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

Way back in 2012, Game of Thrones delivered its first large-scale, episode-spanning battle sequence in "Blackwater." Until then, budgetary constraints had forced the series to write around the massive battle sequences of George R.R. Martin’s novels, with point-of-view characters getting knocked out just as the battle began, or arriving victorious after a battle had already ended, with a prisoner in tow.

Coming at the end of season two, "Blackwater" was a statement of purpose: a sign that Game of Thrones was willing to spend the time (and HBO was willing to spend the money) to bring these sprawling fantasy battles to life. Every season or two since, Game of Thrones has doubled down on that promise with episodes like "The Watchers on the Wall," "Hardhome," and "Battle of the Bastards."

But on paper, a Game of Thrones battle was never going to be any bigger than this week’s long-awaited "The Long Night," which serves as the culmination of a series-long struggle between the humans and the White Walkers. It’s a battle that we’ve been told, over and over again, will be vastly more important than anything else in the series.

And maybe Game of Thrones was just too good at setting the bar that high—because man, is "The Long Night" a letdown.

To understand why "The Long Night" underwhelms, it’s worth thinking about what Game of Thrones used to do so well. Superficially, "The Long Night" has a lot in common with "Blackwater." Again, the entire episode is confined to a single location. Again, the action is split between the fighters and the group of people who fearfully awaited the outcome of the battle in a dim stony chamber. And again, fire turns out to be the linchpin of our heroes’ plan to gain an edge.

But there’s one key difference between "Blackwater" and "The Long Night": This time, it couldn’t have been clearer which side we were on. Back then, Game of Thrones was so much more complicated. Sure, Stannis Baratheon was a little weird and stuffy—but who wouldn’t love to see him boot Joffrey off the Iron Throne? Then again, Tyrion Lannister was defending Joffrey, and everybody loves Tyrion. And Tyrion worked out that brilliant wildfire gambit…which tragically killed the son of Davos Seaworth, everyone’s favorite Onion Knight.

And on, and on, and on, until it was impossible to decide which side you were actually rooting for. Back then, Game of Thrones understood how to layer its consequences. No side was wholly good or evil, and every action—good or bad—came with some kind of unintended but poetic consequence.

This is not that show anymore. The White Walkers have always been unquestionably evil, which is the same thing as being unquestionably boring. And in the face of that evil, every character we care about has become unquestionably good, which is the same thing as being unquestionably boring. (Well, every character except Cersei, who sat out this battle in King’s Landing, drinking wine and banging Euron Greyjoy.)

With all that in mind, I guess it’s no surprise that Game of Thrones took the black-and-white moral struggle of humans vs. White Walkers and delivered a standard-issue, generic-brand fantasy battle, complete with a series of deaths that were as poignant as they were predictable. If it wasn’t a great episode, it was certainly a consequential one. The death toll contained fewer familiar faces than I expected, but it still included Dolorous Edd, Beric Dondarrion, Lyanna Mormont, Theon Greyjoy, Jorah Mormont, Melisandre, and literally every wight or White Walker, including the Night King and the much-hyped zombie dragon.

Part of the problem with "The Long Night" was on the technical side. A few sequences landed with the impact that was clearly intended: The aftermath of the eerie first charge, where the flaming Dothraki arakhs were snuffed out one by one, or Arya’s white-knuckle sprint past the wights that had penetrated the walls of Winterfell. But many, many other promising sequences were undermined by muddy lighting, incoherent staging, or choppy editing—and far too often, all three.

Even more tellingly, Game of Thrones failed to live up to the emotional stakes it set for itself. Remember last week, when Brienne of Tarth received a long-overdue knighthood from Jaime Lannister, who vowed to serve her in the battle to come? I hope that was all you wanted from those characters, because they spent the entire episode grunting and swinging semi-uselessly at the wights on the walls of Winterfell. You could say the same for Gendry or Tormund or even Sam. Together, this crew might have killed five wights or 50 wights. I’d believe any number you threw at me. It was simply impossible to tell.

And when "The Long Night" did punctuate the battle, it leaned toward a cheesy emphasis on heroism that would have been unthinkable on this show just a few years ago. Yes, 13-year-old Lady Mormont gets killed—but she takes down one of the most powerful wights in the Night King’s army on the way. Theon gets a warm pardon from the supposedly emotionless Bran Stark before he dies. When Ser Jorah was protecting Daenerys, I lost count of how many times he was stabbed before he finally went down. There was a time on Game of Thrones when the only thing Ser Jorah would have earned for his selfless bravery was a quicker death. Consider Khal Drogo’s pathetic, unglamorous decline at the end of season one—slow and pitiful, at the mercy of a festering wound he received in a fistpump-inspiring duel—and you’ll see the difference.

In total, "The Long Night"—like last season’s similarly spectacle-laden, similarly disappointing "Beyond the Wall"—is yet another sign that late-stage Game of Thrones is willing to cut corners and break its own rules as it races toward its ending. Melisandre’s prophecies are wrong, unless they’re not. The weaker civilians are left in the "safety" of the crypt, because it never occurs to anyone that the Night King, who can raise people from the dead, might decide to raise some of the oldest bones in Winterfell. The fire-phobic Hound ends up fighting on the wall, despite everyone knowing that literally the whole plan is about setting stuff on fire. And no one ever asks Bran a direct question, because Bran knows everything, and revealing the answers would spoil the suspense.

I’ll admit: It’s easier to forgive Game of Thrones for fudging the details when it leads to great scenes: Melisandre turning the tide of the battle in ways both small and massive, or skeletons rising from the crypts of Winterfell. But it’s also galling, because Game of Thrones used to be the show that was so good about not fudging the details.

And that leads us to the deeply anticlimactic death of the Night King. As the Night King prepares to kill Bran—the closest thing we have to a motive for this eight-season White Walker campaign—Arya rushes up, seemingly out of nowhere, and manages to stab the Night King with a Valyrian steel dagger. The Night King dies instantly. And so does everybody else in his army, because the Night King is the sole power source keeping the rest of the White Walkers and wights alive.

After almost 70 episodes of buildup: Is that all there is? Can the death of a single White Walker—even the first and most powerful White Walker—really wipe out the greatest existential threat Westeros has ever faced? Is this really a worthwhile payoff to a thousand mumbly Jon Snow speeches about the only war that matters?

It’s possible to come up with a more generous, thematically resonant reading of how easily the White Walkers are dispatched in "The Long Night." Time and time again, the episode paid off longstanding relationships by showing our heroes saving each other from near-certain death. Humans have allies; the Night King has slaves. The army that ultimately thwarted the Night King and his followers was built on mutual self-interest and hard-won trust. The Night King had more power, but no loyalty. When your army is nothing but mindless corpses and babies you corrupted into White Walkers, you are the army; when you’re gone, they’re all gone, too.

But I’ll be honest: If I were to earnestly make the case that Game of Thrones intended this as the culmination of the White Walker threat from the very beginning, I’d feel like I was doing work Game of Thrones should have done for itself. Now that they’re gone, the mystery of the White Walkers—which stretches all the way back to the very first scene of the series—just feels like the product of a writing session where somebody said, "We’ll figure this out eventually" and never came back to it. What did the White Walkers really want? What were they doing in those thousands of years beyond the Wall? Why was the Night King turning human babies into White Walkers? What was the deal with the symbols they left everywhere?

I guess Game of Thrones’s final answer is: Who cares? They’re all dead now. On to the Iron Throne.