Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 3, “The Long Night”

The episode gives the audience exactly what it expects, and absolutely nothing else.

Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 3, The Long Night
Photo: HBO

Despite the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones having already spent two full episodes watching its characters mentally and physically readying for the Battle of Winterfell, “The Long Night” opens with further preparations. We first track alongside Samwell Tarly (John Bradley-West), cold and quaking with fear, practically jumping out of his skin as fellow soldiers suddenly bark out orders in his periphery. The camera then follows Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) for a bit, long enough at least to show us the wheelchair-bound Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) being pushed into position in the Godswood.

This hustle and bustle doesn’t evoke anything emotional so much as it suggests the clockwork of the show’s title sequence: Watch as all your favorite pieces take their places. There’s Podrick Payne (Daniel Portman), Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), and Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). In front of them, Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson) and the Unsullied. In another direction, we catch glimpses of Tormund (Kristofer Hivju), Beric Dondarrion (Richard Dormer), The Hound (Rory McCann), Gendry (Joe Dempsie), and Edd (Ben Crompton). And then there’s Ghost—the only time in this episode you’ll see Jon’s dog—and Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen).

Never has Game of Thrones felt so much like a game than it does in “The Long Night,” and never at a worse time, with the stakes so existentially high as a last stand between the living and the dead. The episode is entertaining in the way that Avengers: Infinity War is: It gives you exactly what you’d expect, and absolutely nothing else.

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Every character who dies in “The Long Night” goes out with some measure of glory, even Edd, who, despite getting stabbed in the back, still manages to save fan-favorite Samwell in the process. Lyanna Mormont (Bella Ramsey), the littlest of all the fighters at Winterfell, is crushed to death by a wight giant, but with her last breath delivers a death blow, piercing one of her enemy’s ice-blue eyes. Jorah dies, of course, cradled in the arms of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), as his only real purpose on the show has been to protect her. And then there’s Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), who predictably outlives all of the other Ironborn guarding Bran in the Godswood, and just long enough for Bran to tell him that he’s a good man. And it’s then—and only then—that Theon is killed in one stroke by the Night King (Vladimír Furdík).

If that’s not clockwork enough, there’s the return of Melisandre (Carice van Houten), who tells her sworn enemy, Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), that there’s no need to execute her, as “I’ll be dead before the dawn.” (True to form, she abandons her age-defying necklace at episode’s end and walks out into the rising sun to die, her final and convenient purpose having been fulfilled.) Like Bran, she embodies the worst, most prophetic, and rule-breaking portions of Game of Thrones. To her, Beric Dondarrion isn’t a character worth mourning, but rather a device to be resurrected as many times as necessary so that he can now die serving the show’s own present purpose: to protect Arya Stark (Maisie Williams).

“The Long Night” isn’t only long, it tasks itself with accomplishing too much. In between the wonderful, minimally scored beginning to the battle and the powerfully elegiac ending, the episode sets about busily satisfying a checklist. Director Miguel Sapochnik’s previous battle-centric episodes, “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards,” benefitted from sticking to the at-times hopeless point of view of Jon Snow (Kit Harington), but here the editing is spread too wide, jumping from character to character, often mid-action. Additionally, the nighttime setting effectively makes it hard to tell what, exactly, is even going on half of the time, especially during the terribly CGI’d dragon fight between Jon and the Night King. The episode clearly knows how to make artful use of shadow, as in the stealthy sequence with Arya in the library. That so much of it still turns to indistinct chaos is a reflection more on the corner Game of Thrones has written itself into than on any directorial failure.

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To be generous, “The Long Night” is a purposely long shell game. It aims to distract us with the chaos of warfare so that we don’t guess the inevitable conclusion of the battle against the undead army, namely, who the hero has to be, even though Melisandre outright tells us it’s Arya. Though we’ve already seen Lyanna have a similarly heroic moment, Arya faces the Night King and pierces him with her dagger, severing his link to all the other White Walkers and ending the battle with perfect dramatic timing, as Jon was about to get burnt to a crisp.

All the other important story beats get shuffled out of the way, all the better to make room for big, distracting deaths. Sansa (Sophie Turner) has so little to do in this episode that she actually tells Tyrion that hiding down in the crypts, way outside the main story’s way, is “the most heroic thing” they can do. When the Night King raises the dead, leaving the two surrounded by wights, each armed with a dagger and a prayer, the camera cuts away from them. It lingers on their heroism but not on their subsequent show of heroism, because it has to tend of the business of fulfilling a contractually obligated battle elsewhere.

The battle’s start, in which the Dothraki charge into the darkness with their flaming arakh sickle-swords held aloft, is satisfying. The Dothraki resemble an arrow of light in the distance, and the moment their flames are swallowed up one by one until there’s nothing but darkness and quiet left is more terrifying than anything the rest of the episode delivers. Once that tsunami of wights appears, the show falls back on predictable terrain, summoning visions from everything from Army of Darkness, as the dead climb Winterfell’s walls, to World War Z, as the monsters fall through a ceiling. Every action, even the brief glimpses of the brave quaking with fear as death looms over them, feels like an inevitability, and by and large unsurprising. With the exception, perhaps, of the realization that the episode’s shell game is intentionally empty—mere table setting for the battle to come with Cersei Lannister.

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This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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