“The Long Night” wanted you to believe that these tried-and-true tricks would no longer work, but it didn’t take a Three-Eyed Raven to see what director Miguel Sapochnik and the show’s creators and writers David Benioff and D.B. We’re used to Jon saving the day at the last moment to Dany lovingly snarling dracarys and summoning plumes of get-out-jail-free fire. These moments were intended as subversive as clever deviations from the typical formula, designed to upend expectations. Daenerys’s dragon ex machina parked dopily in a swarm of Wights, which clung to it like termites infesting rotten wood. Bran was used as glassy-eyed bait to entice the Night King into an ambush, but nobody was there to ambush him, presumably so that Jon could sprint through corridors and courtyards of his butchered friends just to fail at the last hurdle. The more that went awry, the more contrived it all felt, in part because a lot of what went wrong should have been foreseen way in advance. Along with weapons of dragonglass and Valyrian steel, all the show’s heavy-hitters were bedecked in convenient plot armor. But the good guys didn’t lose, and what’s more is that they never seemed as though they might. Things went wrong during the Battle of Winterfell. All the show’s blowout battle sequences in seasons past - from Blackwater Bay to Hardhome to the Battle of the Bastards - were characterized by a genuine fear that everything was going to go wrong, that your favorite character might die, that the good guys might genuinely lose. And it’s a large part of why Game of Thrones was so able to dig its icy fingers into the cultural consciousness. Martin has always been so keen to kill off major point-of-view characters, or at least was keen to do so when he could be bothered to write anything. War, of course, is never good in the traditional sense, and A Song of Ice and Fire has baked that idea into the story’s firmament as surely as Arya baking Freys into pastries. Before criticizing “The Long Night”, first we must consider the feelings of everyone who worked on it, and then those of the people who enjoyed it, and then the possibility that a negative reception might jeopardize the episode’s potential for an Emmy nomination, and frankly I just don’t have the time for any of that. It has been decided that there are certain things we, as a culture, must enjoy equally or stay silent about so squishy and sensitive are we now that a difference of opinion is heretical. And it’s not intentional, you understand, just necessary in this wacky climate of social media shoe-shining, in which any mild dissent is perceived as a personal attack, and any even well-meaning dissenter as a desperate, flailing contrarian. Find me a big enough parade and I’ll be sure to bring some rain to it.
Forget the encroaching blue-eyed undead armies eventually, the hype will consume us all. But I’m particularly dismayed by how many of these nonsensical arguments are coming from critics, some ostensibly professional. I’m astonished once again at the absurd mental gymnastics fans will indulge in for the sake of defending their favorite things, even though at this point I shouldn’t be. The silliest argument I’ve heard for the hazardously low lighting of “The Long Night” is that it was to help simulate the chaos of battle and the harsh, wintry climate of the North, where the Night King’s armies finally marched from a storm front and besieged the steadfast keep of Winterfell, as has been promised and dutifully foreshadowed since this eighth and final season began.
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