Geeking Out About Television #7: Game of Thrones Rewrite | The Long Night

Problem: 

During Season 8 of Game of Thrones, we finally got our long awaited battle after multiple seasons of build up..."The Long Night". The White Walker action set piece to bring this entire series-long threat to a point of resolution (or perhaps be a major stepping stone for a continuation into King's Landing forcing Cersie into the conflict). Either way, this was a highly anticipated conflict for this villain arc and...let's just say hundreds of fans like myself left the episode feeling pretty underwhelmed to put it lightly. The famous line of the show, "For the night is dark and full of terrors" ended up feeling more like "for the night is dark and hard to see and full of disappointment". So let's tackle some of the major points of controversy being the Night King's questionable death, Jon Snow's role to play in the whole thing, and maybe some of the more minor issues littered throughout. 

Remedy:

Let's take the scene from the moment the Night King got knocked off of his dragon and is being confronted by Daenerys and see what we can do from this point forward to maybe smooth over the larger fanbase a bit more effectively. So here's my version of the episode starting from this scene. After Daenerys sees the Night King getting up from the snow seeming to be completely unscathed from such a massive fall, with a trembling in her voice to imply her shaken confidence, she commands Drogon to rain down dragon fire over him. The Night King of course is revealed to be untouched by the flames to which he looks up towards her direction, gives a more nuanced grin, picks up one of his ice javelins, and Daenerys barely escapes as the spear is able to cut through one of Drogon's wings. 

So right there already. This first small change already shows the Night King actually doing a little damage to Drogon (only it's not enough to fatally injure him). This one tiny tweak allows him to be more menacing instead of what they did on the show being this supernatural force of nature who missed twice with his spear throwing against Drogon. Jon unsheathes his sword and confronts him just as we got in the series. Only this time, it plays out to where he runs up to the Night King immediately after the javelin toss, charging at him heroically to which the Night King swiftly turns around with his sword clashing with Jon's. It's a great shot of Jon Snow with a two handed swing realizing in concern how the Night King is able to casually block this attack with just a one handed block showing no sense of physical strain. The formidability of the Night King immediately presents itself in just this one clash alone setting the stage for the conflict ahead. 

Jon is then shown to be clearly outmatched in this fight as the Night King effortlessly knocks him down and back with each blow landing a powerful impact (the sound design here gives off a ringing echoey sound much like the sound when Jon's sword clashed with the White Walker's at Hardhome). Every time Jon swings at him with all of his might and tactical prowess, the Night King confidently counters knocking Jon back and away causing Jon to stagger in exhaustion. At one point, Jon does pull a quick sword maneuver that allows him to nick just a tiny piece of the Night King's shoulder armor resulting in the Night King ferociously knocking Jon briefly off of his feet. This one aggressive assault hits Jon so hard that our hero flies backwards loosing grip of his sword and rolling in the snow. Jon becomes completely defenseless here as he lays on the floor gasping for air watching how far away his blade has fled from his reach struggling to crawl towards it. 

The scene then cuts to the Night King now looking down at him starting to walk towards him to finish him off. However, the powerful antagonist suddenly stops then swiftly turns around as we see this huge flock of ravens begin to aggressively surround him almost like a blast of fire or a flood of black feathers. Here we get a quick insert shot of Bran sitting in his chair with his eyes pale white as the sounds of Theon and his men can be heard echoing in the background fighting the other wights. This allows Jon to barely scurry away not entirely sure what's happening while tripping up towards his sword (a visual homage to the Hardhome scene when he fought the White Walker and was tripping up to reach Longclaw). 

The Night King, who is completely surrounded by the darkness and sounds of the smothering ravens, then utilizes his power to scatter the ravens away like he did during Season 7. The imagery here can portray him being engulfed in darkness then turning around towards one particular direction psionically blasting them away looking in the direction of where Bran is located. The cinematography and editing with insert shots of Bran snapping out of his warging ability and taking a breath to catch himself implies that the Night King has located Bran in this moment of retaliation. He turns his gaze directly towards Bran like a predator deflecting the arrow of a far away hunter glaring at him with rage and determination. 

He decides to disregard Jon with Bran clearly being his primary objective whereas Jon is seen simply as a minor obstacle in his way. He glances towards Jon and the visual direction of the scene implies that he's either taking a brief moment to admire Jon's determination as a courageous warrior or perhaps it can be speculated that he's thinking about how to best take him out like an annoying pest that needs to be handled. The audience can have fun with theory crafting here giving the moment a nice air of mystery. The Night King then directs a couple of wights in the surrounding area to attack Jon with a simple hand gesture as he makes his way to Bran's location. Having a scene like this establishes further why this is such a unique and horrifying threat for mankind to face unlike anything else taking place within the politics, conspiring, pillaging, and tyrannical reigns happening in the rest of the world.

