The long night

‘The Long Night’ is the third episode of the eighth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 70th overall. Below, the most beautiful moment of the episode according to Yezen (including the music I’d add) in his video ‘Why Theon should have killed the Night King’.

I have said that Martin didn’t finish the last two novels of his epic when D&D were filming the series. If I had been the director, instead of what the D&D Jews did—trying to compact what Martin had confessed to them in a few episodes—I would have devised the script differently so as not to spoil the plot, as D&D spoiled it. I simply would have forgotten about the game of thrones, or the war between the two bitches, and focused solely on the threat that the army of the dead posed to Westeros once the Night King’s dragon brought down the Wall.

From that angle, the long night in the sense of the long battle that was fought at Winterfell would have appeared at the end of the last season. And instead of the ultra-feminist scene that D&D came up with—the girl Arya kills the Night King in this episode—I would have chosen Theon to be ‘The Hero of Winterfell’. That way we wouldn’t have seen packed together, in just six episodes, a complex plot—or rather plots—that should have been filmed over several seasons.

It’s no excuse that the directors have run out of Martin’s latest novels. If they had been good artists they would have simplified the plot, guillotining any war between Dany and Cersei from the script—that is, the ‘game of thrones’—so that the show would look more like ‘a song of ice and fire’. The Night King, the white walkers and the army of the dead live on ice on the north side of the Wall; and fire is represented by the character most loved by fans, Jon, who lives on the south side of the Wall. As we saw, in previous episodes it’s revealed that Jon is Aegon Targaryen, and in Martin’s universe the Targaryens represent fire.

Without Martin’s latest novels, that would have been the compromise a good screenwriter would have made.

In many respects, ‘The Long Night’ is the culmination of the entire series. The following episodes, # 71, # 72 and # 73 represent a huge anticlimax that disappointed the fandom. And while the battle against the army of the dead in this episode is the most exciting of all seasons, I suspect that the feminist agenda finally stretched the show’s credibility to breaking point (as we said above Theon, not a girl, should have killed the Night King).