Like the Battle of the Somme – with zombies
The stress. Lord, the stress.
Game of Thrones – the blistering fantasy serial on Sky Atlantic – has had battles before, monstrous battles, titanic battles, but nothing on the scale of last night’s. It was a remorseless, punishing onslaught, not just for the combatants, but for the viewer. For 80 minutes we endured wave upon crashing wave of terror and brutality. It was gruelling, shattering, and often outright bewildering. It made Saving Private
Ryan look like Dad’s Army.
This was the decisive battle between the armies of the living, led by Jon Snow (Kit Harington), and the armies of the undead, led by the Night King (Vladimir Furdik). To watch, it was terrifying, not least because, a lot of the time, it was so hard to be sure what was going on. The rapid cutting between shots, the relentless swarming of the zombies, the smothering darkness – and then, to cap it all, a blizzard.
We couldn’t see much. But what we could see was hellish. The humped mounds of bodies. The billowing, blood-red smoke. The mud, the murk, the screams. It looked like the Somme. The Somme, with zombies.
Until now, the longest battle scene committed to film had come in 2002’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
It lasted 40 minutes. In yesterday’s
Game of Thrones, that record was comprehensively crushed. Long before the end, I felt drained, bludgeoned, and groggy. So groggy, that when finally, suddenly, impossibly, the end came – Arya (Maisie Williams), leaping from nowhere at the Night King, lunging with her dagger, and shattering him like a greenhouse window – I barely registered it. I was numb. Overcome. Overloaded.
Which was for the best, I think. Because if, as viewers, we hadn’t spent the episode punch-drunk and reeling, our senses pummelled, our brains dazed, we’d have been a lot more concerned about its flaws.
How, for example, did Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) and Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-waldau) survive, given that we saw them being utterly submerged by zombies? How could the zombies in the crypt have failed to kill Sansa (Sophie Turner), Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) and numerous others, given that they were all confined in such a small space, with no means of defending themselves (apart from Sansa’s dagger, which she didn’t even end up using)? Why didn’t Jon Snow and Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) use their dragons (while they still had them) to torch the corpses on the battlefield – when they knew full well that the Night King had the power to revive them if they didn’t? Where exactly, in the end, did Arya spring from? And didn’t it ultimately feel disappointing (not to mention implausible) that none of the main characters – or at least, no one more significant than Theon (Alfie Allen) and Ser Jorah (Iain Glen) – got killed?
In a sense, this is a difficult episode to rate. For sheer drama, sheer horror, sheer visceral sensation, it’s five stars all the way. Six stars. Seven. Plot-wise, however, it undeniably had holes. But what the hell. I’m giving it five stars anyway. This, after all, was the battle we’ve been waiting for, and, in terms of pure spectacle, it was as brilliant, and as awful, as we could ever have hoped.
The biggest problem, though, may prove to be the Night King’s defeat. There are still three episodes left to come, and now that he and his forces are gone, the show is at grave risk of anticlimax. Sure, there’s Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) to vanquish. But while she’s an infinitely more interesting villain than the Night King, she’s also infinitely less dangerous. The Night King was out to annihilate all humanity. Cersei, by contrast, is merely out to bump off a few rivals. For all her cruelty, she at least isn’t plotting to eradicate every life form on the planet. And in any case, a battle against her armies – composed of normal, regular soldiers; live, breathing human beings – will practically feel like a holiday, after the midnight tsunami of ravaging undead.
How on earth can the writers follow this episode? How can they hope to pick us back up? How can they make us care, now, about who wins the Iron Throne – which is, let’s be frank, a trivial squabble next to the threat of total global extinction, a threat which has now abruptly passed?
Our heroes thought this battle would be the end. It wasn’t. Yet somehow, it felt as if it was. Game of Thrones