“He’ll come for me.
He’s tried before, many times with many Three-Eyed Ravens.”
The second episode of Season 8 gave us a crucial scene that
finally explained what the entire Game of Thrones fandom
has been wondering about for years now:
what the Night King is after
and, on a deeper level, what his quest represents.
“He wants to erase this world, and I am its memory.”
The “endless night”
that the Night King aims to bring to Westeros
is translated for us by Bran and Samwell Tarly
as the destruction of all living memory:
“That's what death is, isn't it?
Forgetting.”
This scene pretty much dismisses the widespread fan theory
that Bran is the Night King,
but it also explains why that theory was so persuasive to some.
There’s a deep link between Bran and the Night King
“His mark is on me.
He always knows where I am.”
the two are mirrors of one another.
One is memory, and the other is forgetting.
So let’s linger on this for a moment and unpack what it really means.
If the Night King’s forgetting equates with death,
then the series is saying memory is life.
“I can see everything,
everything that's ever happened to everyone.”
In fact, memory is a good definition
of what separates the army of the dead
from the army defending Winterfell.
The Night King’s wights are reanimated corpses
who have the basic hallmarks of life
(they can move, and pose a very grave threat to the living)
but they have no knowledge of who they are or what they’ve seen.
“If we forget where we've been and what we've done,
we're not men anymore.
Just animals.”
Through this theme,
the series is getting somewhat meta
as we are all engaged in watching
an exercise in preserving humankind’s memory.
This story is loosely inspired by medieval history,
as well as classics of literature and fantasy.
Most fundamentally, it’s trying to pass down to us
the deeper lessons history has taught us
about power, love, survival, and the bigger picture.
“Before you leave, you must learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Everything.”
This sentimental gathering
on the eve of the battle against death itself
reminds us that if we don’t preserve this shared better self,
we don’t just lose life, we’ve lost what makes life valuable.
So in this crucial scene revealing Bran’s ultimate importance,
the show subtly announces its own ambition
to bring us closer to that precious font of memory,
because stories that contain the truth
are the key to making us alive in a real sense.
“Your memories don't come from books.
Your stories aren't just stories.
If I wanted to erase the world of men,
I'd start with you.”
In light of this message, it makes sense that
the rest of this episode is about ghosts,
and the memories and truth these ghosts carry with them.
Near the end, we get a melancholy song from Brienne’s squire Podrick:
[Singing] “And she never wanted to leave,
never wanted to leave…”
And it feels like the lyrics are speaking about
passionately wanting to live not wanting to leave this life,
which is here deeply intertwined with wanting to remember.
“I remember the first Time we were here,
the first time I saw this hall.”
The first line of this song “Jenny of Oldstones”
comes from the books, while the rest was written for the show.
The lyrics tell of a young woman dancing with ghosts:
[Singing] “Jenny would dance with her ghosts...”
And as the army of the dead gets ready to strike,
it’s as if all of our character’s ghosts are present at Winterfell,
symbolically in formation ready to pounce on the living.
The episode ends with Jon telling Daenerys
the secret he’s dreaded bringing to light,
“My real name is Aegon Targaryen.”
and just like his conversation with Samwell,
again, this painful moment of truth happens in a crypt.
So it’s as if the truth itself comes from our ghosts below ground,
though it remained buried a long time, it’s still there ready to rise again.
The way that each character reacts to truth in this episode is symbolic.
Daenerys responds to Jon’s information with anger.
“That’s impossible.”
We see this Targaryen rage coming out of her more and more
when she doesn’t get her way.
“If you can't help me take it back, I'll find another Hand who can.”
And here we might notice that Jon lies to protect Sam from Dany’s wrath,
“Who told you this?”
“Bran.
He saw it.”
“He saw it?”
“And Samwell confirmed it.”
so even this incredibly trusting man who loves her
fears that she will rush to fury before fair judgment.
Dany’s first response is (predictably) skepticism
“A secret no one in the world knew
except your brother and your best friend.”
but Jon isn’t interested in wasting time on denial,
“It's true, Dany.
I know it is.”
and this look he gives her before they’re interrupted
betrays a disappointment that her first instinct
is a selfish and defensive concern for her claim.
“You'd have a claim to the Iron Throne.”
(If the incestuous implications aren’t the main issue here,
then she’s also not being logical here.
If they got married, two claims are better than one.
“A proposal is what I’m proposing.”
So the fact that she assumes there’s a need to compete
and wants to be the sole primary ruler,
underlines a key difference between the two as leaders.)
In the next week’s scenes, we hear Sansa say,
“The most heroic thing we can do now
is look the truth in the face.”
True to form, the unfailingly decent and dutiful Jon
faces the truth with a reluctant, mournful acceptance.
But Dany has become so attached to a particular narrative of herself
“All my life, I've known one goal: the Iron Throne.”
that she’s resisting any evidence that contradicts her narrative,
and this impulse to strong-arm the facts
is the hallmark of rulers who abuse their power.
