Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 3 Review: Forget Battle Of Bastards Or Red Wedding, This Is THE EPISODE That Will Haunt You Forever

From the moment Bran was pushed from that tower at the end of the first episode, every time we thought we have seen it all, Game of Thrones has proved us wrong.

After sitting through Ned’s Beheading, the Red Wedding, the destruction of Sept of Baelor, the Battle of Bastards and many other episodes where the show went where our imaginations could never go, we never thought we will be shocked ever again, by the show or in life. But this episode made us go through the same emotions that we went through while watching these all episodes too, just 10 times more intense and everything at once.

Where do we even begin? The episode opens with everyone taking a moment before the battle begins. Red Woman re-appears and lights up the sword of the Dothrakis with fire before they charge ferociously at the army of the dead. But in just 30 seconds we see the flames going off and the dread that filled us at that moment continues for the rest of the episode until it made our stomachs churn. Everything we never saw coming, happened.

The Dothrakis are wiped out of existence, Lyanna and Jorah Mormont are gone, but not before the heroic Mormont blood makes its presence felt, Theon gets his redemption but does not stay alive for a second chance and Arya does the unthinkable. Yes, she finished the Night King, hopefully once and for all.

Somewhere in all this commotion, we also see Sansa and Tyrion rethinking their marriage.

Shot like a musical, this episode had hardly any dialogues. But the exhaustion, dread or hopelessness that fills up the screen is almost too much to bear. Like in Battle of Bastards, the hopelessness and exhaustion become almost too personal, in this episode that feeling is one steroid. 

The episode has also defied all expectations in terms of visuals. The sequences where the dragons have a deadly fight in a clouded sky is surreal, to say the least. While some may have issues with visibility in the fight sequence, but it was done to evoke that sense of darkness, fear, claustrophobia and utter chaos that the characters are going through in the scene.

Although it is redundant to point out the brilliance of the makers, but it is an indescribable moment when you see all of Arya’training falling in place. She shoots the arrows like she was doing in the first episode. When Sansa says she cannot wield a weapon she utters the same words that Jon taught her when he gave her her first sword, Needle and taught her the first lesson of wielding a weapon, ‘Stick’em with the pointy end’. When there seems to be no hope left Mellisandre helps her remember the words her first teacher Syrio Forrell taught her, ‘What do you say to Death? Not today’. And finally, the deadly moves she learned at from No One and the one that Brienne questioned her about the day they were parring at Winterfell for the first time is the same move with which she kills the Night King.

With Arya, you go through this whole journey all over again and it is a feeling that is much beyond being overwhelmed.

We are exactly halfway through the season and there are only 3 episodes left. With almost all our expectations met and defied, even the biggest Game of Thrones aficionados have no clue what comes next. A part of us does not even want to know, but then we owe it to this one heck of a journey that we have been on for the last 8 years. Whether we realize it or not, GoT has long become much more than a show and this episode was a reminder of how powerful it has become in triggering our emotions. We can try writing pages and pages, but nothing will ever do justice to what we went through while watching this episode.