This season’s fifth episode, Eastwatch, was dense with setups and had our characters hopping all over the world in a matter of minutes. Just when you didn’t think characters could move any quicker, we have the exciting-but-clumsy Beyond the Wall. Let’s get into it.

Dungeons and Dragons

Credit: HBO

We rejoin our bunch of misfits as they traverse the dangerous land north of The Wall. It’s clear we’re in trouble from the get go, as the show misses the point of having a ragtag gang. These characters hate each other, as established last episode: Gendry resents Beric for selling him to Melisandre, the Hound doesn’t like anybody, and Jorah’s father was Tormund’s (giants) bane. And how does this hatred surface? In a series of dull and tensionless conversations.

All scenes must have conflict. We should be worried about whether these guys can work together at all. Instead, they mope about, Gendry only once bringing up how Beric and company screwed him over. Sure, the Hound is there to drop some comical C-bombs but it’s not enough. Nothing is solved or revealed. And upon rewatching this episode, I realised all I was doing was waiting for the action. That isn’t Game of Thrones.

Then an undead bear attacks them. It’s pretty cool, Beric and Thoros showing off their flaming swords. A few red shirts get picked off and Thoros suffers injuries that eventually prove fatal. Because obviously our fantasy role playing squad would be too OP if they had a guy with +1 resurrection. However, it’s scenes like this that may have endangered the concluding seasons of this great show – more on that later.

Stupid Little Girl

Credit: HBO

In my last review, I said that Arya wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for Littlefinger’s ploy. I was wrong, and not in the way I like to be. For reasons I’m utterly unable to fathom, Arya treats Sansa like her worst enemy for an entire episode. Sansa – as she admits herself – was a cowardly, stupid child when she wrote that letter. Why she’s getting such a hard time about it now, I’ll never understand, especially as Sansa has proven herself a smart and capable leader in the latest episodes.

Moreover, Littlefinger mentions that Brienne could settle a conflict between the sisters, for some reason. Then Sansa inexplicably sends Brienne away, for some reason, after Sansa received an invite to King’s Landing, for some reason. This is a classic example of plot coming before character – for what happens in episode seven to make sense, Brienne can’t be there. So, the writer’s hand reaches down and plucks her away, scribbling some bullshit about an invitation as it goes.

I hear you: “Maybe they’re ganging up against Littlefinger,” or, “there’ll be more to it.” That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t excuse Arya – who I was starting to like again – from torturing her sister for an entire episode.

Meanwhile, where is the all-seeing and all-knowing three-eyed raven Bran this whole episode, who surely knows of Littlefinger’s treachery and can have birds spying on the whole castle? Well, let’s say his absence is stark.

Beyond the Convenient

Credit: HBO

What comes next is an admittedly exciting and shocking battle sequence. It also might be the dumbest in the show to date. In a show where character choices have heavy – often dire – consequences, and where every twist stems from such a decision, we have a string of eye-rollingly convenient events.

After defeating the undead bear, our rangers encounter a rabble of wights. We learn that wights drop dead Phantom Menace style if the Walker controlling them dies. Oh. So the war against the dead may not be as difficult as we once thought. And anyway, this doesn’t help our group because now they don’t have a living wight to capture. Oh wait, a single wight happens to remain wandering about, so they catch it. This is the sort of shit that underpins the rest of the episode.

Next, the whole army of dead appears, so Gendry is sent back to Eastwatch to telegram Dany, presumably not once encountering any bears or dead or dead bears on the way. Our heroes run to a small island in a frozen lake. The ice around them breaks, rendering the wights unable to follow them. We learn later that the wights are perfectly happy to go underwater, but never mind that now. The White Walkers themselves also stand on the sidelines making no effort to attack, not even with any of those giant ice javelins that they can throw with pin-point accuracy at high speed.

Morning now, and the writers need a way to trigger the battle. Well, the Hound happens to lob a rock on the ice and so begins the shitstorm. Seriously? Not once did the wights attempt to pursue them? Meanwhile, Dany gears up in her winter garb (which, props to the costume department, looks fucking awesome) and rides north with her dragons.