“Someday you'll sit on the throne and the truth will be what you make it.”
Meanwhile Tyrion, despite his recent faltering,
reminds us again why he’s the smartest of our central characters
“You’re here because of your mind.”
because he enthusiastically steps up to welcome the truth with open arms.
“You've had a strange journey.”
“Stranger than most.”
This moment epitomizes Tyrion’s devotion
to making knowledge his best friend to attempt to know the full story.
“It's a long story.”
“If only we were trapped in a castle
in the middle of winter,
with nowhere to go.”
And we can only wonder what useful insights he may have gleaned
from this offscreen conversation.
Meanwhile, we see Jaime forced to face his truth publicly,
as he’s put on trial by a collection of his former enemies
for his many past sins.
“When I was a child, my brother would tell me a bedtime story
about the man who murdered my father.’
Jaime’s more recent good deeds save him from death.
“You vouch for him?”
“I do.”
“You would fight beside him?”
“I would.”
Yet crucially Jaime stands behind his so-called “sins”
because he did them for the right reasons.
“Everything I did, I did for my house and my family.
I'd do it all again.”
Thus the Raven’s line to Jaime,
“The things we do for love.”
is not just a veiled nod to Jaime’s attack on Bran,
“The things I do for love.”
but also an un-ironic statement – Jaime really did do it all for love.
And that’s why, even in his haughtiest early days,
he was so likable.
“No matter what you do you’re forsaking one vow or another.”
He did terrible things honestly,
not letting himself off with self-deception
like other characters do.
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking of us.
You're a bit late to start complaining about it now.”
As Tyrion says of Jaime’s love for Cersei:
“She never fooled you.
You always knew exactly what she was.
And you loved her anyway.”
In this scene, Bran chooses not to share Jaime’s greatest sin of all
with the group.
“Why didn't you tell them?”
So while we’re seeing this moral that one must face the truth,
at the same time the Three-Eyed-Raven demonstrates a complementary wisdom:
if you are far smarter than the limited minds around you,
there’s value to being selective about the truths you reveal,
as a superior intellect understands
how pieces of the truth influence human behavior.
“You won't be able to help us in this fight
if I let them murder you first.”
On the theme of ghosts, this episode also returns
to three different unresolved loves who have been haunting one another.
The reunited Arya and Gendry finally act on their feelings.
“We're probably going to die soon.
I want to know what it's like before that happens.”
In their time apart, both have solidified their identities as fighters.
“Are you going to be down in the crypt?”
“No, but-”
“But you're a fighter.”
Now they try to put on, a brave face for this battle
“He’s got many faces.
I look forward to seeing this one.”
but after their love scene, we even see
Arya’s fearless mask drop for just a moment,
as she contemplates the war against death itself.
Sansa and Theon reunite at the place they once escaped together
and the intensity of feeling between them
sends an interesting message about how living through terrible things
can bring people together.
“Your name is Theon Greyjoy.
Last surviving son of Balon Greyjoy,
Lord of the Iron Islands.
Do you hear me?”
Despite what Theon did to the Starks,
his brave sacrifice in rebelling against his terrifying abuser
gave Sansa life.
“I'll lure them away.”
“No, I won't make it without you.”
These two ultimate victims are the only ones
who understand the trauma each other endured,
“It can't be any worse.”
“It can.
It can always be worse.”
and they’ve come through that experience
with a stronger-than-ever sense of self and purpose.
If Sansa is in love with Theon,
and if Arya were to get pregnant by Gendry,
this would be an interesting reversal
of where we expected each Stark girl to end up.
Sansa wanted to be a traditional lady
who mothered lords,
“I love him and I’m meant to be his queen
and have his babies!”
“Seven hells.”
but Theon can’t father any children thanks to…
“I’m not killing you…
Just making a few alterations.”
Arya once dismissed the idea of motherhood
“That’s not me.”
Yet she’s become so confident in her own skin
that we saw her take control of her first sexual experience
with the daring that defines her.
“I'm not the Red Woman.
Take your own bloody pants off.”
And we can imagine her taking on parenthood
with the same sense of agency
and lack of concern of doing it the usual way.
Meanwhile, if Gendry and Arya’s night together
does produce a Baratheon-Stark heir,
that could ultimately complicate lines of succession for the Iron Throne,
but that’s a major “if,”
relying on certain people not surviving
and Arya avoiding the tragic fate of
the aunt she so reminds people of, Lyanna Stark.
The greatest love story of this episode
is that of Jaime and Brienne, and their romance with knighthood itself.
“Arise, Brienne of Tarth, a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”
We have a whole video coming up about Brienne,
so we’ll be digging more into this there.
“How do you know there is an afterwards?”
Hi guys!
It’s Susannah and Debra.
And we are The Take.
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