Game Of Thrones "The Long Night" Review: Episode 3 of Season 8 Shot a Terrible Twist

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We are now halfway to the last season of Game of Thrones, and we talk a lot about it as the show comes to its final conclusion. If you're caught unawares before Sunday's episode 4, find out why the death of this gigantic battle was disappointing, what Melisandre told Arya in Season 3 and what combat tactics this episode was supposed to be . You might also wonder what happened to Jon's dragon, Rhaegal, and what happened to Ghost, not to mention the new theories based on episode 3.or a deep dive in every episode of Season 8, Discover GameSpot of Thrones Lucy, Ryan, Tamoor and Dave with the Westeros networks every week to count out the last three episodes of Game of Thrones. Although it's not as long as this one, it's about three oversized episodes lasting up to 80 minutes. So much remains to be done.

Through everything that has happened in the past seven and a half seasons, Game of Thrones has never been so simple. There have always been machinations, twists, intrigues and unexpected but carefully planned developments. Season 8, episode 3, "The Long Night", however, concluded one of the main Game of Thrones scenarios, and it was quite simple. The battle with the dead is over, the king of the night is defeated and the forces of the living are victorious. And that happened in the least inventive and predictable way possible.

It is possible that I am immersed in the world of theories, speculations and prophecies of Game of Thrones for too long. But it's a big part of the fun of being a Game of Thrones fan: the books, and sometimes the show, are designed so densely, with layers of meaning and allusions, that sneak line by line for suss The last secret is an endless reward. Internet fan communities have been developing theories for decades, even though the pace of book publishing has slowed at a breakneck pace (and even seems to have stopped altogether at some point).

All these years of in-depth research have sometimes made it difficult to watch the show, which is (understandably) simplified compared to the source material. But this also gives a huge perspective to the biggest fans of the series: we can see all the possibilities for which the preparatory work has been done with expertise over the years. And in "The Long Night", all these possibilities were basically nothing.

Where do I even start? I guess with the fact that it seems that the Game of Thrones show just missed the goal of the whole series: that the feuds between the big houses of Westeros are nothing compared to the unstoppable force of nature that slows down the wintery north. Game of Thrones has never been supposed to be a battle for the throne, but rather characters who come together to realize what was really important. According to George R.R. Martin's brain, human error par excellence is to believe with absolute certainty that your personal battles are the most important of all existing struggles. It's a lack of perspective.

Now, with three episodes remaining, the ultimate threat of the series is extinguished with a groan, and his most shortsighted characters have proved righteous, their selfishness justified. As we saw in the preview of the episode next week, the survivors return to their quarrels. They won the great war, but lost the thematic thread. Why did it matter? To give Arya a cool hero moment? So Bran could continue to do nothing? So could Theon die needlessly?

The litany of "why", "what" and "where" does not stop to cross my mind: what has Melisandre Volantis been doing since last season? Where were the living dead Rickon Stark (or any other recognizable character) when Stark's corpses became alive in the crypts? Why were there so many prefigurations on the crypts if no important person would die there? Why does the series refuse to recognize Ghost or does it not include the giant wolf in a meaningful way? Why did Jon's revelation to Dany – one of the most important intrigues in the series – take place just before this battle if it had no impact on the events of this episode?

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There is no catharsis or gain in anything that happened in "The Long Night". Yes, it was cool to see Jon and Dany tear up the sky on their dragons devastating the army of the dead with huge flames of fire. But this episode seemed strangely autonomous, as if everything that had happened before his arrival mattered little. All the theories of fans about the battle against the dead that I've seen – that it's about a theory taken from books 20 years ago or from Reddit last week – are infinitely more interesting than what actually happened.

One of my favorites so far was that the king of the night does not actually show up at this battle – that Winterfell's attack was a feint and that he was going to King's Landing to roast Cersei on his throne. There was a ton of evidence for that, but it would still have been a shock. And even better, the ultimate theme of the series would have been that the fight for the throne was a little quarrel and that people who did not see the big picture (ie Cersei) would pay the price. Instead, the king of the nights took the bait to Winterfell and died like an idiot. He took his whole race with him and we never learned anything about them except "White Walkers = bad".

There is so much, so many things that will never be paid now. Dany unified the Dothraki tribes and brought them to Westeros so that they could die, all and all, in one poorly conceived accusation (seriously, what was the strategy to follow?). What was the interest of the whole story of Melisandre – the Lord of light, the resurrections, the prince who had been promised? Was it really all that she could light swords and tell Arya to go stab a guy?

Even within the confines of the story of this episode – Night King is only a stupid Big Bad Guy after all, he comes to Winterfell, he gets himself killed – there are innumerable more rewarding ways to make it disappear. Do you remember when Dany survived magically at Khal Drogo's funeral pyre in Season 1? Now, imagine that Jon did not tell Dany about his true identity last season, but instead, she realized that there was more than he thought when he entered his fire. dragon, unharmed, and stabbed the Night King in the back. Or it's Arya – but instead of absurdly jumping on the back of King Night, she uses her Faceless Men magic to pretend to be Bran. Bran stabs the king of the night, removes his face, but that is Arya.

C & # 39; pay. This was boring.

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The battle was not even so cool, because all the creators of the series put it forward. Long, yes, but most of it was so dark that it was hard to read the action and say what was going on. And all their strategies were terrible: they messed up the Dothraki with a single useless charge, Jon and Dany flew in the clouds doing nothing for minutes and they sent their most vulnerable people underground with dozens of zombies prepackaged just waiting for the king of the night to put them in the microwave. Dany sat on the ground without reason and did not notice the horde of undead crawling on Drogon's back, and the king of the nights and all his generals did not hear the young woman sneaking through the snow. Every character, living or dead, acted in the most stupid way possible. It's amazing to me that this episode was written by screenwriters David Benioff and Dan Weiss, because it's as if it had been written by someone who has never seen it before. the series before and that includes even less the source.

With three episodes left, Game of Thrones drew one of his latest twists: He subverted all our expectations in the worst of ways. We were expecting real and percussive deaths from the main character in this episode, and it turned out that the stakes were not as high as we thought. We expected positive spinoffs for the things Game of Thrones has been doing for seven seasons, and the reality is largely useless. And worst of all, we expected the culmination of the most important plot of Game of Thrones – the literal battle between life and death – to matter.

We expected Game of Thrones to be better. And unfortunately, the show did what it did so many times before: it upset our expectations. But being surprised by Game of Thrones has never been so much worse.

Read more: 22 Easter eggs and references you might have missed in "The long night"

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