The Long Fight and the difficulty of endings

Endings are difficult. No less a writer than Neal Stephenson taught me that. I love Stephenson's intricate storylines and data dump of information inside a narrative that still makes sense and moves forward. But his endings suck. He's gotten better at them, but when you build up a story that elaborate and then suddenly have to wrap it up, it becomes a tricky thing to figure out just how much time or how many words to devote to people and events that you've been working with for years. I know that I've struggled with them at times because, having had some characters in my head for years (decades, in some cases), I don't want the story to end because it often means the end of that character and his/her intricately constructed situation. Thus, we arrive at the first of the final battles of Game of Thrones.

On the one hand, all stories must have an ending and this was the ending for the Night's King. In some ways, the symmetry was rather interesting. Bran's plan was to lure him back to the point where the Others were created, in the Godswood of Winterfell, and hope that Arya would be able to close the door. She did, appropriately with the Valyrian steel dagger that had once been used in the attempt on Bran's life that triggered many of the events that have led most of the cast to this time and place. (Yes, Littlefinger started the ball rolling with Jon Arryn's death, but Catelyn jump-started the war when she thought Tyrion had tried to assassinate her comatose son.) The immediate events leading up to that dagger plunging into the greatest threat to the world entire were suitably chaotic and desperate and tense and action-packed. That's all well and good.

OTOH, one of the basic themes of the story was that the petty squabbles among humans grasping for temporal power paled in comparison to the Others returning with their eternal power. We as yet don't know why the Others were returning now instead of any time over the thousands of years since their initial defeat and the raising of the Wall. The show also has (probably wisely) skipped over the fact that the Night's King wasn't really created by the Children, since he was a commander of the Night's Watch before being lured north by a witch, which means the Wall was already present when he left his post. So, now we've been given the lie to that entire and ancient theme (which, in truth, may only be a concern to those of us who've read the books.) In fact, the war to end all wars was just a prelude to the REAL fight between more of those squabbling humans. This seems a little like putting World War II before World War I, despite the presence of trenches. (Air power was far more important in the former, too.)

To properly serve the story, you really can't reduce the final confrontation between Cersei and everyone else and the final decision on who sits on the Iron Throne to a sideshow in the face of the advancing Others, so I get it. This had to be wrapped up before everyone turned back to the south. However, with half the season still left to play out, I can't help but feel like this was a little too quick an ending for the greatest threat to the world entire. Despite losing Jorah, Edd, Beric, Melisandre, the lady Mormont, and Theon, that's not quite the casualty list one would have expected from a story built on the idea that "no one is safe." Of course, we know that's not true and that most of the major characters who have died (Ned, Robb, Drogo) were long planned to do so as our tragedy proceeded. All the same, I have to say that the overall impact of this episode for me was pretty low. I expected that the Others and their army of the dead would carry on for at least another episode, perhaps pushing everyone to the south and forcing Cersei to get involved. Instead of another instance of "those northerners and their fairy tales", everyone south of the Neck would have to acknowledge that the Night's Watch actually served a purpose for those thousands of years. Instead, we've ended up in the spot that Cersei, with her usual pragmatic perspective, had predicted: Let the monsters kill each other and then she'll mop up what's left. That feels too easy.

And that's kind of the root of my mixed feelings. Yes, I understand the need to end this plot line here. No, it doesn't feel satisfactory. Yes, I understand the technique of battle chaos. There is such a thing as too much of it. I think there were some great moments of atmosphere: the wait in the darkness for all the troops; the weighted silence between Jon and Dany on the hill; the tender moment before what seems like their impending death between Sansa and Tyrion; Melisandre taking the last walk into dust, the Lord of Light's purpose fulfilled. But I still feel like I wasn't getting much story or, if I was, not as much story as I expected from a threat that we first encountered almost a decade ago on the show (and far longer in the books.)

Now that we've resolved the plot line that's been running since the prologue of the first episode (and the prologue of the first novel) and it feels kind of empty, where do we go? Again, I get why this had to be pushed out of the way in order to resolve so many other plot lines, because this is a story about characters. But it's also a story about grand themes and the remaining three episodes now have a tinge of the Scouring of the Shire, where we've done all the hard work and now it's just about cleaning up some recalcitrant old man and his thugs who just won't go away. This is not what I was expecting and I'm wondering if, like Stephenson's novels, there just isn't a way to make this ending work in the way that everyone would like it to.