The company are struggling, presumably flummoxed by Jon’s orders to fall back when they are completely surrounded. Luckily, Dany comes to the rescue. Now look, I’ve taken the piss a lot here but I’m going to be honest and say I found this stage of the episode riveting. At last, the full power of all three dragons is unleashed. And my heart sank the moment the Night King gripped his weapon. This is great writing: introducing the scorpion as a means of downing a dragon allowed the ice javelin to be a plausible surprise.

Then comes the more annoying part of the episode. For no reason, Jon hangs back and winds up underwater while the rest of them mount Drogon. He doesn’t die, of course, and he’s left in the wilderness with the dead on his tail. Then comes Benjen ex machina to save the day, only to chuck Jon onto his horse and refuse to travel with him a la Titanic.

Benjen is the most poorly-written character of the show. He’s been a source of tension for many seasons – Jon even wandering into the trap that killed him at the prospect he was alive. He saved Bran out of nowhere last season, and saved Jon out of nowhere this season, and now, he’s dead (probably). No payoff whatsoever, and the cherry on the cake of a tensionless moment. I mean, really, did anyone think Jon Snow was going to die here?

Emilia Clarke fails to sell that she’s a mother who’s lost a child, and Dany and Jon’s sudden reversal of priorities I don’t buy, either. But again, the show needs them to be aligned or else we’ll never get the story finished in the next seven (yep, seven) episodes.

Why Seven?

Credit: HBO

Here I’ll discuss my thoughts on the season as a whole, and in particular, why I now feel it was a mistake to cut this season short. If you just want my conclusion on this episode scroll down now.

Up until this episode I’ve enjoyed the hell out of season seven. Our characters disrespected the established geography of Westeros by bouncing from place to place, but I didn’t care. We’ve seen the world. We, the audience, simply assume that weeks are passing between episodes and scenes. Beyond the Wall is different. It shows Gendry running presumably miles to the Wall, a raven flying to Dany, and Dany flying from Dragonstone to the Wall in parallel to Jon being stranded on an island overnight. But even this abuse of time didn’t bother me.

What bothers me is that with all this rushing around we’re losing out on what we love most about the show. The characters. I don’t feel like there’s been anywhere near enough time for our characters to live, breathe, and develop. Jon and Theon never got a chance to settle their dispute. Dany and Jorah never properly reunited. Arya and Sansa – what the heck is going on there? Bran’s scenes have been so short and vague that he could now plausibly do anything to patch up any plot holes later down the line. Remember all the development that took place between Brienne and Jaime, Arya and the Hound, even Samwell and Gilly because of how long their journeys took?

While I complained that season five and some of season six were too slow, I now feel that seven episodes is not enough. I wasn’t worried to begin with because the showrunners had us believe that we’d see seven episodes’ worth of story. Now, it feels like ten episodes squeezed into seven. And if that’s the case, why not make ten episodes like usual? Answer: Money.

The behind the scenes of Beyond the Wall holds a revealing moment. Showrunner D. B. Weiss says they fought for years to get a zombie polar bear on screen, writing it into every season. They were denied by producers and visual effects teams, who said: “We cannot afford a zombie polar bear.” The story could easily have been told without an undead bear, as much as I enjoy how it foreshadows the zombie dragon. But because the showrunners were so insistent on spending their yearly budget on scenes like this, the only possible solution was to cut the number of episodes.

I’m all for big battles. The Battles of Blackwater, Bastards, Hardhome, and Mance Rayder’s assault on the wall – some of my favourite sequences in the show and the culmination of hours of expertly written intrigue, character development, and rising tension. But saving money by sacrificing storytelling on the altars of zombie polar bears and other unnecessary extravagances like Euron’s fleet is troubling.

In Conclusion

It’s epic, containing an exciting sequence with a couple of surprises, but its convenient-at-worst and stale-at-best writing places Beyond the Wall as the weakest episode of season six. Still, I’m hoping the finale will tie up these frayed ends and put us on track for a killer final season.

Predictions? Dany meets Cersei in the next episode and it won’t go swimmingly. Brienne will be there too, because why not.

Thanks for reading, and check out my review of last episode, Eastwatch.

Header image credit: HBO