Let’s assume Maximum Effort from all the flying animals involved, and that Gendry can run a Marathon in the snow in 3 hours because his life depended on it. According to the Internet, a pigeon can stay airborne for up to 60 days with an average speed of 30 km/h. But ravens are faster, according to the book, so let’s double that speed to 60km/h. And according to this page, a crow can hit 90 km/h, so let’s go with that. That’s 34 hours from the Wall to Dragonstone, or about 1.5 days. Let’s say Dany’s Dragons are as fast as a Raven because Magic and shit. So, 3 days out and back, and a day to prepare, those fuckers were on that rock for 4 days.
I loved this episode for what it accomplished. We had terrific interaction between the characters, especially the Magnificent Seven (RIP Thoros of Myr!) and Arya & Sansa. We resolved the whole “find a zombie to prove it’s all real” bullshit, we had a flaming undead bear (fuck yeah!), a horde of zombies, White Walkers doing their thing, dragons doing their thing, and a dragon death and then it’s subsequent re-animation. What a ride!
On the other hand, I am very frustrated with HOW it was all accomplished. I know most of these were already groused about, but I need to make my own list of gripes:
18 hours (from mid-afternoon to mid-morning the next day) for Gendry to run back to the wall, Davos to send a Rocket Raven to Dragonstone, and Dany to decide to leap on the back of her dragon and then fly there, find Jon in the middle of a mountainous, blizzard-filled nowhere and attempt to save him.
The Night King and his crew have giant fucking chains in the middle of nowhere, for no discernible reason.
At no point in the battle does Jon or anyone think to point out to Dany and her Dragons that they should melt the Night King and his guys, because then the zombies cease to function.
BenJen has probably been following the Night King, so I can give them his reappearance, but he has no time for any explanations or advice? C’mon.
Jon Snow had ZERO reason to go hero at the end. Drogon could have used his wings to knock back the encroaching zombies, and even if a couple managed to latch on, they couldn’t hurt the dragon and the people on it’s back could have knocked them off.
You just spent however long at Dragonstone mining Dragonglass. Why isn’t everyone in your party equipped with a Dragonglass tipped spear, a long Dragonglass knife and a Dragonglass dagger. Or bows and Dragonglass arrows for that matter?
There were many other minor things that bugged me this time too. It’s blatantly obvious that the writers are trying to rapidly tie up loose ends while moving the story forward at a pace that meets the producers and HBO’s expectations. In return we get warp travel and coincidences and circumstances too convenient for belief. It’s gone from really intelligent television to a Trope-a-thon in a single season.
I still love it though.
Did anyone else notice that the red-shirt wildlings all seemed to look very similar. I think the last 3 guys to die may have even been the same guy three times…black beard and hair, gray cloak and hood, long spear…it was almost comical. Maybe they saved a few buck on extras to put toward the CGI?
My GF repeated this the entire episode while up north. I think her exact comment chain was something like:
“Oh wow, that bear is a zombie, they should use dragonglass.”
“Why doesn’t Jon just use dragonglass on the white walker?”
Then, late into the Magnificent Seven scene:
“WHERE THE FUCK IS THE DRAGONGLASS?”
We talk, laugh, cheer and enjoy every episode of this show. (Which we rarely do for anything else we watch.) One part of me is wanting it to finish, and the other keeps celebrating every episode we get.
Jon doesn’t need it, Longclaw bypasses the wight’s DR by virtue of being Valyrian Steel, which counts as a +3 weapon. I believe the others all had Dragonglass daggers, though, which we saw them briefly using. Beric stabbed the zom-bear in the head with one.
It’s like… where could they possibly have come from? What would you use chains that are seemingly hundreds of yards long for, besides dragging up a dragon? Maybe boat anchors? But why would they have them?
Or just, you know, turned his head and torched all the bad guys there? Including the Night King?
Or hell, just torched the ice? Then there would be no way for the zombies to get to the island.
Very poor tactical use of the dragons. You can be sure the Night King isn’t gonna half ass it with his new dracolich.
it’s also pretty clear that time does pass with them waking up from a nap.
I’m not worried about the time thing. Some of the other decisions, yes. But Jon hasn’t really proved himself to being all that smart anyway. He fell for an obvious ruse about Benjen that got him killed. He then did something stupid in the Battle of the Bastards that his sister saved his skin on.
Not getting on the dragon and trying to solo the adds was totally in-character for him.
They did! Did you not notice that Tormund’s axe was missing it’s head for the last half of the episode? It’s because he switched to something more akin to an obsidian tipped mace. In one scene, Mormont drew two dragon glass daggers, which he spent the remaining time fighting with instead of a sword.
I presume if you look at most of the redshirts, they also had similar armaments at the end - I can grant that the reason they stood so long against the horde - the only one that kept coming back the whole time was the one the Hound kept hitting with the hammer.
The rest of the episode, kind of good and kind of meh. We got some cool dialogue and the moments we knew were coming came, but they felt cheap to me because of the terribad pacing/time stretching/deus ex Drogon/deus ex Benjen/100 yards of chain.
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