Last night’s Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall,” was the most expensive episode of the entire series thus far and yet despite all of the stunning visuals and another beloved character’s death, it was still a little…blah? Oh, my god, GoT. Have you finally desensitized us to violence and destruction???
It cost $8 million to produce the first official clash between the Night’s Watch and the wildlings and it’s no wonder where all of those HBO bones got spent. Neil Marshall, who helmed the incredible Battle of Blackwater in season 2, returned as director for an episode packed with giants, woolly mammoths, dire wolves, fire and an incredible gigantic scythe that slaughters anyone who dares to scale the Wall. Because so much time was devoted to showing off fancy action shots, not a lot really happened by way of plot
But even with all that time devoted to bloodshed, they still managed to sneak a theme that wasn’t “it hurts to be stabbed” into “The Watchers on the Wall” — and that theme was love.
“Love is the death of duty,” Maester Aemon — the blind, anti-Dumbledore — tells Sam when he catches the younger man up late worrying over the fate of Gilly, the woman who he continues to deny is love for even though the evidence is all there. In this way, he and Jon are one in the same. Jon, too, denies any love he felt for Ygritte, choosing instead to focus on the sex they had and (bloody) disagreements that ultimately followed. And yet it’s her and Gilly — not strategy — that the two boys find themselves discussing on the eve of the battle because, as Maester Aemon points out, “Nothing makes the past a sweeter place to visit than the prospect of dying.”
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