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And now that the Night King has been revealed to possess an Achilles' Abdomen, the show can get back to the business of Great Houses going after each other, of feudal infighting, and then maybe - maybe - after an appropriate amount of time has passed, we can quietly admit to one another that the Night King always looked a little goofy. There was always a disconnect between the series' love of palace intrigue (think The Sopranos, but with more draped damsel sleeves) and its evil-ice-zombies-are-evil! bits (think The Walking Dead, but Canada). It was never an easy fit, and the show knew it.
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It's rich, it's nuanced, it's complicated, it's got something to say about the human condition.īut then, amid all that, you drop this, you know, evil marauding horde of ice zombies from hell. Ultimate Evil" schmear - to show characters navigating a world like ours, where the noblest ideals routinely fall prey to the immediate, grubby demands of the everyday, where the way characters act is a byproduct of the tiny, ongoing, ever-shifting set of moral transactions they're making with themselves, and with those around them, in any given situation. This show, and the books on which it is based, have always prided themselves on circumventing the rigid tropes of the high-fantasy genre – the whole "Consummate Good vs. (Have some fun, and rewatch that climactic sequence with the sound off, while blasting Nick Lowe's "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass." It is, I assure you, immensely satisfying.) One knife in the gut from Arya and the guy shatters into a million icy pieces, taking his entire organizational infrastructure with him. know that.Īnd so, after a prolonged and costly and kind of gorgeously harrowing battle, we bid a permanent night-night to the Night King and, not for nothing, to every Edgar Winter-ish White Walker, croaky wight and undead dragon in his employ, thanks to the You've Got To Kill The Head Vampire Rule - or the Fruit of the Poisoned Tree Rule, if you're jurisprudently inclined. Seek them out and keep their custom, because here at NPR we're gonna be riding the "Bran MacGuffin" train all the way into the station, so just. I have it on good authority that there are one or two other sites recapping this scrappy little basic-cable show. This is all by way of saying: If you think, given these new facts on the ground, that I would be even remotely capable of referring to the Game of Thrones character played by Isaac Hempstead Wright as anything other than "Bran MacGuffin," we would do well to part ways here, you and I. He was this season's central, driving plot device – the thing our villain the Night King wanted to destroy, and the thing our heroes must protect, or die trying.Īlfred Hitchcock famously coined the term of art that applies to something that characters care hugely about and that audiences, by extension, must be made to understand is Very Important: The Maltese Falcon, the Ark of the Covenant, The One Ring – they are all, in film studies parlance, "The MacGuffin." No, it turns out he's Hugely Important To The Story (Um. Let's get this out of the way at the top: We learned last week that Bran Stark, the Three-Eyed Raven, is more than just a living, 26-volume set of the Encyclopedia Westerosi like we thought he was, doling out precious nuggets of exposition to the characters around him.
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We're recapping the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones look for these recaps first thing on Monday mornings. Varys (Conleth Hill) and Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) commiserate over how very, very safe they are, down in the Winterfell crypts, because they are dumb.