15 BEST Game Of Thrones Season 8 Theories

6. Sam Kills The Night King

Stopping the Night King is paramount to winning the Great War. If the living are going to continue to be just that, then he’s the one they need to kill. So who is going to be the one who does it? This naturally fits with the idea of Azor Ahai/The Prince That Was Promised, but even if that prophecy does come to pass, it’d be great if the show still subverted it.

As things stand, the person most people expect to kill the Night King is Jon. He’s the one leading the fight, he’s faced him down on a couple of occasions - with another similar moment promised in Season 8 - and he might well be Azor Ahai reborn too. Which is why his bookish best friend, Samwell Tarly, should be the one to do it.

Thrones likes to defy conventions, and it’d be very fitting with that to have not the dashing, brave hero kill the ultimate evil, but the fat, quiet person no one gives credit to. It has some echoes of Samwise Gamgee in George R.R. Martin’s beloved Lord of the Rings series, but also to another key event in Game of Thrones.

The Tower of Joy is hugely significant to, well, just about everything we’ve watched. And there we watched how Howland Reed stabbed Arthur Dayne to save Ned’s life. Jon is very much like Ned, and Sam has echoes of Howland (neither are fighters, both are highly intelligent). The Night King, like Arthur Dayne, is considered the ultimate warrior to defeat. So Jon (Ned) battles the Night King (Dayne), and Sam (Howland) stabs him with dragonglass (or Heartsbane). Howland Reed may never appear in the story now, and this gives him even greater thematic importance if he isn’t going to turn up.

It also provides a great callback to earlier in the show: it was Sam, not Jon, who first saw the White Walkers, and he, not Jon, who first killed one. For a story like Thrones, Sam killing the Night King - and not being the subject of prophecy - feels far more satisfying.

[James]