Game of Thrones showrunner explains that lets-capture-a-wight plot

Remember that nonsensical Game of Thrones storyline where Jon Snow tries to capture a wight? The showrunners break down what they were thinking.

Although the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones received the lion’s share of backlash once it aired, there were other parts of the show — especially in its seventh season — that didn’t sit well with a lot of fans, either.

For example, remember the episode where Jon Snow went beyond the wall with Tormund, the Hound, and others to capture a wight? Gendry ran back to the Wall with lightning speed and summoned Daenerys to help the rest of the Avengers-style group, who had been stranded on an island surrounded by wights. It all ended with Daenerys rescuing them with her dragons, but at the cost of her Viserion, who rose again in thrall to the Night King.

This all led to Viserion and the Night King bringing down the Wall, but they had to seriously stretch the logic of the show to get there. In the new book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series, showrunner Dan Weiss explains how they came up with this. “We were talking about breaching the Wall and trying to figure out what pieces we already had on the board without introducing new deus ex machina pieces. What was in the world already that could conceivably knock down the Wall?”

"Just getting the Night King past the Wall didn’t do it; just getting the White Walkers past didn’t do it. You needed to get an army of a hundred thousand dead men past the Wall, which means a giant hole. We were racking our brains as to what could do that. Then we realized there would be something massive in the show – they weren’t massive at the time we thought of this – and that was the dragons. But getting a dragon north of the Wall was tricky."

It sort of sounds like they started with the conclusion — let’s get a dragon to knock down the Wall — and worked their way backwards from there. The results speak for themselves.

We still don’t know how the Wall will come down in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and given that Weiss says he and the other producers were “racking our brains” to think of a solution, it doesn’t sound like he told them, or else didn’t tell them anything they could use.

Some fans think the Wall will fall thanks to the Horn of Joramun, a legendary artifact said to be able to awaken giants from the earth. Sam may have stumbled across the horn when he was beyond the Wall. It actually did appear on the show, but didn’t play any role beyond that.

Image: Game of Thrones/HBO

Tricky indeed.

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h/t Screen Rant