Why that surprise 'Game of Thrones' twist was a huge betrayal
From the very first scene of the very first season of Game of Thrones, the story seemed to make us a promise: There is a larger mystery at the heart of this world. And you should not forget it.
Before even learning their names, we watch the three characters who open the show fall victim to an ancient and sinister otherworldliness. All but one is systematically slaughtered by creatures of untold power, unknown motivation, and inhuman brutality.
It was the enigma that launched the largest cultural phenomenon in TV history. Who were these beings? What did they want? Why were they massacring humans? What made them come back?
For eight years, we patiently subsisted on agonizingly slow servings of information hinting at answers -- confounding puzzle pieces that only added to the wonder of that mystery. It felt like, if we just worked hard enough to figure it out, we might even grasp the overarching themes that defined our long, winding, twisted journey.
Finally on the eve of the final season's much-hyped "Long Night" episode, we prepared for Game of Thrones to make good on that promise. At the end of the hour-and-twenty-minute long battle confronting that unfathomable existential conflict, we finally got our answer ...
And apparently, it's that there was never any mystery at all. Or rather, that the answers were given to us all the way back in that Season 1 opener. We just made the mistake of thinking there was more to it.
For seven seasons we waited for the winds of winter to come -- only to have it abruptly blow over with a quick gust.
Who were the White Walkers? Ice monsters. What did they want? To end humanity. Why were they killing humans? It's their thing. What made them return? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For seven seasons we waited for the winds of winter to come -- only to have it abruptly blow over with a single gust.
Maybe we should have seen it coming. In truth, we always knew Game of Thrones wouldn't tell the story we thought it would tell. We loved it because it was a show built on pulling the rug out from under us, repeatedly subverting the expectations of its own narrative setups, and then reinventing itself from the leftover aftermath.
We expected the unexpected. But what happened to the White Walkers wasn't a deliberately dissatisfying subversion of expectations. Instead the premature conclusion to their storyline seems to sabotage all the previous narrative subversions that came before it.
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Unlike any of the series' other game-redefining twists, not making good on the White Walker storyline failed to deliver on the promise that this show had something bigger to say. Sure, this began as a game of thrones. But we were told it would end as a song of ice and fire, more elemental and universal in its thematic scope than the squabbles of aristocratic families.
Yet if the preview for episode 4 of Season 8 is any indication, that's exactly where we're headed: Back to the spokes on a wheel -- Lannister, Stark, Targaryen, Greyjoy, etc. And the surprise twist at the end of "The Long Night" that brought us back there feels like a cheap bastardization of what used to make Game of Thrones exceptional.
Again, we're used to (and enjoy) the show's capacity to reinvent itself by not giving us what we either wanted or expected -- Ned's beheading, the Red Wedding, Oberyn's death, the Sept of Baelor. But every time Game of Thrones reinvented its narrative stakes with a major upset before, it stemmed from an understanding that even the best players and heroes were expendable to the story's larger themes.
All men must die, because no man matters more than the collective. Valar morghulis, valar dohaeris.
This is what the White Walker threat embodied: challenges that are bigger than you, or any one of your favorite heroes. It's also what allowed us to read real-world metaphors into a fantasy show, seeing the worldwide threat as global warming, nuclear annihilation, or the hubris of human exceptionalism.
By eliminating that threat in one fell swoop with zero thematic payoff for the sake of a surprise, for the first time ever a Game of Thrones twist has made its story smaller rather than more expansive. The latest shocker does not reinvent the story. It resets it back to square one.
Before the White Walker threat could even become the fully realized central conflict of Game of Thrones, the show ditched that more uncharted territory to return to its comfort zone. And we're left to wonder what purpose the slowly built up introduction of them as a threat served in the first place.
Forget all our earlier questions about the mystery of the White Walkers, what they wanted, and why they were killing everyone. Let's take that at face value, because in all likelihood that's being saved for the upcoming spinoff show literally called the Long Night (which, again, still feels like cheating the story we started eight years ago).
For the first time ever a Game of Thrones twist has made its story smaller rather than more expansive
Let's focus on the most important question to determine whether or not the White Walkers were an effective storytelling device: What did the characters and world of Game of Thrones learn by defeating them?
