Quote:
Originally Posted by Bananaphone
This is Game of Thrones where Oberyn, a fan-favorite, got his head brutally crushed in while screaming in agony because he got cocky. Now all the characters have plot armor except a handful.
Like...this is the ultimate showdown battle. This is the Great War they've been building up for 7 years since the pilot, yet 90% of characters survive and the Night King dies because Arya teleport-ganks him from nowhere.
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This is my one substantial criticism of the episode (other flaws I either don’t think are flaws, or can live with).
But it’s very substantial. The thing is, I don’t think GoT - the show or the books - has ever been all that daring about killing off characters. Certain characters have always been clearly marked as “Will survive until the climax.” Mostly, GoT kills off people who are very killable-off. And that’s fine — there’s no reason to do deaths that don’t serve the story just for the sake of showing that you can kill people off.
But you know what? We’re getting to the end now. Now is when you can kill people off whom you couldn’t easily kill before this, and this episode didn’t even kill off all that many people who could have died a while back.
There are peculiar problems with this episode in particular making it so very obvious that your chance of survival was high if the audience knew who you were. For one thing, it undercuts all the hard work that the director did — some of it very effective — to sell that this was a horrific and terrifying thing if such a high proportion of named characters are immune.
More importantly, though, we only have three episodes left, and leaving this many characters alive is an awful lot of characters to touch on in those three episodes. From a writing standpoint, this was an excellent opportunity to take people off the table so that the writing could focus on the relatively small number of people who, at this point, are key to the plot. How many of the secondary characters will get a better good-bye than they got in the previous episode?
(Except Grey Worm. His scene with Missandei last week went so far into being-just-one-day-away-from-retirement territory that he pretty much
had to stay alive, leaving aside the question of the optics of it.)
I expect that we’ll learn next week that a couple more minor named characters died, admittedly. But still: Brienne, Podrick, Thormund, Gendry, Sam, even Sandor Clegane and Jaime — kill more of them off!
In fact, I’d have been quite happy if they’d had the courage to kill Arya off when she killed the Night King, for all that I think Maisie Richardson does a tremendous job in the part. If you’re going to do the thing where killing the Big Bad neatly takes away all his forces and saves everything, it’s better to extract a cost that the viewer is going to feel.
EDIT: When I say “quite happy,” there’s a consideration that you should be careful about doing the whole “Woman has intimate relations and dies” cliché, I suppose. But aside from that, I think Arya dying would have improved the episode.