Arya’s big moment sets up the Game of Thrones ending we deserve

This weekend, Game of Thrones aired its series finale…three episodes early. From the very first scene of the very first episode of the show, we’ve been anticipating a clash between the forces of the living and the forces of the dead, between the heroes of Westeros and the evil White Walkers. We got it in “The Long Night,” as the army of the dead beat the living inexorably back into the castle of Winterfell, until the Prince That Was Promised, the hero who would deliver the dawn from the darkness, emerged from the black of night to kill the Night King.

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Only Jon Snow couldn’t do it because he was squaring off with an angry undead dragon, and Daenerys Targaryen was busy killing wights side by side with her right-hand man Jorah Mormont, so Jon’s little sister Arya unsheathed her Valyrian steel dagger and shanked the Night King in the stomach, in exactly the same place where the Children of the Forest violated him with a dragonglass dagger millennia ago.

Milage will vary, but this was a wonderful twist. Even people who were down on the episode, like Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone, agreed that having Arya be the one to land the killing blow was genius. This is Game of Thrones, a show that built a reputation on zigging when the audience expects it to zag, on killing characters who looked like leads. Killing a villain who looked like he was going to be the final threat is very much in keeping with that. And for Arya to do the deed is doubly sweet.

I’m just speaking for myself here, but under no circumstances did I want to see the Night King go down in a one-on-one swordfight with Jon Snow, or even a dragon-on-dragon dogfight with Daenerys Targaryen. Those two characters have had more-or-less traditional hero’s journeys, give or take a little pyromania, and letting them save humanity with the swing of a blade or a breath of fire would have been far too straightforward for this show. But little Arya, who’s been training to be stealthy and quick and deadly starting in season 1 with Syrio Forel (“Swift as a deer. Quiet as a shadow”)…that was terrific.

But not everyone thinks so. In the wake of the episode, there’s been a fair amount of blowback from fans who thought it fell short. In some cases I agree with them, but in many I don’t. I’d like to argue why “The Long Night” succeeded where it mattered, and how it clears a path for a richer, better ending than we would have gotten if the Night King were still around.

Arya and the god of death

At the risk of strawmanning, there seems to be a general dissatisfaction among some fans that Arya hadn’t “earned” the right to kill the Night King, and I’m quoting a word used by several commenters here at WiC. “A battle against Jon would have made sense even if Arya still kills him,” writes wonderful and awesome and brilliant commenter Hellawakens23.

I think these criticisms reflect a concern that the Night King’s death didn’t pay off the rivalry that had been building between him and Jon Snow, which kicked into high gear when the Night King raised a village full of wildlings from the dead in “Hardhome” as Jon looked on.

“The Long Night” references this moment when Jon tries to charge the Night King only to be beset by a host of newly raised wights. Instead of engaging Jon, the Night King walks away, which seems like a clear rejection of this line of thinking, and made me laugh out loud. Why should the Night King spend his time trading blows with Resurrection Boy when he has Three-Eyed Ravens to kill?

So the Night King’s death didn’t trade on his rivalry with Jon Snow. But it did trade on Arya Stark’s eight season-long journey from naive tomboy to super assassin. As WiC writer Katie Majka points out in her Unsullied recap, Arya’s journey has been about death from the very beginning, starting with Syrio Forel (“What do we say to the god of death?”) through her adventures with the Hound (“Nothing isn’t better or worse than anything. Nothing is just nothing.”) to her time in Braavos (“Valar Morghuis”). The Night King is the show’s representation of death; the Hound names him as such in this episode. He’s the closest thing the show has to a literal god of death, and it makes perfect metaphorical sense that Arya Stark, who’s known more death than anyone her age (or any age) should, would end him. Perhaps after killing death itself, she can learn to let go of her bloodlust, which has been ebbing as she reconnects with her family.

As for the literal mechanics of the death scene, some fans — like WiC’s own Corey Smith — wonder how Arya managed to sneak past the Night King’s lieutenants. Now, the show didn’t give us the exact combination of steps she used to slip past these guys, but it set up the idea of Arya being nimble and sneaky all the way back in season 1 when she was chasing cats through the Red Keep, and reminded us of it in this episode when she successfully weaves her way through a library full of wights..noiselessly; her blood dripping out her nose made more noise than she did. And let’s remember that it’s easier to move silently when your footsteps are muffled by snow and there’s ambient noise as there is in the godswood, a place Arya knows very well having been raised at Winterfell.

She’s a water dancer, smooth and liquid. She’s an assassin of the Faceless Men who can fight and move and kill even when completely blind. Given how dark this episode was, that skill came in very handy. The show even dropped a little bit of setup for this in the season 8 premiere, when Arya surprises Jon Snow in — surprise, surprise — the godswood. “How did you sneak up on me?” Jon asks. Because she has skills, Jon. Because she has skills.

