‘Game of Thrones’ Recap Season 7, Episode 6: Blue-Eyes Wight Dragon

Game of Thrones is a 38-time Emmy-winning pinnacle of prestige TV, a dark, ingenious subversion of fantasy tropes and political maneuvering that not only confirmed we were living through the second Golden Age of Television, but set a new bar for what a series can achieve in terms of ambition, scope, and storytelling. It is a very serious show, and certainly deserves our respect.

But never mind all that shit, let’s talk about this flaming zombie bear.

“Beyond The Wall,” the penultimate episode of this shortened seventh season, is either the purest example of this show at its best or worst, depending to whom you bend your fandom knee. Because if you came for the clever characterization or savvy political intrigue—something closer to the early stages of George RR Martin’s tightly wound source material—you probably feel as left out as Ghost sitting by his empty water bowl at Castle Black. But if you came for that good old-fashioned HBO $6 million-an-episode spectacle? Then you got Beric Dondarrion mowing down wights with a flaming sword. You got a blue-eyed demon impaling a dragon with a magical icicle spear. You got the aforementioned flaming zombie bear mauling Thoros of Myr, while Sandor “The Hound” Clegane looked on like “please not a flaming zombie bear, my one weakness.”

Full disclosure: It was dope. All of it. It made very little narrative sense, but it was dope. This hour of television owned harder than the entire existence of Ballers combined, and I want to make that very clear. But man, this was definitely not the bravest Game of Thrones episode I’ve ever watched, but it was by far the drunkest.

To get a proper sense of how much you had to extinguish the wildfire inside your brain to embrace “Beyond The Wall,” let’s quickly run-down the major events of this episode, up to the point when Viserion tragically falls, without commentary:

Jon and the sassiest crew of bearded main characters set off on a suicide mission to extract one single wight from an army of roughly one million. Things quickly go south due to a combination of undead polar bear attacks and Jon not having any sort of plan in the first place. Gendry—despite the fact that he runs like Randy from A Christmas Story—flees several hundred miles back to Eastwatch to send a raven to Dragonstone. Jon and company proceed to have a staring contest with the White Walker’s army over the course of several hours (days?) until the script says, “it is fighting time now.” Meanwhile, Gendry’s raven breaks the sound barrier to reach Daenerys, and the Mother of Dragons flies north with all three of her children, swooping in ex machina, wearing a stunning outfit she specifically color coordinated for this scenario.

It’s not the timeline issues or warp-speed travel that irk me; anyone who points to that as their major complaint needs to take a long, hard look into whether they’d rather watch a large-scale battle over the course of an hour or a group of men sailing in frigid waters for four straight episodes. But the rushed nature of this episode—and of season seven overall—has started to cultivate an uneasy feeling that things are happening just to happen, as if David Benioff and D.B. Weiss knew they needed that big penultimate episode extravaganza and finally decided it didn’t matter how they got there.

It’s indicative of how much this show has changed from the beginning. Game of Thrones transformed into a pop culture phenomenon on the backs of its characters, who we grew to love because of their intensely unique charm and the knowledge that any of them could die, at any time. But that’s just not Game of Thrones anymore.

Game of Thrones is dangling dangerously close to becoming a show more about moments than characters. If it wasn’t, Tormund Giantsbane would be a headless corpse at the bottom of a frozen lake; the dude gave an entire “I can’t wait to get home to my woman and have babies” speech and survived. The only characters we said goodbye to here were a handful of faceless Wildlings, and Thoros of Myr. No disrespect to Thoros–his brief conversation with Jorah Mormont was the most moving quiet moment of the episode—but if you visit the HBO store in midtown Manhattan you’re not going to see a ton of Thoros of Myr t-shirts, is all I’m saying.

It’s not that I particularly wish for Tormund to die. I want that beautiful ginger Wildling to breakdance over Ramin Djawadi’s score behind the final episode’s end credits. But his survival of a certain seasons 1-4 death just hints at a storytelling cheapness that is creeping its way into Game of Thrones like an army of the undead. And that was before Jon Snow borrowed Jaime Lannister’s scuba gear to survive drowning under a sheet of ice, and that was before Benjen Stark arrived from someone’s most unlikely fan fiction to save his ass again.

That isn’t to say death—most notably Viserion’s murder at the frozen hands of The Night King—doesn’t hang over this episode like a specter. The mirroring is clear but but a jolt nonetheless; the child Daenerys named for her abusive older brother is the first of her newfound family to die. But Daenerys’ often-stated devotion to her dragons has always been of the Lucille Bluth variety, with her physical and mental connection to Drogon always ringing the clearest and, by extension, the audience’s attitude toward the other two dragons not being nearly as strong. Viserion’s demise is more horrifying not because it happened but because of what it means for the future. The Night King’s army was formidable before adding the Westerosi version of a nuclear bomb to his arsenal, a weapon to combat Daenerys’ fire-breathing White Walker deterrent.

But all hope is not lost. The surviving members of the zombie extraction crew did manage to strap a wight to Drogon’s back, a bargaining chip they can use to convince Cersei Lannister that her throne-obsessed brand of insanity is misguided. Amid the chaos, they also discovered a strategic loophole worth exploiting; to slay a White Walker is to crumble any corpse it resurrected, so a fatal blow to The Night King would simultaneously turn three-quarters of his army to dust. Plus, the alliance between Stark and Targaryen—between ice and fire—has never been stronger. A recovering Jon finally refers to Daenerys as his Queen in a bedside scene so achingly tender I stood up and audibly wished for incest to occur before my eyes. Shame on this wonderful, stupid show for making me shout at a woman to just fuck her nephew already so we can all relax.

That level of…familial unity isn’t so firm back at Winterfell, where Littlefinger’s shady-as-hell letter placement has sowed increasingly tense discord between Arya and Sansa. I keep bouncing back and forth between hating and loving this. “Hating,” because we seem to have missed a step between the moment Arya defeated The Waif in season 5 and the instant she just straight-up became The Waif. Like I wrote after the premiere, the lesson of Arya’s early departure from The House of Black and White was yes, she is an angry, semi-trained little killer but she’s allowed to have feelings. And then the moment she returns to Westeros she’s The Terminator. She’s cold, unflinching, and waving death threats in her sister’s face—her pretty, easy wearable face—over the most meager of evidence.

But I do mean “loving,” simply because Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner have such a firm grasp of these characters that they’re able to guide them through even the shoddiest of writing into something engaging. Turner, especially, is able to pack years of horrid muck into the line “you never would’ve survived what I survived.” Her voice quivers but doesn’t break, where just a season or two ago it would’ve shattered into a hundred pieces.

Brienne of Tarth, who was correctly pointed out as the best protective wall between the Stark sisters, has been sent away to King’s Landing. Littlefinger’s mere presence invokes nothing but under-the-surface ill intentions. This season of Game of Thrones has really enjoyed playing with the terror that comes from hearing your enemies before you see them. Think of the Dothraki hoofbeats in “The Spoils of War,” or the thunder of the approaching undead in this episode. There’s something similar happening at Winterfell. The bloodshed hasn’t arrived yet—Arya handed the Valyrian steel dagger over, after all—but it’s clearly on its way.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.

Watch the "Beyond The Wall" episode of Game Of Thrones on HBO Go