I hope Jon wargs into ghost right before his final death scene, that’s what I’d do. Then Ghost could ride around on Rhaegals back.
According to previous seasons she’s wanted to die for many years but she had to serve her purpose before that, that’s how I took it. I woulda ran out and grabbed that necklace if I was Davos though.
Battle of the Bastards set the bar pretty high for GOT battle scenes, I doubt the “Last War” will surpass it.
Really? I thought that was arguably the most effective sequence in the episode (an episode that I thought was great overall). Especially starting from the Dany-and-Jon eye view, they looked like a "charge of the light" with all those swords creating a swarm of points of light...and then you see from the perspective of the other soldiers the light slowly swallowed up by darkness, leaving only silence. You don't see any of the death, just the light being extinguished and silence. It was, IMO, a really powerful scene to set up the horror of the battle.
Visually, sure. Totally agree. But from a "let's plan a battle" perspective it was dumb as shit. This show is suffering from "sitcom misunderstanding syndrome": something happens and the only way for the episode to continue towards the conclusion is for the characters to act completely irrationally, rather than how any typical person with half a brain would react.
Because you would think that a bunch of guys who had been fighting wars for the past few years would know not to charge light cavalry head on into an unknown enemy. That's not how cavalry works. You use them to flank and chip away. You use their speed as an advantage. They wasted all of their speed on an unknown. Most of their battle plan made no sense at all. Why not dig trenches a few hundred yards out to slow down the dead? That gives you a chance to whittle down their numbers before they even reach your troops. Why not hold your cavalry in reserve and then send them in from the side or the rear? Nothing they did made sense, and you'd think they had zero time to prepare for this, rather than however long Jon was gone trying to convince Dany to come up north. Maybe they didn't have much time with the troops they acquired, but the people in the castle could have been preparing.
I don't disagree. Almost all of the defense of Winterfell was stupid, tactically. This is the biggest problem with the show relative to the books. The books, IMO, are about as realistic a depiction of how people would act that a single author (with one person's knowledge and capacity for research) could probably produce. The show adjusts things for better visual effect. An example is the Night King's end--he didn't have to advance slowly himself to kill Bran. He could have let his undead minions kill Bran. He could have killed him from the air with dragonfire. But the slow advance, with the music and the cuts to all the other desperation happening concurrently, made for a better visual framing, in addition to putting him in reach of Arya for the ending they wanted.
Sure. But TV producers are never going to do a show like this with proper grasp of tactics over framing the narrative the way they want, the way they think is most powerful.
Well, it's like you said, the books are just better. Period. They're actually fairly realistic in how they portray human emotion and human decision making. The show runners can't seem to disengage themselves from regular TV thought process. There's simply no way GRRM would have left so many named characters alive.
Yeah, honestly the books (or lack thereof) are probably partially to blame for my rotten opinion about the show. I read the first 4 books long before HBO came along. The fact GRRM has been sitting on his thumbs, coupled with HBO (a) going off the rails and (b) going way too long without any new shows really made my interest wane. But circling back to your NK comments... Was that really all the NK wanted with Bran? To kill him? If so, that makes not just the whole battle, but the entire existence of the NK completely stupid. If that's all he wanted he had ample opportunities to do so. Given all the pomp and circumstance surrounding NK and Bran there had better be more to the story than just "he wanted to kill him". And by "more to the story", I don't mean the Children of the Forest NK origin story.