Also, it’s not like Arya intended to remain hidden — she only needed to stay swift and stealthy long enough to stab the Night King in the back, which she nearly fails at when he catches her by the throat. But then she drops her knife into her other hand and drives it home, a variation of a move she first pulled off during her sparring match with Brienne of Tarth in season 7. All of this was there to see long before “The Long Night” came round.

As for Corey’s complaint that the Night King shouldn’t have gone down with just one stab of a Valyrian steel dagger, I just can’t agree. I think the show did itself a disservice when it made the Night King capable of doing things like sniping dragons out of the sky with ice spears. Beyond that, he’d never shown any combat ability, and for all we know doesn’t like to mix it up. He’s better off leaving the fight to his minions, as he did with Jon Snow, although he clearly makes an exception for the Three-Eyed Ravens past and present; remember that he slew the last Three-Eyed Raven personally as well. He was a White Walker general, and he goes down the same way the other White Walkers do: with a slash of Valyrian steel.

All that said, I didn’t like the way all the other White Walkers shattered after the Night King went down. Todd VanDerWerff of Vox is right that boiling victory down to killing one guy is a tired trope, but I never said the episode was perfect. And besides, it’s become clear now that killing the Night King was never the show’s endgame, anyway.

For the Throne

I think that’s something else that rankles fans: the Night King was supposed to be the main villain of the show. How could he go down this easily?

But was he the main villain? I wonder if what we have here is a case of differing priorities. It’s true that the specter of the Night King and his army has hung over the whole series, but we’ve spent a lot more actual time with characters jockeying for power and trying to play the game of thrones. That was always the heart of the show, and ahead of season 8 I was getting nervous that the producers were going to forget that and make the final season all about an existential threat to humanity. Dispensing with that threat relatively early on is a bold move, and one that clears a path for the show to return to the kind of day-in day-out politicking that dominated the earlier seasons, married to the production values that have marked the latter. To me, that is an excellent development.

I know some fans are upset that the show didn’t delve into the Night King’s backstory, but I don’t think that was ever where this story was going. Whatever happens in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels, the Night King of Game of Thrones is an implacable representation of death, a fairy tale monster without beginning or end, existing only to wipe out all life. That’s in direct contrast to villains like Joffrey Baratheon and Tywin Lannister, who were cruel and self-serving, but at the day terrifyingly human. That’s the kind of adversary we’re going back to.

All this time, the show has told us that the game of thrones was a distraction from the otherworldly threat of the White Walkers. The twist, which comes late in the game as all good twists do, is that the reverse is also true. An otherworldly threat will not stop petty, vindictive human beings from hurting one another, and will not stop even good-hearted people from lusting after power, even if it means their own destruction. George R.R. Martin is fond of this William Faulkner quote: “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” We’ve dealt with the inhumanity of White Walkers. It’s time to get back to the inhumanity of humans.

Speaking of Martin, when discussing the ending to his story, he’s gone on record as saying that he’s inspired by “The Scouring of the Shire” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “The Scouring of the Shire” occurs late in Tolkien’s books and was not adapted by Peter Jackson in his movies. It happens after Frodo tosses the One Ring into Mount Doom, and depicts the return of he and his friends to the Shire, which they find corrupted by Saruman. The Hobbits put what they’ve learned over the course of the story to use, rout out the evil, and learn that they can never truly go home again. Said Martin:

"I’ve said before that the tone of the ending that I’m going for is bittersweet. I mean, it’s no secret that Tolkien has been a huge influence on me, and I love the way he ended Lord of the Rings. It ends with victory, but it’s a bittersweet victory. Frodo is never whole again, and he goes away to the Undying Lands, and the other people live their lives. And the scouring of the Shire—brilliant piece of work, which I didn’t understand when I was 13 years old: “Why is this here? The story’s over?” But every time I read it I understand the brilliance of that segment more and more. All I can say is that’s the kind of tone I will be aiming for."

Perhaps that’s how we should be looking at these final three episodes. The existential threat is over, and now it’s time to see what we’ve learned and what it means.

I don’t want to imply that I thought “The Long Night” was perfect. I didn’t. I was fortunate to watch the episode of a TV where I could make out what was going on without difficulty, but when I re-watched on my laptop…yeah, the lighting is very dark. And I agree with critics who say that more characters should have died. Or if they’re not going to die, don’t show us a sequence where Brienne and Jaime and Grey Worm and Tormund and freaking Sam are all fighting to stay alive only for…all of them to stay alive. And that’s without getting into Gilly and Varys and Sansa and Missandei and Tyrion all surviving down in the crypts. This was a zombie apocalypse and credulity can only stretch so far. (RIP Theon and House Mormont, though.)

But ultimately, these are nitpicks. I think “The Long Night” did what it set out to do, which was to close out one part of the story and open another. The moments that mattered landed, and for the rest, the Internet Remembers.

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