Rewriting Game of Thrones' "The Long Night" to not suck

Look, I'm not here to rain on anyone's Game of Thrones parade. If you liked the most recent episode, more power to you. There were certainly plenty of high points to be found in it. When it wanted to, it did portray the white walkers with a sense of ruthlessness and urgency that they deserved. But personally, I just can't ignore the numerous glaring writing mistakes that were made, especially for a show of GoT's caliber.

It's unbecoming of it, particularly because for so long the show was great at providing numerous twists and turns in the plot without ever breaking its own rules or having the characters make irrational decisions for the sake of fanservice and cheap Hollywood thrills. Yet unfortunately this episode, "The Long Night", was littered with them.

[Spoilers ahead, just in case you didn't figure that out by now based on the subject matter]

We were already beginning to see the plot unravel last season, but this felt like on a whole other level. Tyrion hides in the crypts instead of commanding on the wall. The Dothraki are stupidly thrown away in an unnecessary charge when you already have trebuchets to pick the white walkers off from afar. Dany lands in a field that makes her an easy target for a swarm of undead to overwhelm her. Jon is left with nothing to do but wander around until he gets pinned down by the white dragon. Arya just materializes out of nowhere to slay the Night King despite no proper buildup to it by the end of the episode, and no explanation of how she slipped by 30+ white walkers that were surrounding the Night King and Bran. Not to mention that she has no real rivalry built up with the Night King. He didn't murder her parents or abuse her sister. If the Night King was destined to fall this episode, it should have been by Jon's hands, having witnessed the Night King's ferocity in previous encounters.

But of course, the Night King shouldn't have even been on the front lines to begin with if his army's fighting strength is predicated on his sole existence. There is no reason he couldn't have just stayed on the sidelines to the very end until his army demolished Winterfell by sheer numbers, then retrieve Bran after the dust has settled. But apparently according to the writers, the way you win at Chess when you start with thousands more pawns than your opponent is to send your King out front so he can be easily checkmated.

The worst offense of all with this episode though is not all the glaring plot holes and breaches in logic made by the characters, but the fact that fundamentally, it completely collapses the foundations of Game of Thrones' plot that were laid out from season 1 episode 1. From the very beginning, we were teased that the white walkers were coming, as if it were some deep foreboding omen; a Westeros-shattering event. Something that would shake the very foundations of the world. They were constantly scheming what appeared to be some grand plot beyond our understanding while Westeros' kingdoms squabbled over power grabs. Yet in the end what happened? They didn't even advance past the very first establishment south of the wall before they were completely wiped out, making their impact less effective than pretty much every other army in the series. This was the great terror that almost conquered Westeros and had to be sealed away by a giant magical ice wall thousands of years ago? It's a complete joke.

So here's my basic script rewrite, which took me all of a few minutes to conceive in my head, just to show how easily an amateur writer could have done a better job with this episode:

First, Tyrion provides battle tactics instead of whoever the idiot was that ordered the Dothraki to go commit suicide for no reason. Since this is the final season, this is one of the last chances for Tyrion to show off his knack for being a good leader even if he isn't necessarily a good fighter, so Tyrion instructs the Dothraki to split into 2 flanks that hide in wait from the east and west.

A line of unmanned torches are strewn along north of the keep in order to help them signal when the white walkers arrive. This allows us to recreate the eeriness of the Dothraki charge scene, but without the idiotic tactics. We see that the torches start to dissipate, signaling that the white walkers have arrived, so they begin with a trebuchet barrage that puts pressure on the white walkers and forces them to move.

Once the white walkers reach close enough range, the dragons swoop in and create a line of fire that cuts off the rest of the army's advance, making it a smaller front line that can't overwhelm the Unsullied. The Dothraki then come closing in from the sides to fully pin them down and pick them off. But now just as the living start to get their hopes up, the white walkers make their surprise counter attack with the white dragon swooping in to destroy one of the Dothraki flanks. The dragons are forced to refocus their efforts on that, while eventually the wall of fire clears and the white walkers continue their advance.

Winterfell is still basically fucked at this point, but it at least shows that the humans aren't complete morons when it comes to tactical planning. They retreat to the keep but still get overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Arya manages to take out the giant shortly after he breaks down the keep door, as she's too small and agile for him to keep up with, and her blade forged by Gendry proves to be deadly. This gives us a nice substitute for her scene with the Night King as it shows how overpowered Arya is without completely breaking the narrative, but it doesn't make much difference anyway because the numbers are just too great.

Dany and Jon defeat the white dragon but lose Jon's dragon in the process, so Jon goes to join the rest of the army to help fight in the keep. With Dany's dragon finally able to return its attention to the battle on the ground, they might be able to turn back the tide, but at this point the keep is already thoroughly overwhelmed, and the Night King and his lieutenants are now making their appearance armed with ice spears. They arrive in a spread-out formation which allows them to target Dany's dragon from multiple angles.