Technical stuff:

Years and years ago, I enjoyed the approach that action directors were taking in showing scenes and fights/battles in "real time". Fights are chaotic and it's often hard to tell friend from foe, especially if there are thousands of them milling around. That's part of why warriors in medieval Japan used to wear those little flags on their backs; so they could tell who was lining up with which daimyo. But that's been taken to an extreme in the last decade and it's now often difficult to even tell what's happening in a lot of fight scenes. This one, also taking place at night and with the flickering lighting of fire, was perhaps the worst example of that I've seen in quite some time. I spent a fair amount of time feeling like I was missing something or trying to tell whom it was that was actually fighting. That's called "knocking your audience out of the action." I mean, yeah, the episode is titled "The Long Night" so it's hard to see and the haze over the action only added to that feeling of tension and disorientation. Fine. But when I'm reading your story, I still don't want the words to be blurry. It was and is a fine technique. As with most directors over the past 20 years, I think they overdid it. And get off my body-filled lawn.

I've already seen some criticism going around about the execution of the battle, especially over the suicidal charge of the Dothraki. Well, let's just say that that was a fine example of one of the oldest of military aphorisms: "No plan survives contact with the enemy." A full Dothraki charge is one of the most fearsome things in all of Essos and, presumably, Westeros. A full Dothraki charge with flaming arakhs is even more fearsome. That it was swallowed up without a sound (Dothraki screamers, remember?) by the dead was just one way of demonstrating how fearsome the opposition was. That's the way the helmet bounces sometimes.

In contrast... FFS, trebuchets are not field weapons! They're siege machines because, for all the enormous damage they can do, they're ridiculously hard to aim. That's why everyone in the real world only aimed them at things that didn't move, like curtain walls. They're really good at pitching stones at those walls that, like most walls, don't move anywhere until they fall over. They're horrible when used to hurl projectiles ahead of your advancing lines! Even worse when those projectiles are designed to burst and shower flames when they land. You're much more likely to end up dropping so-called friendly fire on your own guys than you are the enemy, most of whom probably haven't even come into range of your weapons and, if they have, then you're about to drop shit on your own guys who are, at that moment, engaged in an all out charge at the enemy. I really wish ancient/medieval/fantasy warfare writers and directors would get over that idea. Artillery in the ancient world wasn't like that of the Gunpowder Era and beyond.

I hope they delve into Bran's nature and actions a bit more in the last three weeks. I hope it's not just a case of "we really don't know what to do with the magic man." Last week, much was made of the fact that the Night's King was coming to Winterfell because he was coming for Bran and the plan was to lure him to the Godswood and then try to take him out from there. So far, so good. But if the King knew that Bran was at Winterfell, it felt to me like he didn't need a flashing neon sign to find him. Bran went warging into all of the ravens in Winterfell and my initial thought was that he was sending them out to summon some allies that we didn't know existed or perhaps to harass the enemy somehow. But, looking back on it, it seems like he was just using the birds to lure the King to the Godswood which... okay? That seems kind of superfluous. But maybe it's just my lingering dissatisfaction with the episode as a whole.

One other moment of symmetry also involved Arya, which had her revert to her childhood role of running in order to stay alive. The library/horror scene was well done in that respect and I understand why they did it, since non-stop battle can get a little old. But I also felt that, as much as I liked the flashback to Arya running through the catacombs under the Red Keep (and then having the prayer to the god of Death recited to her again; first sword of Braavos, salute), it felt a little unwieldy. There's this rampaging horde of undead, sprinting and growling through every square yard of Winterfell... but these guys have slowed to a walk and are just wandering around. Wouldn't they have sprinted through the library in search of things to kill? Instead, we do the horror scene for a couple minutes. Again, the lingering dissatisfaction and the difficult endings.

I'm disappointed that over the last two seasons, Conleth Hill's role has been one of stating the obvious in grim reflection of what we can already see happening around us. He used to be so much more interesting and insightful. Granted, the Lord of Whispers doesn't have the same impact in the middle of all-out war, but I'd still like to see him saying something other than his lone line for the entire episode ("At least we're already in a crypt.") being an obvious flaw in the plan that most viewers were already talking about at the end of last week's episode. (When facing a guy who raises the dead, what do we stay away from? Dead people!) Similarly, perhaps the wolf unit should have just been retired. We got two seconds of Ghost sitting in the battle lines and another second of him running with the Dothraki charge. That's it. I know using the dogs is a complicated task, but these little glimpses are possibly worse than just having written the wolves out entirely.

Lines of the week:

"That's the most heroic thing we can do now: look the truth in the face."
The wisdom of the formerly naive that has been through things almost worse than death.

"Everything you did brought you to where you are now. Where you belong. Home."
Bran with the summation of a lot of these characters.