Dear White Walkers and Your Thousands of Undead Wights:
I get it—you’re scary and disgusting. To Jon Snow and his ragtag, reluctant band of allies, you’re a formidable enemy, an unstoppable harbinger of death; to TV critics, you’re a horrifying thrill. Your triumphant appearance in the “Game of Thrones” episode “Hardhome,” after seasons of teasing, was a coup, a set piece, a breathtaking, daze-inducing experience so pleasurable that it transcended what was already transcendent. To me, however, you’re a snooze factor eleven.
Wights, when I see thousands of you, your gray, gristled skeletons scampering over a cliff like a throng of bipedal lemmings and crashing to the ground, motionless—Hey, you’re dead! No, you’re not!—and then popping back up again, waiting to kill and be re-killed, I sigh. I play a little Words with Friends. Is VENOE a word? Apparently not. Is NOVAE? Yep, that works. Oh, you’re still on. Enough, already.
White Walkers, don’t get me started. You there, with the icy face and the glowing antifreeze eyes and the Billy Idol head spikes—I scoff at your whole vibe. I admit that you got me when you killed all those wildlings, let them lie around for a minute, and then conjured them up again, like a yoga instructor post-Namaste, while staring menacingly at poor Jon Snow as he fled in his little rowboat. That was effective. Scary stuff. But I’m not interested in what you’re up to; your evil doesn’t matter. I’ll never hate you like I hated King Joffrey or Ramsay Bolton or that freaky Jocasta who got shoved through the moon door.
But we represent the very destruction of all mankind!, you protest. Death itself! The folly of man and his little plans, something bigger than Westeros and its politics and its throne wars! We might even represent climate change—try to stop that, eh? Yes, I know. But oh, the grunting!, you say. Can’t you hear us growling and snarling like direwolves, tigers, alligators, professional tennis players? Sure I can. It’s terrible. So is getting stuck in traffic—you think it will never end. But what about this Mag Nuk-speaking giant who’s whacking us with a flaming log?, you wonder. He raises the stakes a bit, doesn’t he, this freaky Free Folk creep with the penis face? Nope: he stinks too.
To be fair, White Walker Army, it’s not just you. It’s the entire tradition of long, boring fight scenes in movies, on TV, everywhere, made more stultifying by recent years’ onslaught of visual effects, able to conjure anything. I’m sure they enchant some of us, including their creators: you wights, for example, appear in various lovingly rendered stages of decomposition. Some of you are “super-fresh,” dead for a week or two, your flesh only beginning to fall off; some are “mid-decomps,” dead six months to two years, and looking terrible; and some are greenscreen wights, dead as a doornail with decomp to match, rattling around full of negative space. I’m not a zombie connoisseur, but to me, all of you nincompoops, however brilliantly executed, have the emotional pull of an army of ants, minus the ants’ dignified social structures and attractive formic-acid exoskeletons.
Many people love battle scenes and C.G.I.; zillions of them strap on headsets to kill friends and strangers in live-shooter video games all over the world. Plenty of those people must find zombie battles exciting, whole fields of yuckos scrapping and yelling and dying; to me, they’re just a lot of frantic silliness. But there are, in the world of entertainment, some satisfying battles—even a few decent massacres—and most lack zombies or wights. The ice battle in “Alexander Nevsky,” for example. (The Prokofiev helps.) Or the Battle of Blackwater, on “Game of Thrones.”
Remember that, White Walker Army? (You watch “Game of Thrones,” right?) Now that was a battle. Tyrion, Joffrey, Davos Seaworth; ships fighting with a castle; alchemical “wildfire” shooting through the air, making ships burst into green flames. Our hero was wounded, but he saved the day. Or the Meereen fighting-pit melee from “Dance of Dragons,” last week: the life-saving surprise spear throw, the gold-faced Sons of the Harpy, popping up and terrifying us all, the joyful stabbing and the screams of the victims. That was a thrill too. You know why? Because there were people in it. (And, O.K., a dragon.) Even Jon Snow, who, as several characters reminded us, has a pretty face and a sympathetic backstory, isn’t enough to provide all the human intrigue in a scene with seven million undead C.G.I. assholes.
“Game of Thrones,” which is part fantasy, is also mostly a drama, and those of us who are there for the drama, White Walker Army, and for the comedy, such as it is, rate you very low on the emotional-realism scale. We dread your appearance not just because you threaten Jon Snow and his cohorts but because you threaten to drag the show we love further into a realm that we find tedious. As a friend texted me recently, “It’s turning into a video game. I want to see more of Mayor Carcetti.”
We all do. Mayor Carcetti—or Littlefinger, as he’s known in this corner of the HBO kingdom—could teach you a thing or two, White Walker Army. He’s an appealing no-goodnik—a warm yet cruel whorehouse magnate who “would see this country burn if he could be king of the ashes.” In short, he’s dramatically realized, and a human, and is therefore everything you are not. If you were human, I’d risk offending you by saying this, but you’re anything but, so who cares: on behalf of my particular faction of “Game of Thrones” fans—the Littlefinger enthusiasts, the Tarly-ites, the supporters of the Targaryen restoration—I hope that, in the season finale this Sunday, Dany flies to Hardhome on Drogon and has him breathe C.G.I. flames on you and everything you inhabit. The White Walkers will shatter; the North will be paved with dragonglass. And next season, that settled, we can get back to people flaying their enemies, selling cockleshells to advance obscure revenge plots, romancing their siblings, and poisoning each other at weddings.
Yours truly,
Sarah Larson
