Game of Thrones, season eight, episodes 3 and 4: "The Long Night," "The Last of the Starks" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I took a break from MS-NBC’s repetitive news coverage last night (all about the impending -- and actually already in progress -- Presidential election and its outcome) and watched the third-from-last and second-from-last episodes of Game of Thrones, which we started our progress through in June 2019. (It almost seems like that was so far back the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros were still going concerns then.) Series producers and show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss -- who won the rights to Game of Thrones’ source material, a still-unfinished multi-novel saga by George R. R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire, by promising they would do it as a TV series rather than a feature film -- or even three feature films of such bloated dimensions as the movies of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings -- made the last four episodes of season eight all an hour and 20 minutes long when most of the predecessors had been just an hour, so we had to turn off the news early to get to squeeze two into one evening.

I can see why season eight disappointed so many online commentators when it first debuted in 2019 -- two years after season seven was shown -- and I suspect the reason is that Benioff and Weiss got tired of waiting for Martin to finish the cycle (he still has the last two books unfinished on his computer, or his typewriter, or his hand-built wooden writing table and quill pens, or whatever he uses) and decided to write their own ending instead. Thus you have phenomena like the marvelous, if way underused, character of the butch female knight Brienne of Tarth (played by six-foot-tall actress Gwendoline Christie, who’s given interviews complaining that she has a hard time getting cast in anything because not many screenwriters create parts for women six feet tall) fall so madly in love with Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) -- even though he’s just on the rebound from having broken up with his sister/lover Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) -- she even cries when he leaves her to go on some errand or another. To quote Anna Russell’s marvelous like about Brunnhilde in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, “It sure seems like love has taken the ginger out of her!”

Maintaining plot consistency is always a problem in a long-form series, especially one in which the ultimate person in charge of the writing changes over time; when Christopher Meloni left Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Michael Chernuchin took over from Neal Baer as show runner, he tried to “humanize” series star Mariska Hargitay a series of on-screen boyfriends of increasingly outrageous unsuitability for her -- or at least the version of her character Baer and overall producer Dick Wolf had spent the 12 years of the Meloni era creating for her. I’ll once again quote the online imdb,com synopses and then do my glosses:

The Long Night: “The allied living meet the vast Army of the Dead outside Winterfell. Despite swords ignited by the Red Witch, the initial Dothraki charge is decimated, and the Unsullied are quickly overwhelmed, despite the dragon-fire assist. Edd is killed saving Sam. Survivors retreat into the castle. Melisandre ignites last-minute the fire trench surrounding Winterfell to delay the advancing horde. Jon and Daenerys aerially engage the Night King, all three riding dragons. The wights fill the fire moat with corpses to invade Winterfell, storming at great effort the walls, then easily overpowering line after hideout of defenders. Jon and Rhaegal knock the Night King off Viserion, and Daenerys and Drogon burn him with dragon-fire in vain, the Night King raises the slain Winterfell defenders, including the dead entombed in the crypt, which attack the sheltered non-combatants. Wights pull Daenerys from Drogon, and Jorah is fatally wounded defending her. The Night King arrives at the Godswood and kills … “

The Last of the Starks: “After the funeral for the dead, there is a feast at Winterfell. Gendry is recognized as a Baratheon and asks Arya to marry him. Brienne and Jaime have a love affair. Daenerys asks Jon to keep his roots secret, but he decides to tell Sansa and Arya. Daenerys, her dragons, and her fleet are ambushed by Euron's fleet and are defeated; Missandei is taken captive. Daenerys decides to go to King's Landing to ask Cersei to surrender, but Cersei makes a tragic decision.”

Reading the above synopsis of “The Long Night” I’m tempted to think, “Oh, so that’s what’s supposed to be going on!” After the beauty and nobility of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” dealing with the lead-up to the big battle against the White Walkers (zombie-like creatures made from the bodies of dead normal humans by the supernatural powers of their leader, the Night King. played by Vladimir “Furdo” Furdik), the battle itself proved a major disappointment. Despite director Miguel Sapochnik’s claim that he spent 7 ½ months on this long and elaborate sequence, it falls pretty flat on screen for one big reason: it’s too dark. For some reason Benioff, Weiss and Sapochnik decided to have the entire battle take place in the dead of night. Real medieval battles always took place during daylight, for a clear and obvious reason: in the age before artificial illumination, you needed to fight during daylight because you needed to be able to see what you were doing. “The Long Night” descends into a murky blackness that makes it virtually impossible to figure out who’s doing what to whom and why.