We see Jon finally obtaining to his sword, struggling to pull himself up while holding onto Longclaw almost like a crutch heavily breathing as if he got the wind knocked out of him barely surviving the Night King's sword clashes. Jon manages to take out the few incoming wights just in time showing that he still has enough fight left in him. Now, this is when the scene from the actual episode comes in when the Night King is shown walking down the fiery field as Jon chases after him trying to catch his breath and you get that amazing shot of him stopping, turning around, and raising the dead. The rest of the episode can play out pretty similarly in terms of some of the spectacle elements with the zombie dragon and other action packed scenes that we saw (with better lighting for the audience to enjoy of course).

But what’s great about this alternate take is that the trope of Jon being the powerful savior is still being subverted which honors the show’s general nature to surprise audiences by going against cliches. However the Night King’s prowess as a warrior also gets to finally be shown off in a meaningful and impactful manner. The idea here is that is this supernatural entity isn't just some necromancer who can be easily taken out once he doesn't have his waves of zombies to protect him but instead simultaneously an ancient warrior with centuries of tactical knowledge who can take on the best of whatever humanity has to offer. The only other personal inclusions during this segment (the resurrection scene) that I would do would be to have the White Walkers that show up to the castle entrance actually fight our characters.

It's an amazing shot in the actual episode but it literally lead to absolutely no payoff. Perhaps you can show the White Walkers completely slaughtering through our survivors left and right which catches the attention of our main elite group resulting in them putting their focus directly on fending them off. This being our previously established expert fighters (Brienne, Jamie, the Hound, and Greyworm) who's still left at the castle leading the charge against them while the others are left fighting the hordes of wights. After all, this is the “great end battle” that was set up since the pilot, isn't it? It would be bizarre not to see the White Walkers actually fight at least once. So you can show our main heroes amongst the chaos struggling to kill the Walker generals reminding the audience just how powerful these higher ranked zombie soldiers are supposed to be especially now that they're fighting with a bit more tactical awareness than before.

What I mean by that last statement is that, instead of just confidently fighting without a care for the weaponry that their victims used (which worked for them for years until the revelation of Jon killing one of their own during Hardhome), they're shown to be more evasive in their maneuverability in combat. This heavily implies through visual storytelling that the Night King was indeed paying attention to Jon Snow's victory during Hardhome and somehow made his generals more aware of dragon glass and valerian steel weaponry while fighting. You can have bits throughout this section of the episode where we see characters like Brienne and Jamie having to put forth a lot more effort to take down the Walkers than what we'd expect because of this subtle upgrade. 

Having these types of extensive imagery reminds the audience of how great the walker threat is as well as displaying the importance of having some of these particular heroes fight in this war that we've previously set up. Now for a much bigger shift, yet still leading to the same outcome is my alternate take on the big conclusion to the Night King. That's right. The big controversial Arya moment. So let's fast forward a bit to the scene where the Night King is shown staring down at Bran after killing Theon. As the two have this stare off interaction, you can then cut a few times to these quick POV shots of what is assumed by the audience to be the perspective shot of Ghost (because of how low and quick it is) running through the thick bushes swiftly rushing pass wights and White Walkers as the sound of ravens can be heard surrounding him. 

The audience, due to the visuals and sounds of these shots, will likely get the idea in their mind that perhaps Bran warged into Ghost as a means to attack the Night King from behind. The low angle shot, the quick pacing of the movement, the sounds and sights of ravens surrounding the perspective. All of it points to Bran clearly using his nature manipulating abilities for some sort of ambush. Here's where you can cut back to the shot that we get in the episode with the Night King reaching back for his sword to which Arya leaps (quietly) from behind and ambushes him. However, instead of her just popping up from darkness, you first see a white walker getting killed from behind, and he's falling to his knees Arya is shown leaping up and over him throwing a dagger at the Night King.

The Night King then turns around and quickly deflects it as Arya rolls and rushes towards him holding another dagger to strike. The Night King then easily dodges her attack and grabs her by the arm lifting her up sinisterly glaring at her. Arya begins to panic staring into the eyes of death seeming to be completely defenseless. Now before I jump into the big moment that happens next, the idea behind the POV Ghost misdirect shots is that Arya’s swift assassin skills are what we, as the audience, are witnessing as she was quickly rushing pass the zombie army towards the Night King and that the sights and sounds of ravens surrounding was actually Bran using the birds to help distract the wights. It also thematically links Arya (a Stark) to the Direwolves in a cool subtle visual way. 

