Warning: as this episode aired at 2am in the UK, this review contains spoilers.
8.3 The Long Night
From the very beginning of The Long Night, it’s clear that this isn’t the standard episode of Game Of Thrones. For one, there’s no preamble to prime the viewing audience for what’s to come. Instead, the show leaps right into the opening credits, which, rather than being the usual tour of locations, focuses solely on the minutiae of Winterfell. It’s a necessary primer for the episode, which takes place in essentially one location, but makes use of every possible nook and cranny of that location as a staging ground for one of the most ambitious, insane fight sequences ever filmed for television.
From the very opening of the episode, the tension is already building. Simply the variation from the usual, and the way the blue tiles of the Night King surround Winterfell, is enough to start the worry, but that’s emphasised by the preparations for the battle. The viewer is thrust in with Sam, and his anxiety is only mirrored by the anxiety of everyone else around him as he’s given a weapon and sent off to find a place to stand and wait. Tyrion grabs a skin of wine and heads for the crypts with Sansa and the other non-fighters. The Unsullied march into position. Lyanna Mormont rallies her men with lots of fierce yelling. The Dothraki horde wait, horses pawing anxiously at the snowy ground. Everyone’s on edge, and with good reason. The fate of the world is in their hands.
The tension builds until the battle breaks out, and after that it’s a non-stop thrill-ride for a good half an hour, with director Miguel Sapochnik able to shimmy around budgetary constraints while delivering a visual feat. The shot of the Dothraki horde riding out, flaming weapons brandished, only to run into a solid wall of dark was thrilling—it’s simple enough to do with CGI, but it’s a great way to show just what kind of threat the assembled army of humanity is facing down. These are the most feared horsemen in the known world, and they’re not only brought to a standstill, they’re cut down by the army of the night, with only the winking out of flame and the occasional spooked horse fleeing back towards Winterfell for their efforts.
It’s a brilliant shortcut to avoid a lot of difficult horse combat, and it’s an immediate way to show the real threat of the zombies besieging Winterfell even before they arrive. As the lights wink out, Dany and Jon watch and worry (until Dany throws the battle plan into chaos by jumping on her dragon and riding out) and the folks on the ground (the Hound and Sam) start to sweat in fear. Then, the zombies come, and they come in force.
The battles, to be fair, are confusing, but deliberately so. It’s a bit more of that ‘man on the ground’ combat that Game Of Thrones does really well, but when it’s time to get a more comprehensive view of the battle, Sapochnik makes great use of the dragon’s eye view and the view from the battlements of Winterfell. Rather than just watching individual Unsullied or Wildling get tackled down by a zombie, we see from the battlements as the Unsullied phalanx gets overrun a row or two at a time, crushed beneath a wave of sheer undead force. The Night King makes good use of his numbers, overcoming basically every possible trap set in place for him by using Zapp Brannigan’s patented manoeuvre: throwing wave after wave of his own men at them until they’re no longer a problem, be it dragonglass caltrops, a giant flaming pit, or the walls of Winterfell.
After a fashion, The Long Night reminds me of World War Z, except better executed and with better special effects. There are certain structural similarities to that bigger-budget picture, with the zombies winning via sheer number rather than any sort of tactics. Even with the best fighters in Westeros and Essos teaming up, all it takes is enough bodies and even the most able swordsman can be subsumed, though the tag team of Brienne and Jaime Lannister do a remarkable job of watching one another’s back and Ayra is a thing of beauty with that spear in her hands.
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The Long Night does a solid job of picking a character and sticking with that person. Arya, of course, does a lot of the heavy lifting, but we spend a good amount of time with everyone during the course of the battle, and everyone (whether they live or not) gets a solid hero moment during the fighting. For some characters, this will be their finale. For others, there are battles yet to come, but every name character gets a moment or two to stand out, no matter how frenetic or chaotic the battle in the first half of the episode.
The second half of the episode, after the White Walkers break through the battle lines and storm Winterfell’s gates, is constructed less like an action movie and more like a horror film. Arya skulks around in the dark, avoiding White Walkers or killing them quietly. Down in the crypts, Sansa and Tyrion have a brief, quiet chat about their marriage while hearing the battle above rage on, and go not so well for the living side. Those in the crypts, as Sansa says, are doing their best by admitting that they have no place in battle, but that just leaves them helpless to whatever happens above. That itself imparts a lot of tension, even while every other moment features some hapless Winterfell defender or another is dragged kicking and screaming into the Night King’s army.
It’s not the fighting and dying, or the constant stream of zombies falling through the ceilings in Winterfell, it’s the moments where Arya is skulking around in the dark, trying not to get caught. It’s when the folks in the crypt are just listening to the battle in the distance, knowing they’re at the mercy of others. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss don’t get a lot of places in which to have characters do more than bark out orders to one another, but when they do, they make the most of them. The Hound and Beric get the most discussion, but every little bit seems designed to matter, particularly Bran and Theon’s exchange in the Godswood. It’s quiet, all things considered, but the few words they have on screen all seem to matter.
It’s not simply the words that matter. The deaths carry weight, as well. A lot of nameless characters get sacrificed, but they don’t feel as if they are thrown to the wolves. The Unsullied square up fearlessly against the horde. The Wildlings never give up, to the last man. The Dothraki ride out valiantly. The lords and ladies of the North defend their homeland. The Night’s Watch do their duty to the last. Not everyone lives, but no one runs.
The Long Night wasn’t perfect, but it was thrilling and visceral in a way that few things can match, be they television, movie, or book. Like Game Of Thrones itself, it was an achievement, the perfect melding of a zombie apocalypse show with a sword and sorcery epic, a cross between a survival horror video game and a martial arts film. Thrill ride doesn’t even begin to cover it, and there are still three more episodes yet to come.
Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, here.