There are a lot of swords that erupt into fire (the synopsis makes it clearer than the film itself that this is the handiwork of the Red Witch Melisandre, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who suddenly appears after having been absent for most of the last two seasons) and a lot of shots of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and her lover Jon Snow (Kit Harington) riding her two remaining dragons and at one point engaging in a dogfight with the third dragon, which the Night King killed and turned into a zombie dragon in an earlier episode. Since one of the premises of the White Walkers is that anyone who is killed by one becomes one themselves, there are a few scenes -- but not as many as there should have been -- of members of the human armies fighting them realizing they’re going to have to kill a former friend or comrade because he’s gone over to the other side.By far the best sequence involves the invasion of the White Walkers into the Crypt, the part of Winterfell castle in which the people running the battle decided to have the lesser characters, including Samwell Tarly (John Bradley), who even though he began as a comic-relief character has developed and happens to be the first normal human ever to kill a White Walker permanently; Sansa Stark (Sophie Tucker -- oops, I mean Sophie Turner), who’s supposed to have been in charge of Winterfell in Jon Snow’s absence; and even Brienne of Tarth, whom one would think they’d want to have fighting the White Walkers. Sapochnik gets some quite good suspense editing in the sequences in which these unlucky humans are being stalked by the White Walkers, and the scene is genuinely frightening in ways most of the self-consciously “horrific” moments in Game of Thrones haven’t been.

The final gimmick is that though the fires emitted by Daenerys’s dragons eliminate a lot of the White Walkers, as do the swords of so-called “dragonglass” (actually obsidian) with which at least some of the human warriors are armed -- fire and obsidian are the only things the White Walkers are vulnerable to -- the Night King is ultimately taken out by Arya Stark, who despite her seemingly meek and vulnerable appearance is actually a trained assassin with a high body count to her credit from previous episodes. The victory at Winterfell -- it seems we’re supposed to assume that the various phases of the human attack felled all the White Walkers (either that or they simply couldn’t survive without the direction of the Night King, like the drooling, defecating, bestial warrior-hordes of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, a fantasy satire on the fascistic elements Spinrad saw in sword-and-sorcery fiction in general and The Lord of the Rings in particular; the gimmick of The Iron Dream is that it’s supposedly the text of Lord of the Swastika, a novel written by Adolf Hitler in an alternative universe in which he fled Germany in 1919, settled in the U.S., got work as an illustrator for science-fiction pulps and then, once he learned enough English, started writing for them as well), so the concerns of the series can move back to the human characters and in particular the whodunit-like suspense of who’s going to be on the Iron Throne, the supposed seat of power of all Westeros, at the end of it. (I say “supposed” because the Iron Throne has changed hands so often, and with little behind it but an assassination or a show of force, that it’s hard to imagine this rather brutal tale coming to a complete and definitive ending because whoever’s on the Iron Throne today could easily be overthrown by either a rival claimant or a Genghis Khan-like thug tomorrow.)

We’ve learned in these later stages of the series that Jon Snow isn’t who both he and every other cast member thought he was -- the illegitimate son of Ned Stark, head of the Stark clan, which is now down to sisters Sansa and Arya and their brother Bronn, a.k.a. Brandon, but is in fact the son of the last member of the Targeryan family to rule Westeros, the “Mad King” Jaime Lannister assassinated in the backstory, whom Ned Stark hid out and raised as his own. This means that Daenerys is either his sister or his aunt (the two degrees of consanguinity with which Richard Wagner gave his incestuous characters in The Ring of the Nibelung) -- either way, they shouldn’t be having a sexual relationship, though when Jon tells this to Daenerys (after he’s just discovered it from Bronn and also from Samwell, who found it out in an old scroll he stole from the library where he was training to be a “maister,” Westeros’s term for a professional intellectual), she couldn’t care less and wants to keep it a secret from everyone else so she can ultimately rule Westeros and have Jon as her prince consort.

The big action in “The Last of the Starks” is the decision by Daenerys and Jon to approach Queen Cersei Lannister, the current occupant of the Iron Throne, and demand that she surrender the throne and the big palace/castle at King’s Landing to Daenerys, or else her army will attack and take the place. As things turn out, Daenerys’s armies, largely depleted and totally worn out by the battle against the Night Walkers, are in no position to take anything -- especially once Cersei’s forces deploy their own secret weapons, the “ballistas,” which they developed as an anti-dragon weapon -- sort of the Westerosian version of an anti-aircraft gun. Not only do they shoot down one of Daenerys’s dragons with the ballistas (they tried and failed to do so earlier, but that was because they only had one; this time they have multiple ballistas and fire barrages of large metal projectiles at once) but they destroy much of Daenerys’s navy with their new super-weapon and they capture the woman who was formerly a slave until Daenerys freed her and hired her as an interpreter (she also became the girlfriend of one of the Unsullied, the castrated warriors Daenerys captured in some of her earlier conquests, because even though he couldn’t fuck her it occurred to both of them that he could eat her out and give her sexual pleasure that way). They threaten to kill her and use her new captivity to mock Daenerys’s pretensions as the freer of slaves.

That’s pretty much the standoff that exists two episodes before the series’ end, and I suspect it’s the fact that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to fill in the end of the story with their own inventions instead of having George R. R. Martin’s material to draw on is responsible for the enraging inconsistencies in some of the characterizations (especially Brienne’s -- if you’re going to create a butch woman I want you to keep her that way instead of having her fall for some damned man, especially a scoundrel whose previous girlfriend was his own sister!) and the already apparent (and widely damned online after the final episode aired in 2019!) failure to maintain the tone and the level of dramatic and emotional complexity of the previous seasons.