So it's a sibling ambush allowing Bran to notably do more in the episode against the Night King here helping Arya along adding an extra layer to her big sneak attack. It's also a much more tension building scene where Arya is given slightly more action here killing a White Walker, throwing a dagger at the Night King, attacking him head on and still being caught by him. But what about the actual attack itself and how the Night King catches her in a much more dramatically exciting way here? What happens next? Well, here's where I begin completely deter from what the show did even more so. It's a bit of an episode halting detour artistically speaking, but hopefully you guys will enjoy or at least understand the idea that I'm about to share.

Wasting not time while holding onto her wrist, he fully pulls out his sword to finish her off. Here's where Bran grips his chair as if he's about to do something that's going to exert a lot of strength resulting in the Night King pausing his strike as if paralyzed which Arya helplessly screams in fear not knowing what's about to happen. The camera then cuts to the Night King's eyes and we're instantly transported into a vision of the Weirwood Heart tree setting where the Children of the Forest was shown creating him in Season 6. It's a daytime setting just as it was in that flashback being a big contrast to the nighttime snowy imagery of the Long Night battle.

The Night King is presented now in human form sporting the same armor and standing in the same position that he was in holding Arya in only with no weapon or Arya in sight and is now surrounded by ruins and trees. He doesn't look afraid but instead curious as he glances at the human features of his hand before turning around to see Bran standing with the Weirwood heart tree behind him. The Night King, even with his now human features still looks menacing as he fearlessly and assertively walks towards Bran with nothing but murderous intent. His eyes begin to gradually return to its glowing blue aesthetic and the daytime forest-like setting of the vision begins to shifting into nighttime as snow starts to fall. This visually implies that the Night King's influence is now breaching over into Bran's vision tactic. 

Bran in this moment watches in genuine concern despite his previously emotionless expression and supposed all-knowing nature as the Three Eyed Raven. Bran displays some level of humanity within him in the form of fear which lets the audience know that this particular supernatural mental entrapment power isn't exactly a guaranteed safe place to be with the Night King. It also calls back to Season 6 when Bran witnessed the White Walkers and the Night King through a vision which the Night King surprisingly interacted with him in a terrifying twist of events. 

As the Night King rapidly approaches Bran looking to strangle him to death, he begins to quickly form back into his White Walker form (the icy blue skin) even forging an ice blade leading to Bran magically releasing them both out of this plane before he could reach him. As we return back to the real world, the editing makes it seem as if time had basically stopped for everyone else during this entire supernatural mind melding confrontation bringing us right at the moment where Arya does the knife hand switch to stab the Night King before he's able to properly react. You can also have a quick moment where, instead of just dying right away, he witnesses the stab and is about to continue to kill her right before his body shatters. And there you have it. Arya still gets to be a badass, Bran gets to be much more involved in the victory over the Night King, the episode gets to do something cinematically interesting to contrast the murky dark environment, and the Night King still gets to be scary and mysterious.

It's a much more fulfilling defeat for our big scary villain (if we have to keep the same conclusion as the writers) since it's not just a sneaky knife trick but a surprise supernatural distraction by Bran, Arya's stealth and combat training with the many faced God, and the supposed blue eyes shutting prophecy by Melisandre that leads to it. The Night King gets to be more formidable since he casually defeats Jon in combat and he gets to be scary as nearly killing Arya and Bran in this moment. The Starks family gets to team up in a cool surprising way and you can have Jon redeem himself by having some epic moment where he's able to slay the zombie dragon. Maybe have Rhaegal swoop in to tackle the beast down to the ground in a big scuffle leading to Jon improvising a means to fire off a bunch of dragon glass shards at Viscerion finally taking him out. 

Everybody wins. There you have it. Now I'm fully aware that there's still a lot of people who would've rather seen the Night King get as far as King's Landing at least up until the penultimate episode (me included), but if we must write him off earlier via Arya, this would've been a lot more satisfying. Also, maybe kill a few more big named characters along the way during this battle just to emphasize how bleak this situation truly was and why the White Walkers was indeed Game of Thrones' most horrifying threat. One final note that I didn't get to dive into...implement far better battle tactics by our heroes as opposed to the absurd strategy that we saw in the actual episode. Either way, I hope you guys enjoyed this geek out session taken from a post that I made back in 2020. I felt the need to archive those thoughts on this site as a more accessible means to revisit this topic whenever I'm in the mood for some Game of Thrones creative riffing.

Bonus: Drastically Different Ending

Here's another version of what could've been done with the White Walkers. Let's go even further back to the best scene in the entire series with the White Walkers and the Night King which was Season 5's Hardhome invasion.What if from this point forward, you could have it where the Night King does eventually make it to Winterfell and slaughters through the majority of the army that was brought together by Jon to fight his forces. The Night King also fights Jon 1v1 and defeats Jon but Bran distracts with a flock of ravens allowing Jon to barely make it out alive staggering away before the death blow. The Night King then makes his way through the North massacring all the villages with his army (and zombie dragon and giants and spiders/bears). 

