#GAME OF THRONES BEYOND THE WALL CAST PLUS#
We open where we ended last week, heading north of the Wall with Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Jorah (Iain Glen) The Hound (Rory McCann), Berric (Richard Dormer), Gendry (Joe Dempsie), Thoros (Paul Kaye) and Tormund (Kristofer Hivju), plus a bunch of redshirts, traipsing into the unknown. After a somewhat rushed, piece-moving affair with last week’s “Eastwatch”, GoT delivers a tense, action-packed heartbreaker of an episode with massive ramifications. The penultimate episode of each Game of Thrones season tends to be a biggie and holy crap, this is no exception. Thoros was a great character but his death by zombie polar bear felt like an unconvincing attempt to convince us that major players were also in jeopardy.[SPOILER WARNING: Please don’t read unless you’ve seen the episode. Thank the old gods and the new for Tormond and The Hound, who were there to offer some relief with a hilarious discussion about Brienne of Tarth.Īpart from that, these contrived chats led nowhere, with almost all of Jon’s band of unmerry men surviving the episode. Jon told Jora he knew his dad, Thoros told us he once fought with Jeor in the Greyjoy Rebellion, and, most painfully of all, Gendry reminded the audience Beric had once sold him to Melisandre. Instead, it diverted such screen time to expository “these are how our characters know one another” talks between the headliners of Snow's squad. But Beyond the Wall moved too fast to care.
#GAME OF THRONES BEYOND THE WALL CAST UPGRADE#
Karsi shows that it only takes a few minutes to upgrade a character from a disposable red-shirt to someone unforgettable.
In other words, her death was Thrones at its best. It was tear-inducing, needlessly brutal and it made the enemy unapologetically ruthless. It’s a scene that only lasts a few seconds, but it makes her final death more poignant: Karsi is brought down by the army of the dead because she’s unable to swing her swords at a child – even if it is a wight. In Hardhome, Karsi becomes instantly likeable with a few fantastically blunt lines (after one Wildling says "My ancestors would spit on me if I broke bread with a crow," she responds "so would mine, but fuck them, they're dead").Īnd in another effective use of screentime, she’s also briefly seen warmly reassuring her terrified children who are escaping the massacre on a boat. What makes this more frustrating is that it takes seconds to do. Why? It took no time to flesh out its characters. YouTube tributes were uploaded, memes were made and the internet unanimously bowed their head with respect for a character they’d only known for a few brief minutes.īut after Beyond the wall, there’s not so much as a tweet grieving over the nameless Wildlings.
But, as Hardhome proved, just because you can’t name a character doesn’t mean you don't feel for them.Īfter the episode aired in 2015 there was an outpouring of mourning for a female Wildling leader who although you probably won’t remember her name (it's Karsi), you'll definitely remember how she died: mauled to death by a small band of child white walkers. It would be easy to say that’s because the majority of deaths in the recent episode were anonymous (admit it, pre-Googling you weren’t sure Viserion was the dragon that was shot down) and we weren't even introduced to the Star Trek-style expendables who joined the plot-armoured main characters on their mission. In both instances there are casualties – with Thoros, dragon Viserion and a few unnamed members of Snow’s patrol killed off in Monday’s episode, and the bulk of the wildlings wiped out at Hardhome – yet the deaths in Beyond the Wall carried much less weight. On the cold blue face of it, the massacre of Hardhome and Beyond the Wall are incredibly similar: Jon Snow and a band of followers clash with the army of the dead in a seemingly futile battle, with the Night King himself arriving at the end for a gloat. And this change is clearest when comparing it to season five masterpiece Hardhome. Yet, the battle beyond the wall boiled off the jeopardy, intimacy and simple shock value that was firmly frozen deep into past episodes. A zombie polar bear, an army of the dead and a frickin’ ICE DRAGON: there were plenty of moments in the last episode that would knock over even Wun Wun with fanboy delight.
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