There’s Grey Worm, first leading the Unsullied, then helping them fall back and bravely bringing a rather turtle-paced Melisandre out to light the trenches. But things break up into a few basic camps. The action diverges into so many disparate bits that it’s impossible to recall exactly where everyone is (which certainly helped the showrunners sneak Arya into the Godswood at the end there). At one point I spotted Brienne’s platinum pixie and shouted She’s okay! so loudly I woke my sleeping child. For anyone who’s ever kept count of a few kids at a local playground, watching this episode evoked the familiar sensation of physically craning your neck to see if Jaime/Tormund/The Hound/whoever was still okay out there in the sea of clambering skeletons. Until it isn’t.įor a battle scene featuring about 200,000 warriors, “The Long Night” weaves-sometimes literally, as the camera dodges around so many spinning bodies and underneath so many slicing swords that you may have needed to bump a line of Dramamine to keep your head on straight-intricate patterns around every character we know and love, or even know and hate. The weird, garbled silence that takes them out turns a battle drama into a monster horror show.
And that oughta do it! But after the Dothraki-arguably the Winterfell army’s strongest contingent-extinguish like a candle flame snuffed out by a licked finger, it’s straight downhill despair, thousands of near misses, wild-eyed terror. Light up some trenches to keep the wights at bay. The plan for the Winterfell army was, essentially, to meet the Army of the Dead in the field. So spectacularly wrong that if you spent nearly the entire hour of battle internally screaming There is no way out of this! then you weren’t alone. If Melisandre has arrived, and she fights for the all-knowing, willing-to-get-down-and-dirty Lord of Light, then surely things can’t go too wrong?Įxcept, of course, they do. And so with the lighting of the Dothraki swords, we start with a bit of hope. She did create that shadow baby that killed Renly, she can see the future eerily well, she did, after quite a few incantations, get those fires going in the battle. (How did she get through the Night King’s army without getting killed, by the way?) She’s been oh so wrong about so many things-Stannis, sacrificing Shireen, not sleeping with beautiful, beautiful Gendry when she had the shot-but there was never any denying the Red Woman’s mystical powers. Which made Melisandre’s return a sort of lukewarm comfort.
#GAME OF THRONES SEASON 5 EPISODE 3 SUMMARY TV#
Weirdly and rather aptly, it felt like the TV was spitting a version of our nervous selves back out at us. Sam’s shaking hands are the first thing we see in the episode, then the masses of waiting soldiers, tense and grim. The first hint that this battle would be different was the utter lack of pre-battle pomp (and language-it took several minutes for the first line, “for fucks sake, you took your time,” to come out). Everything goes wrong-as, admittedly, it often does in Game of Thrones battles-but this time, we get the deus ex machina we deserve. A dragon is pinned to the ground by a swarm of dead soldiers. But “ The Long Night” walks away from the old music, the old cinematography, the old tactic of a cavalry arriving just over the rise to swoop in and save the day.
#GAME OF THRONES SEASON 5 EPISODE 3 SUMMARY SERIES#
There have been blowout battle scenes in this series before-picture the ships exploding in Blackwater Bay, the dead coming over the wall at Hardhome, Jon Snow rising like a mud-soaked Civil War soldier out of a pile of bodies in the Battle of the Bastards. Game of Thrones abandoned itself five minutes into this episode, and I mean that in the best way possible. “What do we say to the God of Death?” chanted every single one of us watching this blazing, ink-black, smoggy, high-pitched, wild, sweaty, taut, pin-drop-silent, brilliant whirlwind of an episode.
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