[Response] How Should We Evaluate Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 3, “The Long Night”?

[Response] How Should We Evaluate Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 3, “The Long Night”?

After Bran became the Three-Eyed Raven, he kept repeating in Season 8 that “who you are now is shaped by everything that has happened before.” He said this to Jaime when Jaime was burdened with guilt and reflection; in this episode, he says the same thing to Theon. And when speaking of himself with Jaime, he frames it the same way. Fate is an extraordinarily complex and almost inexpressible thing. Even for someone like Bran—who seems able to see the past and future (though even that remains open to doubt), and to move across time and space—the conclusion he can draw about life is still only this: your experiences make you who you are. In Game of Thrones, the relationship among personality, experience, and destiny is precisely this. Every character still alive in the final season, at least so far, has been brought here by countless choices made in the past. Of course, this theory applies just as well to those who already “took their early exit,” except that their stories ended long ago. But in ordinary life, we rarely have the ability to view ourselves and our fate with such calm detachment. Because we cannot see cause and effect clearly, we carry much more resentment. As the saying goes, “The wise fear the cause; ordinary people fear the consequence.” It is something like that.

This episode spends well over an hour building and staging a single war, and in all of film and television, that alone feels revolutionary. If one were to study it carefully, this design might even be unprecedented. That achievement by itself is enough to secure this episode a bold place in screen history, let alone the fact that even within such a massive battle, it still manages to give so many characters orderly and meaningful beats. It makes a war that seems doomed from the very beginning feel both awe-inspiring and tragic. Until the final reversal arrived, I kept imagining whether, aside from the two dragon riders perhaps taking one or two people with them, everyone else might simply be wiped out. Even though I knew that possibility was slim, I still worried—because what if George R. R. Martin had really decided to go that wild with it?

Once the Night King crossed the Wall with ease and marched south, the defeat of the North seemed almost inevitable. But after Daenerys arrived with her forces, humanity at least felt as though it still had a fighting chance. The moment Melisandre appeared and ignited the cavalry’s weapons, everyone both on and off the screen seemed to share the illusion of victory. But what followed—those flames fading so lightly and so quickly—beautifully conveyed the danger of the situation and the speed of its collapse, crushing morale to its lowest point. Yet at that stage, there was no choice but to fight with everything left, because only in that way could there be even the slightest chance of survival. And in fact, Arya’s seemingly effortless assassination of the Night King, which turns the battle around, is in another sense exactly the result of everyone else’s desperate struggle and all the coincidences that together created an opening for her.

This was one possibility Bran had not seen. As a symbol of extreme rationality, Bran could see no path to victory among all possible outcomes—not even, like Doctor Strange, a one-in-a-million chance. So when only Theon remained by his side, he had almost already given up hope. When he told Theon, “You’re a good man. Thank you,” the emotion he conveyed was basically one of hopelessness. And yet it was precisely Arya—and all the others still fighting for their lives—facing death with the spirit of “not today,” refusing to yield, that turned what seemed impossible to Bran, and to rational calculation itself, into the only possible victory.

There are moving moments everywhere in this episode. But after the emotion settles, watching Daenerys and the North burn through nearly everything they have leaves me deeply anxious for what comes next. Cersei, who originally seemed to have no real chance, now holds a very significant advantage. And the suspicion and possible rupture that may arise among Daenerys, Sansa, and Jon once the external enemy is gone only make the surviving characters more worrying to think about. Whether the series will hold steady through the remaining three episodes until the end, or switch into large-scale death mode and hand out every last “boxed lunch” before the finale, we simply do not know. Though, supposedly, that has always been how Game of Thrones works behind the scenes.