Eventually it's up to the forces created out of desperation in King's Landing to take him on and they BARELY survive the onslaught. Bran is the one who ends up defeating the Night King in the end in some fantastical 1v1 psychic plane standoff (not sword fighting but something else more complex and magical in nature to show the Night King was never going to be able to be defeated in physical combat but "something more"). Bran traps the Night King in a psychic vision where he revisits his past as a normal human with a family who was taken by the Children of the Forest and forged into an ultimate killing machine against mankind.

You can have a powerful emotional moment where the Night King (in human form in this psychic realm though still sporting the armor) looks upon his past self with his family with a confused and distraught look on his face. Bran asks him "Do you remember them?". The Night King's distraught expression turns to pure rage and he tries to grab Bran who disappears as the setting changes to another memory of his family. Bran appears behind him and says "You can be with them again." The Night King responds "I don't deserve them after what I did". Bran then says "Your mission to destroy mankind was never your own but a burden that was  given to you. You don't need to do this anymore if you don't want to." 

However, this won't be some easy villain redemption twist moment as you can have multiple times where the Night King seems to be considering stop but attacks Bran almost killing him a few times in the psychic realm. Bran continues to keep bringing him to different past memories as the Night King witnesses the happy loving father and husband that he used to be gradually regaining his emotions and beginning to feel a longing for his old life. Bran throughout this whole process keeps repeating the question "What do you really want?" to which the Night King repeatedly says that he wants the death of all humans (in dialogue variation). 

Until finally as he's becoming increasingly more nostalgic for his family past, he stops trying to kill Bran and we have a great tender interaction scene where he tells him "I...I know what I want...I know what I've always wanted. I wanted the life that I lost. The life that they took from me. I've been...buried in hatred and...darknesses for so long, I...I lost myself. I lost...everything. The will to live deep down the...the will to remember my past. To remember their faces. The man who I once was died a long time ago. I've seen nothing but death since. And so my mission remains. I am Death"

Bran tells him "You don't have to be. I know they took away your humanity and that you were innocent. But this desire to kill everyone and everything. You don't have to do this anymore. I've shown you who you really are before the Children of the Forest took you. You're not the monster they made you. You can stop this mission here and now before it's too late. You have to choose to end it. Your curse, the White Walkers, the death of millions of people, it ends with you. Your choice." 

The Night King then turns to Bran and says "What will the gods think of me? Generations of souls bleeding in the palm of my hands forced to carry out the death of others by my signal. There is no future for me, child. There is only Hell that awaits me." Bran tells him "If it's redemption you seek, make the choice that no one else can. Break the curse and let the gods decide your fate. Let the last thing you do in this life be the right thing. Do it for your family. The Night King responds "My family? ....they were the first to join me. The first that I turned. Maybe in some twisted way, I wanted them to remain with me safe from the massacre that would commence. I didn't...I didn't know what else to do."

The Night King continues "My wife and daughter's last sight of me was a killer. Not a father or a husband who cared about their well beings. But a murdering butcher. How does a man come back from such an act of sin? Bran responds "By making the right choice" as he holds out a valerian steel dagger. The Night King glances down at it then slowly turns around back to the sight of his family in the distance. He takes a long sigh with his head down and his eyes closed and whispers "Forgive me [insert wife's name]. Now we cut back to the real world now and the Night King looks at Bran as they're both snapped out of the vision. 

Bran hands him the valerian steel dagger. The Night King takes it, looks over the apocalyptic landscape hordes of zombies cutting down the people of King's Landing and causes them all to stop fighting in unison. There's an eerie stillness that fills the land as the remaining survivors and soldiers look upon the sight of the paralyzed zombies in confusion and panic. The Night King then looks up at the snowfall in the sky up at the clouds, closes his eyes, then stabs himself with the valerian steel dagger causing him to shatter into shards of ice as the entire army of wights and White Walkers each shatter into ice. 

The people in King's Landing cheer on in victory and our surviving heroes breathe a huge sigh of relief as if knowing that they clearly wouldn't have made it out if it wasn't for this turn of events. And that's it. There you have it. A bonus alternate version of the White Walker arc conclusion that actually makes it into King's Landing. So in this new version, Winter did come, the Night King and the White Walkers were terrifying, and the world barely made it out alive thanks to Bran as the three eyed raven. Armies fell, more villages and entire nations were slaughtered, and King's Landing became a snow covered semi-wasteland with Daenerys essentially sitting on a throne of corpses trying to rebuild something new with everyone that's left. The bittersweet end that I believe to be well deserved.