“I don’t think of him as evil.”
As the final shot in the recent trailer for Season 8 of Game of Thrones showed, the army of the dead are coming to Winterfell as the biggest battle in the history of TV and film looks set to fill the narrative of the third episode in the upcoming season.
Tellingly, as he did during the Hardhome and Beyond the Wall episodes, it appears the Night King is keeping a safe distance from the turmoil and with good cause. Why risk your own life – is he even alive? – when you’ve an entire army of wights, White Walkers, an ice dragon, zombie polar bears, and hopefully, ice spiders, at your command.
However, as Season 8 approaches, one of the biggest mysteries in Game of Thrones revolves around the Night King’s motivations.
What does he want? Why has he decided that now is the perfect time to move south of The Wall? Can the White Walkers be pushed back – just like they were by Azor Ahai? Were the White Walkers even ‘defeated’ in combat, or did they agree to a secret pact to end the conflict? If so, what were the terms of this pact? Why has the Night King frequently given Jon Snow curious looks of interest?
Our money is on this sequence below being of massive significance.
All will be revealed… we hope!
We do know that the White Walkers were originally created by the Children of the Forest during their war with the Men, but just like Frankenstein’s monster, the Night King turned on his creators and threatened to end all life in Westeros as we know it.
We know how he was created but we don’t know why.
After all, the Night King doesn’t exist in the Song of Ice and Fire books.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss were asked about the origin of the Night King.
“It was almost logical as you went back in time, as you create the prehistory for all this. We’ve seen what the White Walkers do, we’ve seen how they perpetuate themselves and created the wights,” Weiss explained.
“If you’re going backwards, well, they made these things. So what made them? We always liked the implication that they weren’t some kind of cosmic evil that had been around since the beginning to time but that the White Walkers had a history, that something that seems legendary and mythological and permanent wasn’t.
“They had a historical cause that was comprehensible like the way the wars on screen we’re seeing unfold are comprehensible. They’re the result of people, or beings, with motivations we can understand,” he added.
In a previous interview, the actor who plays the Night King, Vladimir Furdik, discussed the motivations of his character in Season 8.
“He never wanted to be the Night King,” Furdik said.
“I think he wants revenge. People will see he has a target he wants to kill, and you will find out who that is. There’s also that moment (in Hardhome) when Jon Snow was on the boat and the Night King looked at him and raised his arms — there’s a similar and even stronger moment between Jon and the Night King this time.”
Whatever that may be, one thing is definite… winter is here.
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