The toll of sacrifice? Nope. At most, only the massacred Dothraki and other nameless armies suffered much loss in the battle. That humanity's survival depends on banding together to overcome tribalism? Nope. Turns out that Cersei's plan to let the do-gooders deal with a world-ending catastrophe while she drank wine was the best plan all along! Perhaps the White Walkers added to the "fuck fate" philosophy heard on the show before? Nope. The Princ(ess) We Thought Was Promised Jon Snow and/or Daenerys might've failed to realize their prophesied victory as Azor Ahai -- but Arya fulfilled her lesser-known fated destiny delivered by Melisandre.
From where we're standing now, the defeat of the White Walkers only redefined the expectation that taking this story seriously was a worthwhile endeavor.
Seemingly nothing about the Game of Thrones world has changed after it was faced with the millennia-spanning existential threat of death itself. Only the North and Daenerys' armies reckoned with facing that reality, while everyone else slept soundly in their beds believing the so-called White Walkers are still one of Old Nan's wacky stories.
Maybe that is exactly the theme the journey was leading us to: Nothing changes. Even after overcoming the last enemy of death against all odds, the parasitic virus of human ego will be enough in itself to wreak the same apocalyptic havoc on the world as the White Walkers. If that's the case, well, we wish we hadn't spent all this time and energy to reach the rather clichéd conclusion that war is, indeed, cyclical and bad.
There is perhaps an argument to be made that by defeating a prophesied, apocalyptic enemy with a literal sleight of hand from one of the smallest heroes works on a thematic level. But that's not our problem with the White Walkers' defeat.
Our issue is that the showrunners seem to be under the impression that the surprise of Arya defeating the Night King instead of Jon is the kind of unexpected twist on par with Game of Thrones' history of subverting expectations. It isn't.
Sure, some viewers might've expected the "traditional hero" like Jon to deliver the final blow. But you don't subvert his hero's journey by replacing it with a different, less expected hero's journey. In every other way imaginable, "The Long Night" turned Game of Thrones into the fantasy genre caricature of pure good versus pure evil that George R. R. Martin has repeatedly condemned.
The good guys won and the bad guys lost due to their heroism during a big battle. While there may still be plenty of deaths and sacrifices in the three remaining episodes with the new "Last War" Daenerys mentions in the episode 4 sneak peek, the damage to the overall story is already done.
"The Long Night" turned Game of Thrones into the fantasy genre caricature of pure good versus pure evil that George R. R. Martin has repeatedly condemned.
Right now much of the Game of Thrones fandom is scrambling to either divorce itself from what the show has become entirely, or cling onto whatever remaining theories, predictions, and interpretations might render "The Long Night" anything other than a complete betrayal of the story we loved.
What if Bran is actually the Lord of Light and evil? What if there's another Night King hiding somewhere? What if what's left of the season is equivalent to the Scouring of the Shire chapters in Lord of the Rings that George R. R. Martin has said he wanted to emulate?
But on Game of Thrones, the Shire has already been scoured for a long time now. War ravaged Westeros since Season 2 (and long before that historically), without any need for the White Walkers. What little innocence existed in the world died alongside those atrocities, as seen in nearly every character arc since Ned's death.
We have been living the traumatic repercussions of war throughout the majority of this story. And unlike those final chapters in Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones didn't just get rid of the White Walkers so it could take stock of the bittersweet aftermath of successfully defeating evil. Instead, it seems to just have replaced a red herring of a Big Bad Guy with the Real Final Boss Cersei.
At this point our best hope is that the shift back to human politics culminates with a melting of the iron throne. Perhaps the White Walkers only served as a contrast to the real battle, which will be the more bureaucratic fight to end the zero sum game of monarchy for a better game where no one really wins but no one loses either.
But after "The Long Night," we wouldn't put it past Game of Thrones to end with the most milquetoast #ForTheThrone conclusion any of us could've imagined: Jon and/or Dany take back the crown, and the cycle begins anew.
We hope we're wrong. We hope that Game of Thrones can pull off one last narrative reinvention, to tell a different story than we expected but still the story we deserve. Like the Night King, though, we won't hold our breath.
If you thought this game of thrones had a happy ending, then it may turn out that you were paying exactly as much attention as you needed to.
Topics Game Of Thrones HBO
Jess is an LA-based culture critic who covers intimacy in the digital age, from sex and relationship to weed and all media (tv, games, film, the web). Previously associate editor at Kill Screen, you can also find her words on Vice, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vox, and others. She is a Brazilian-Swiss American immigrant with a love for all things weird and magical.
