Game Of Thrones Season 8: 7 Ups And 3 Downs From 'The Last Of The Starks'
5. A Return To The Character Drama
The Long Night had some utterly spectacular set-pieces. There were moments of jaw-dropping action, and a sense of scale that felt almost unfathomable in just how purely EPIC it was. It even made room for some smaller character moments, but nothing compared to what we had in the previous episode.
This mostly feels like a return back to that kind of episode. It's not quite as neatly done, but there is some superb character drama driving things here: there's the aforementioned Jaime and Brienne stuff, but also Tyrion and Sansa, Jaime, Tyrion, and Bronn, Daenerys and Jon, and even a good capper on the fledgling Arya/Gendry (Gendrya?) romance, all with a nice mix of tension, emotion, and humour.
A lot of that comes from those opening celebrations. Whenever there's a party in Game of Thrones, things tend to go wrong. These are the places where people die: it's not in battle, but at dinner tables, weddings and so on, so there was definitely a cause to be concerned here.
The show definitely plays on that fear, because it mixes the joy of the celebrations of beating the dead with some almost unbearable tenseness: the glances between the people at that top table make it feel like a pressure cooker that's just ready to explode. There's a superb juxtaposition in the way it'll cut form those terse moments to something much more lighthearted, and it builds a sense of tension that pays off later in the episode.
Game of Thrones can be messy when it gets into plot or bigger picture stuff, especially in these later years, but this once again proves that when you put 2-3 characters in a room together, great things will happen.