Meanwhile Jorah, having witnessed first-hand what the Night King did to Dany's dragon when they were trapped on the island of ice, now sets his own plan into motion. He suspected the Night King would come to try and claim another dragon eventually, so rather than retreat to the keep when the signal was given, he and several Unsullied posed as corpses on the battlefield to lie in wait while the Night King had all his forces deployed to the front lines at the keep. Now with a clear path to the Night King and his lieutenants, Jorah and his small band of Unsullied stealthily make their move. Dany spots the Night King too late as one of his lieutenants has a perfect shot lined up, but Jorah catches him off-guard and scores a clean kill, saving Dany from losing their last dragon. Jorah and the Unsullied then make their way straight toward the Night King, but the king simply responds with raising his hands, and suddenly Jorah is surrounded by a new horde of white walkers that quickly dispose of him and the Unsullied.

Now I'll admit here that this plot point is perhaps a little contrived in order to give Jorah a heroic death saving Dany one last time. One could argue that Jorah couldn't have perceived how the battle would play out this far ahead. You could add a little foreshadowing in the previous episode where Jorah perhaps mentions some blurb to the Unsullied about how he's got a plan to get at the Night King, but the show switches to a different scene before he elaborates on what exactly that is. Then it doesn't come off as too entirely out of left field and builds a little extra mystery and excitement for this episode. Or, we could just write it so that Jorah is badly injured during the initial fight and gets knocked out or something, so he is never able to retreat back to the keep. Then he only barely musters the strength to get back up and take out one of the Night King's lieutenants before dying. Either way, I think it's appropriate to at least give Jorah a heroic sendoff, even if his attempts still prove futile.

Anyway, Dany is devastated, but there's no time for remorse. At this stage it has become clear that Winterfell is lost. Dany knows if she were to try and lunge for the Night King now, she would likely get hit by a spear before she could even reach her target, and the longer she lingers, the greater the risk that she could lose their last dragon. Tyrion, Arya, Brienne, Sam, and a few other survivors retreat to the crypts with Sansa and the gang, and they follow a secret underground passage that leads south out of Winterfell, avoiding the white walker hordes. As the battle continues, the white walkers surround the keep and crowd in the entrance to the crypt, leaving Jamie, Jon, and a few other soldiers still stranded on the surface with nowhere to run. With the remaining dragon left, Dany lays down 2 parallel lines of fire south out of the keep to make a narrow path for Jamie and the others to escape on horseback. As the white walkers begin pouring through the entrance to the crypt, Brienne decides to hold her ground, blocking the white walkers' path and buying them time while Sansa and the others escape through the underground passage. She dies valiantly defending the passageway while the remaining survivors escape. This more or less wraps up the episode. It ends with the Night King standing menacingly atop the keep wall, overlooking the devastation with a look of satisfaction once more, and just as it dips to black, the roar of Jon's fallen dragon can be heard; resurrected as yet another white dragon.

And that's your basic outline to keep building up the threat of the white walkers while still allowing key characters to survive. A couple things to note though for some details I left out. There are several things you could end up doing with Bran in this episode. It could be an interesting plot point if Bran does in fact get captured or killed by the Night King. We still don't fully know the implications of what this would mean for Westeros going forward, and it could be something intriguing to explore further. Or, he could just be with Sansa in the crypt the whole time and he escapes with the survivors to be saved for a more important role later in the season. Either way, the script we actually got has Bran reduced to nothing more than a worm on a fishing pole, so frankly both of these options are preferable to what we ended up with.

Another possibility I've heard suggested about what the Night King could do as a smarter course of action is just skip Winterfell entirely and use his dragon to fly far past Jon and Dany's defenses. Since he can raise the dead, he could theoretically just sneak into some backwater town in the middle of the night, slay a bunch of people in their sleep and raise them all back as part of a southern army that he could then use to flank everyone by surprise. This would be an actually clever subversion of expectations, though I'd still say with the way I've written it, it could still play to the Night King's benefit to try and claim another dragon or two at Winterfell instead, which he does achieve in my version of events.

Now the white walkers are a bigger threat than ever, and we can have a three-way finale between the army of the dead, Cersei, and the Targaryens. To be honest, I'm fine with it if the writers wanted to have the Night King defeated all along, but it was just too early in the plot to feel earned with this episode. They should conquer at least a good half of Westeros and allow us to really feel that winter has come before having a final showdown with Jon and the Night King. That would have been far more cathartic. As it stands now though, the white walkers are a completely wasted element in the narrative; reduced to one-note baddies that leave no real impact on the world despite nearly a decade of buildup and scheming behind the scenes.

It's clear the writers decided after a certain point that they had lost interest in the white walkers, and the real threat that holds the most intrigue to them is Cersei. This is Game of Thrones after all; it's in the title of the show, so to a certain extent this outcome should have been expected. But if that's the case, then why bother with all this teasing and buildup for 7 seasons? If this was all they had planned for the endgame of the white walkers, then they shouldn't have even bothered with this plotline at all.