The Watchers on the Wall: I Couldn’t Stop Watching

gameofthrones14_01Note: This blog entry is pretty much one big spoiler for yesterday’s episode of Game of Thrones.

I need to rave a little bit about Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall,” because it was one of the most entertaining 50 minutes of television I’ve ever seen. Heck, it was better than 50 minutes out of almost any epic war/fantasy movie, and while it was expensive, it was a whole lot less expensive than most of those movies.

I think it worked particularly well for a few reason:

  1. The Night’s Watch was trapped in the middle of two very different battles, each of which had huge stakes.
  2. Despite the epic action, the episode found time for small moments between characters. Those moments made the stakes even bigger than the fate of the south. Also, in Game of Thrones, any character is dispensable, so that makes the stakes of a battle even bigger.

I loved so much about this episode. The giants. Sam kissing Gilly. The sweeping tracking shot across the battle inside Castle Black. Jon Snow. Jon Snow sending his friend to hold the gate. His friend keeping his men by him as the giant lumbered towards them. The huge scythe that swept across the wall. The pacing of the entire episode. And, of course, the final moments between Jon and Ygritte.

So good. SO good.

It was so good, in fact, that I thought it was the season finale. Fortunately I was wrong about that–there’s one episode left.

What was your favorite moment from “The Watchers on the Wall”?

1 thought on “The Watchers on the Wall: I Couldn’t Stop Watching”

  1. Since you gave spoilers, I will, too. Don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoilt….

    Seriously warning you…

    Really totally seriously warning you ….

    Ah, you could’ve looked it up online anyway, here goes…

    Sam doesn’t kiss Gilly in the books at this point. That whole romance happens an entire book later, on a ship, and Gilly instigates it after tensions simmer for weeks. This is one of the points where characters killed off in the series (Pyp, Grenn, a few others), but not in the books is going to cause some problems.later on.

    The battle in the books is tough odds but more believable, and I think more pyrrhic. The southern attacks are defeated first, but at great damage to teh castle. The northern attackers are defeated second, at great losses. Jon’s entirely in Stannis’ hand afterwards, though he doesn’t want to admit it.

    But I nearly cried when I read Jon and Ygritte’s final moments together. It’s one of the times I think I threw the book across the room, cursing GRRM for killing off someone I really came to like, like when Bran was thrown off the roof, when Ned was killed, when ….

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