
Some points I actually agree with but a few things by the reviewer were silly, e.g, Arya wearing Brans face isn't possible, she'd have to physically cut the thing off first :lol: Also 'roasting Cersei' would invalidate the prophecy of her death.

I think there kind of was a cathartic moment when Arya did what she did and even if you disagree with it now I bet most people were absolutely immersed when watching it and took a deep breath when the credits rolled. The whole episode was fantastic in terms of the suspense and tension generated at the time. It's just after a few hours when you start to think about certain points you begin to get more cynical.

I'm hoping maybe the final few episodes won't just rest on the battle with Cersei and there's more to Bran's arc than this though.
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Yeah the Bran point would have raised more issues but still would have preferred it than her jumping over an army.

I genuinely was annoyed by the end but that can happen in shows like this - I was annoyed at the end of some episodes of other shows I adored too.

But for me there was no suspense or tension, at no point did I genuinely feel any of the main characters were going to bite the dust despite their ridiculous situations. You just knew Jon was not going to die when he was on his own vs hundreds of White's - also somehow he hid behind the strongest wall ever to withold ice fire and decided to yell at a dragon in hope it dies. I rolled my eyes more than I should have.

After a minute/surviving the first wave none of Brienne, Jamie, Sam, Hound or Tormund were going to die. You knew Dany wasn't going to die, or Sansa and Tyrion either. Bran was obviously going to survive and same with Arya.
 
LARulz said:
Yeah the Bran point would have raised more issues but still would have preferred it than her jumping over an army.

I genuinely was annoyed by the end but that can happen in shows like this - I was annoyed at the end of some episodes of other shows I adored too.

But for me there was no suspense or tension, at no point did I genuinely feel any of the main characters were going to bite the dust despite their ridiculous situations. You just knew Jon was not going to die when he was on his own vs hundreds of White's - also somehow he hid behind the strongest wall ever to withold ice fire and decided to yell at a dragon in hope it dies. I rolled my eyes more than I should have.

After a minute/surviving the first wave none of Brienne, Jamie, Sam, Hound or Tormund were going to die. You knew Dany wasn't going to die, or Sansa and Tyrion either. Bran was obviously going to survive and same with Arya.
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I can almost semi forgive them for not killing off the fighters because y'know they're meant to be the best warriors in Westeros. It's a bit dumb but I can let it slide. What I can't let slide are the people in the crypts all surviving and Samwell surviving all of whom cant fight properly and in the case of the crypts were unarmed. Meh.
 
LARulz said:
Sorry if posted before. But I've been going around in circles trying to express how annoying I found that episode and how the show to me now is essentially finished/don't really care about the rest but will have to finish it now.

This review hits most my complaints on the head:
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As more time passes, I agree with reviews like that more and more.

I was looking forward to episode three all week and nervously wondering what would happen. Now that it’s over I feel like I’m not looking forward to the rest of the season at all.
 
So how does Cersei possibly stop Arya now? Given that even the thickest man in the worldtm Tyrion with all his uselessness was able to enter the keep through a hole in the floor, Arya with maxed out Stealth, Dex and Intelligence will make mincemeat out of them all.

Unless the Mountain has a second phase, and he was the final boss all along, I can only see one winner and a quick winner at that. Stretched out over four hours.
 
For those wondering about the Dothraki, this is what happened at the start of the episode, according to Reddit.

Jon Snow: "to win the war, all we have to do is destroy the night"

Dothraki: "ok boss, will do!"
*Dothraki charges into darkness*

Jon: ...king.
 
The Night King Soundtrack is available on YouTube, brilliant brilliant score from Ramin Djawadi :drool:
 
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