When it comes to the Game of Thrones ending, there was one thing for me that made it anticlimactic, and that was the order in which the battles happened.
From the very beginning, I always envisioned the battle against the Night King being the last of them all. Sure, the fight for the Iron Throne had to happen at some point, but that shouldn’t have been the very end. The worst thing was there were ways to make it all fit, if the fight against Cersei came before the final battle against the biggest and most dangerous threat the Seven Kingdoms had ever faced.
It was about the White Walkers from the start of Game of Thrones
We just have to look at the way Game of Thrones started to see how it should have ended. The very beginning involved a group of men from the Night’s Watch heading out on patrol. While there, one of the men deserted due to everything he had witnessed, and he made it clear before he was later beheaded that there was a supernatural threat north of The Wall.
Ned Stark didn’t believe him, but viewers knew that something had happened. There was some sort of mysterious threat, barely glimpsed in the snowy forest. And then that was it for a whole season. The White Walkers weren’t mentioned, but it was the storyline that the majority of us wanted to see play out.
Gradually, the White Walkers became a bigger threat. The mythology grew, and we learned that there had to have been a bigger threat to Westeros than the Wildlings. The Wall was far too big just to keep a bunch of humans out, and there had to be a darker reason for the Night’s Watch to have been created in the first place.
The more we saw of the Night King and his undead army, the more we knew he was the biggest threat. You see, for him, it wasn’t about the Iron Throne. It was about revenge and winning, and with how hard it was to kill the undead, the fight against him should have been the hardest of them all.
Nobody believed in the White Walkers
On Game of Thrones, it really was a case of “seeing is believing.” People didn’t believe that the White Walkers existed until they saw them with their own two eyes. Even when they did see them, they couldn’t quite believe what they were looking at, and they certainly didn’t believe the undead to be the threat to Westeros that they would end up becoming.
After all, the White Walkers were stuck north of The Wall. There had to be a reason for the Night King and his army couldn't get past that towering barrier. The fight for the Iron Throne stole the realm's focus, and it meant that the Night King had time to bring more of the dead back to life.
It was only when Daenerys' dragon Viserion was killed during the penultime episode of season 7 that the Night King became the threat he was on the final season of Game of Thrones. This transition could have been handled much better with some slightly better writing and more time.
Without anyone in the south believing that the Night King was real, it would have made for a far more tense arc. After all, there wasn’t much time to convince Cersei that the Night King and his undead army were real, and that would have meant everyone would have been ill-prepared for the fight. On top of that, there would have been more people to face the threat, creating a much larger and more iconic ending to the series.
There were two ways to handle The Long Night
Ending the White Walker arc with still three episodes to go of the final season made the entire plotline feel like a waste of time. For seven seasons, we had this huge buildup for the threat of the White Walkers. The Night King was smart and patient, and that made him far more dangerous than anyone in the land of the living.
Yet, as soon as the Night King was able to travel south of The Wall, he became somewhat easy to defeat. Sure, there were deaths, and The Long Night was an excellent battle — I will still agree with the way it was filmed, because making it difficult to see put me in the mindset of the characters, who couldn’t see a thing — but the war against the White Walkers was over before it even began.
We’d seen time and time again how characters had to retreat because there wasn’t an easy way to kill the undead army. Look at Jon Snow retreating from Hardhome after going up there to get more Wildlings on his side, or the way Hodor and Summer sacrificed themselves when the Night King’s army invaded the underground lair of the Three-Eyed Raven, so Bran Stark could escape.
Winterfell should have fallen to the Night King. Everyone should have had to escape from Winterfell, heading to King’s Landing as refugees. It would have made for a much stronger story for the Battle of King’s Landing, as Daenerys, Jon, Sansa, and others would have needed to face Cersei in the hope of her agreeing to help them — and we all know how that would have turned out.
Cersei would have then had to face the Night King. We would have seen everyone coming together, or the end of Westeros for good. After seasons of “winter is coming,” winter would have reached King’s Landing, and that real threat would have been experienced rather than just teased and somewhat felt.
Game of Thrones could still have had Arya kill the Night King if that was really the way the show was meant to go, but it would have been later on in the show's final season.
However, one complication to the idea of the Night King triumphing at Winterfell is that Bran would have known that the castle would fall, so there wouldn’t have been the need for the battle. This leads to the second way of handling the arc. I guess some could have stayed at Winterfell in the vain hope that the Night King could have been stopped, unable to accept Bran's vision. But it would have made more sense for everyone to retreat before the Night King made it to Winterfell.
This could have created a different ending. Rather than Daenerys, Jon, and others heading to Cersei as refugees, it could have created the story of them convincing her that the undead were on their way. Of course, she wouldn’t have believed this at first, which could have then led to a small battle at King’s Landing before the Night King turned up and forced everyone to work together.
With the lack of time to fully develop the characters to make the final episode of Game of Thrones work well, opting for the Long Night to take place at King’s Landing would have helped to connect back to Daenerys’ vision of the ash falling around the Iron Throne, making it clear that the Iron Throne was destroyed in the fight between the living and the dead.
Regardless of the way it was handled, Game of Thrones should have ended in the way that it began: with the White Walkers.
Game of Thrones is available to stream on HBO Max.