Where are my ice dragons—Is Viserion a wight or a White Walker?

In the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones season 7, the Night King lays hands on the dead body of Viserion the dragon, whom he’d knocked out of the air earlier with an icy projectile. Roll the moment of impact:

Excellent javelin work, Night King. Tens across the board.

Anyway, after things have quieted down, the Night King dredges up Viserion’s body from the bottom of that frigid lake and raises him anew as a blue-eyed monster that breaths azure flame, as opposed to the golden-eyed monster that breathed crimson flame he was before. Together, they take down a big chunk of the Wall and will surely get up to all manner of no good in the show’s final six episodes.

But what exactly is the resurrected Viserion? Taken at face value, he seems like a wight, no different than any of the other thousands of undead soldiers in the Night King’s army, or the undead horses we’ve seen them ride in the past.

See also: zombie polar bear. It’s well-established that the White Walkers can resurrect animals as wights just as they can resurrect humans. Viserion is just more of the same…right?

Maybe. Recently, the script for “The Dragon and the Wolf,” the season 7 finale, went up on the Emmy website. The final scene of that episode has Viserion blowing open the Wall, and the description of the dragon sheds some doubt on exactly what he is:

The script, by Game of Thrones creators Dan Weiss and David Benioff, doesn’t call Viserion a wight dragon or a zombie dragon. It calls him an “ice dragon,” and specifies that the Night King did the same thing to him as he did to Craster’s sons. If you’ve forgotten, we got a demonstration of exactly what the Night King did to Craster’s sons at the end of “Oathkeeper,” from season 4:

A White Walker puts Craster’s son on an alter, the Night King touches the baby on the cheek, and the child’s eyes turn ice-blue, the same color as Viserion’s eyes when he opens them at the end of “Beyond the Wall.” The Night King has done more than turn the baby into a wight. Wights, after all, are the reanimated bodies of dead humans and animals. To make them, the Night King need only find some corpses and raise his hands. He does this after the Massacre at Hardhome, when he drafts thousands of dead wildlings into his army:

Craster’s baby, on the other hand, was alive when he transformed, and the Night King had to touch him in order to turn him. In that moment, Craster’s son became not a wight, but a new White Walker.

Is this what happened to Viserion? There are similarities and differences. As with Craster’s son, the Night King touched Viserion physically, and went to the trouble of dragging the dragon’s massive body out of the water so he could do it. (Insert tiresome complaint about where he got the chains here.) If the Night King was just trying to make a wight, he could have stood on the shore and raised his hands; Viserion’s corpse would have come crawling out of there eventually. He was trying for something more.

However, unlike with Craster’s son, Viserion was dead when the Night King laid hands on him. Does that make a difference? We’re not sure — the White Walkers have not provided us with a rulebook for all their freaky rituals. But at the least, it seems that Viserion is more than just another wight. Rather, he’s something closer to a White Walker dragon, or as the script puts it, an ice dragon.

The next question is why the Night King chose to resurrect Viserion as a White Walker rather than a wight. This isn’t a question we can answer conclusively because we don’t know enough about the biology of wights versus White Walkers, because neither of those things exist. But I have a theory: I’m guessing that, if brought back as a wight, Viserion wouldn’t be able to breathe his blue fire, which the Night King needed to take down the Wall.

Wights are dead things, moving corpses animated by the wills of their White Walker masters. When a White Walker dies, so do all the wights they raised. But White Walkers are independent. They can think and move of their own accord, and as the Night King showed us during his assault on the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave, they can pull off some nifty tricks when they have a mind to:

I think the Night King wanted Viserion to keep his own nifty tricks, and to do that, he couldn’t just bring him back as a shambling flesh bag. Viserion is a servant of the Great Other now, body and soul.

Either that, or I’m reading way too much into a couple stray lines in the shooting script. What do you all think?

To stay up to date on everything Game of Thrones, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Watch Game of Thrones or Succession for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels