Listen to JOE’s brand new GOT reaction show, The North Awaits, with Michael Fry & Carl Kinsella right here.
He never spoke, until now.
If you’re one of the very few people that hasn’t seen the latest Game of Thrones episode, you know what’s coming.
To paraphrase a famous line from The Shawshank Redemption, right now, the people in Winterfell are probably saying to themselves: “I’d like to think that the last thing that went through the Night King, other than that Valyrian steal dagger, was how the hell Arya Stark ever got the best of him”.
Well, as we’ve seen over the course of eight seasons, a girl has trained to become the fiercest killer in Westeros and Arya is more than capable of killing someone when they least expect it.
Meryn Trant, House Frey, The Waif, Littlefinger, and countless others can attest to her deadly skills.
However, as stated previously, we’re somewhat disappointed to see the Night King’s demise in Game of Thrones because there’s still so much mystery and intrigue about the character to explore.
Again, we’ve no idea what the next three episodes have in store – perhaps the leader of the White Walkers will return in some way? – but for now, we can only deal in what we’ve seen and heard from those involved in the show.
On this note, it’s very likely that Game of Thrones will be moving away from this supernatural evil as they focus on the war for the Iron Throne.
However, despite the fact that there’s still so much intrigue about the leader of the White Walkers, Season 8 did give us more insight into what the Night King actually wanted.
“He’ll come for me. He’s tried before many times with many Three-Eyed Ravens” said Bran in the second episode.
When Sam asks what the Night King wants, Bran responded by saying: “An endless night. He wants to erase this world and I am its memory.”
“That’s what death is, isn’t it?” states Sam. “Forgetting. Being forgotten. If we forget where we’ve been and what we’ve done, we’re not men anymore. Just animals.”
Aside from this, we know that the Night King was created by the Children of the Forrest to help them in their war against The First Men. We then saw the absolute worst of Game of Thrones’ own Frankenstein’s monster when he turned against his creators.
In doing so, the battle-lines between the living and the dead were clearly drawn.
Again, we’ve no idea if any mad theories about the Night King’s return will come to fruition – theories about an ‘evil’ Bran and an agreement between the Night King and the Three-Eyed Raven have been discussed – but the man behind those chillingly-blue eyes, Czech actor Vladimír Furdík, has spoken about the motivations of his character during that final scene with Arya in the Winterfell Godswood.
“He wants revenge. Because somebody, many years ago, made some mistake and he became the Night King, and he didn’t want to be the Night King,” said Furdík.
After having that shard of dragonglass pushed into his chest, the Night King has every right to feel pissed and in a a previous interview, Dave Hill, writer on Game of Thrones, said that the leader of the White Walkers was very aware of his brutal creation, as seen by those mysterious symbols.
“As we saw with Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven, the spiral pattern was sacred to the Children of the Forest, who created the Night King by sacrificing a captured man in a spiral “henge of stones.” The Night King then adopted the symbol as a sort of blasphemy, like Satan with the upside-down cross,” said Hill.
In a recent interview with Variety, Furdík elaborated on this theme of revenge and memory.
“He was like now I have a way to go to war. Now I kill everybody because you made me the Night King and made me live seven or 10 thousand years behind the wall in a cold country. He’s tired of living out there in the cold and the snow”.
Here’s hoping that this isn’t the last we hear about the mysterious leader of the White Walkers because who else could terrify millions of people without even saying a word?
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
