It’s been a long week this week, hasn’t it? We got Avengers: Endgame and all the emotions that went into that, good and bad. My heart is still not fully recovered from Endgame and all of a sudden it’s time for Game of Thrones, and the fact that all our favourite characters could end up dead, and I’m not sure my heart can take it. I said to a few people at work today that I literally don’t know if I can deal with the emotional rollercoaster of Game of Thrones potentially killing off everyone I love. But then the actual episode happened and good news, most the people I care about survived. In fact, almost ALL the people I care about survived. In fact, I’ll do you one better, not only did the characters I love survive against the odds but even the dragons survived (although by god was it touch and go there for a while, and I still thought poor Rhaegal was a goner until I saw the trailer for next week and he seems to still be alive), and my heart was given a reprieve. But… something felt wrong.
Now maybe something felt wrong because I’m so used to Game of Thrones taking away all the things I love, and I convinced myself that that’s what it was going to do again here. I loved Renly back when he was around (hell, I’m one of the few people I know who still remembers his name) and that didn’t go well. Then I loved Robb Stark and we all know how that ended. And let’s not even begin talking about Oberyn Martell, who for most of one glorious season was my new hero. While the show has been less evil in terms of killing all the people I love in recent years, it still felt like this episode was going to be “the end”. We had that amazing episode last week building it all up and it seemed for sure like Brienne was going to die given she had that perfect moment. Yet she survived. And Jaime survived. And Tyrion survived. And, against the odds, both Jon and Dany survived. And then Arya, of all people, killed the Night King and it seemed like we got a happy moment. The army of the dead are finally gone, and all is right with the world, right? So… why does something still feel wrong?
Maybe it feels wrong because the ending was so unexpected. I guess I’d built it up in my mind to ultimately be the battle between Jon and the Night King, only Jon didn’t really have a big role to play after all. There were also moments in the episode that I was convinced we were going to get a “Jon in the fire” moment, like we’ve had with Dany a few times, and that didn’t happen either. When Jon was surrounded by the dead after failing to reach the Night King before he resurrected a bunch of undead around him, I was sure that Dany was going to have Drogon set fire to everything around him, including him, only to see him survive like Dany has in the past. That didn’t happen. Then I was convinced that Viserion was going to set Jon on fire, but he was going to survive it anyway, and again he didn’t. When none of that happened, I began to wonder if that meant that we were going to see the Night King survive the episode, kill someone significant and then go on his merry way to murdering more people, but that didn’t happen either. In fact, after eight years of build up to just how deadly the Night King was, he died without really too much of a problem. So, is that what felt wrong? The ultimate big bad wasn’t actually that big or bad in the end? Maybe. But then I started thinking about the episode again and wondering… what was the Night King even doing?!
“He was marching on Winterfell and trying to kill everyone we love Lexy. Stop overthinking it. Just take it as a win.”
Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s what he was doing. But I can’t help but feel like there’s more to it than that. He had so many chances to do so much more damage than he did after all. He definitely had a chance to kill Jon, but rather than immediately order the dead he raised to massacre Jon where he stood and get rid of him once and for all he instead just stood there staring at him for a bit, then walked off while the dead surrounded Jon and didn’t really close in. Was that just for dramatic effect, so the show could have Dany swoop in and save him? Or did the Night King actually not plan to kill Jon after all? And if he didn’t really plan to kill Jon then what did he want?
That’s been bothering me all evening. What does the Night King actually want? His motivations always seemed pretty basic: he wants to kill people and resurrect them as the army of the dead. But for what? For what purpose? Does he want to sit on the Iron Throne? Why is he even doing all of this? We’ve not exactly explored his motivations as a character, and maybe the reason for that is because there are no motivations to explore and he’s just an evil force of nature, but what if it’s more than that? In a show like this, where there’s always something else going on, doesn’t it seem weird that the Night King is just plain evil and there’s no nuance to it? And doesn’t it seem weird that after all this time he just dies just like that? So, then I got to thinking, and maybe what feels wrong is simply that the Night King’s motivations are way, way more complicated than we previously thought. Maybe he’s not just out for death and destruction and to kill all of the living and rule a land of the dead. Maybe he’s got a specific purpose: kill Bran!
Bran himself even said they could use him as bait because the Night King wanted him, right? But why?! I thought we might explore that in flashbacks in this episode, with Bran warging into the past to explain more of what the Night King was doing, but that didn’t happen. Bran was warging for most of the episode however, but besides sending some ravens to fly around the Night King while he was still sat on the back of Viserion what the hell was he doing all that time? People around him were fighting to keep him alive and he was just sat there doing something. Plus, the Night King was determined to kill him and nobody else, even to the point – as I said already – that he could have killed Jon Snow dead and chose to just walk away instead. This all got me thinking, if the Night King’s sole purpose was to kill Bran, maybe that’s why he chose now to do this. Previously I’d assumed it was just a matter of everything falling into place for him, but maybe not. Maybe he’s never had a reason to come south, beyond the wall, before now. Maybe Bran is the reason he’s been doing all of this.
It’s possible, again, that I’m reading too much into this, but look at the facts: The Night King has been north of the wall for hundreds or thousands of years. He’s never tried to come south before, the dead have mostly just kept to themselves, and then all of a sudden they make a huge push to come south. Maybe that was because they had no way past the wall until Viserion literally fell into their laps, or maybe they would have found a way through the wall anyway and Viserion being the means of getting through it was just convenience. Maybe the whole reason the Night King was coming south in the first place wasn’t domination but the simple, undeniable mission to kill Bran Stark – or more specifically, the Three-Eyed Raven – because he knows something we don’t, and that is that the Night King isn’t the true evil in Westeros at all, but instead the Three-Eyed Raven is!
What do we really know about him? Bran’s certainly not been the same boy since he fully embraced his destiny, has he? He’s been distant. He’s been keeping things from people until the right moments, and then meddling to ensure things go a certain way. He’s definitely not been acting like a heroic character, or like anyone else we’ve seen with these warging powers before. And then there’s the fact that the Night King was utterly obsessed with Bran, to the point that after all of this he let his guard down so completely when he was right in front of Bran and that allowed Arya to do something we didn’t think anyone would do (or at least not so easily) and slay him. Why would he be so obsessed with Bran? Well, my theory is simple: the Night King knows something we don’t. He wasn’t an unstoppable force of evil, he was simply on a mission to kill the Three-Eyed Raven (or specifically the Bran Stark variation thereof) in order to prevent something far worse from happening, but all the heroes of Westeros were so convinced he was the bad guy that they ignored the fact that they have a creepy being in their midst who clearly has his own agenda and whom they know nothing about.
Of course, there’s a strong possibly I’m completely wrong, that Bran is actually a force for good and that the Night King was, after all, just a two-dimensional bad-guy with a desire to wipe out all of the living. But that doesn’t stop me feeling like something is very, very wrong at the end of this episode, and that that moment where the Night King walked slowly toward Bran, with his whole army at his back, with eyes only for killing this one seemingly insignificant guy when the rest of the world around him is trying to wipe out his soldiers, is way, way more significant than we all thought on first viewing. Maybe the Night King isn’t the big bad after all. Maybe it’s been Bran Stark we should have been looking out for all along, and whatever the hell he was doing with all that warging in this episode will pay off huge in a future episode because while everyone is focusing on who’ll sit on the Iron Throne, the Three-Eyed Raven has another plan for all our favourite characters… and quite possibly we’re really, really not going to like it.
Or I’m wrong. Kind of hope I’m wrong. But also, kind of hope I’m not.
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