After more than seven seasons of build-up, the heroes of Game of Thrones finally battled the army of the dead, and it was… a bit too easy? The threat looming over the entire series was dealt with in a flash, and we’re left to ponder what exactly the show was about all this time.
Opening scenes are important; they set the tone for everything to come. It should mean something that way, way back in 2011, Game of Thrones began its very first episode not with Jon Snow, or Daenerys Targaryen, or Cersei Lannister, but with three men from the Night’s Watch riding out beyond the Wall to search for Wildlings, only to be set upon by White Walkers, the show’s frosty, undead-commanding villains from an age long past.
It’s the same way the first novel in George R. Martin’s series began, and although the story gained a reputation for intense and often brutal politics and backstabbing among its human characters, the shadow of a true existential threat always loomed over the proceedings for the audience. Even the title of the first episode, Winter is Coming, emphasizes the slowly approaching doom.
Well, in season 8 episode 3, winter did come… and then it went. After eight and a half seasons of buildup, the White Walker menace was (apparently) summarily dispatched of in a single episode. For years now, the show has hammered home the point that the battle for the Iron Throne is a petty, insignificant trifle compared to the undead army that is coming to wipe out humanity. As Davos lays it out when Daenerys demands that Jon and the North kneel to her, “If we don’t put aside our enmities and band together, we will die.
