Game Of Thrones drinks, talks, and readies for war in an all-time great episode

Alex McLevy


“The North remembers.” This was always a saying meant to convey pride. Pride in being a northerner, pride in refusing to ignore the past, pride in the warning it served to any who would dare cross swords or wits with those living in the upper lands of Westeros. But in the face of an existential threat, one that challenges the very existence of humanity, it has become something more. It expresses the essence of what all these people gathered at Winterfell are now trying to defend—the fact of history. Humankind has a past, and what defines the species is knowledge of itself. Sam puts it most succinctly: Memory makes people who and what they are. It’s the entire purpose of legacies, written accounts, and the passing on of stories, a means of enshrining and declaring that this happened. As long as someone remembers, a thing can’t be erased from the world. And the army of the living is here to remember.

That odd guy who sat around in the courtyard all last week has turned out to be not just the best hope for drawing out the Night King and ending his threat, but the avatar for the assembled hopes of every person making a stand at Winterfell. Brandon Stark (or the one who used to go by that name, anyway) embodies the very concept of history. “He wants to erase this world, and I am its memory,” the three-eyed raven tells Dany and her assembled counselors, and the declaration seems to awaken something in everyone who hears it. Memory of the past carries within it the hope for memory in the future, and if there’s anything they’re trying to preserve beyond their lives, it’s the possibility of a human world going on after they’re gone, and someone to tell the story. It’s what gives meaning to their actions. It’s the only thing that does.

Game Of Thrones has always been a story about stories, a narrative about making narratives, and an epic about the reasons we choose to act as we do, in hopes of contributing in some small way to our own story—our memories, and those of others. “A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms” takes that old reliable framework—the calm before the storm—and uses it to reflect on how and why its characters have all ended up in this one place, making a desperate stand against the dead. And what begins haltingly and piecemeal, in fits and starts as people attempt to really speak to each other during what might be their final hours, slowly coheres into one of the most satisfying and rewarding episodes in the history of the series. To call it “fan service” would be to do a disservice to what credited writer Bryan Cogman and director David Nutter have pulled off here: Summing up eight years’ worth of development in a way that does justice to this large panoply of characters without tipping into phony sentiment. These conversations were often baldly sincere, occasionally awkward, sometimes brittle, and downright mawkish at times...and not a single one rang false.