Game of Thones: The Short End of the Long Night
By Cory Thone
Criticism 3: The episode was too dark
No getting around this one: we couldn’t see jack in the Thone household. We have HBO Go, and apparently that was an issue lots of streamers were having. If you had cable, and a really big TV that was backlit and had the brightness levels set just so, then it probably looked fine to you.
But that wasn’t the case for 75% of fans out there.
Fabian Wagner, the cinematographer for the episode, said, “the lighting was not a mistake. I know it wasn’t too dark because I shot it.” Well, literally everyone disagrees. I know it can be tough to accept criticism for things that you DON’T think are true, but this isn’t some small subset of fans complaining about the brightness of the episode.
I fully understand the mood that was being set and the darkness was supposed to be disorienting, which it was. But it was just too much.
Verdict: Valid. The Long Night was too damn dark, guys. Sorry.
Criticism 4: Jon/Dany/The Dragons didn’t even do anything, they just flew around.
Jon and Dany were never going to be focused on the ground assault on Winterfell. They made that clear in previous episodes. Their target was the Night King and the White Walkers.
However, they probably could have swooped down and burned a few more wights while they were flying around. They certainly helped in the beginning, but three or four more passes of dragon fire probably would have saved lives, especially when Jon and Rhaegal were just sitting on the godswood wall for a hot minute.
That being said, the dragons burned a LOT of wights, and they knocked the Night King off his dragon and injured Viserion something fierce. When they got the Night King on the ground, Dany tried to burn him, which didn’t work, and Jon tried to fight him one on one, which he had no interest in because WHY WOULD HE?
Jon, Dany, and the dragons all put up a fight. In the end, it got the Night King where he needed to be: on the ground in the godswood with his back turned to an unexpected enemy. I know we all were HOPING for more one-vs-one with Jon, or more dragons swooping and burning, but that wasn’t what the battle was about. Could there have been more fan service? Sure. But there wasn’t, and that doesn’t take away from the overall narrative of the episode.