Six years since Arya Stark killed the Night King in Game of Thrones and I still believe the sequence could've been handled better 

Disclaimer: The following piece reflects the personal opinions of the writer

Game of Thrones ran successfully for eight seasons on HBO. However, it's also true that while the first five seasons of Game of Thrones were adapted from George R. R. Martin's The Song of Fire and Ice book series, the showrunners eventually exhausted the literary source material by the end of the fifth season and as a result had to relied on their own creative judgment to develop the storyline for seasons six to eight.

This naturally resulted in several narrative disjunctures and missing plot points between the book series and the HBO show, with chief among them being the act of Maisie Williams' Arya Stark swooping down and killing the Night King in the third episode of the show's final season. While the sequence does merit a few praises, I'm generally of the opinion that it was rather half-baked and could have maximized its impact had it been handled better.

Here's everything that you should know.

Arya Stark killing the Night King so easily on Game of Thrones season 8 felt out of place

Game of Thrones is a long-drawn show that has the advantage of using narrative storytelling to further the dramatic device of foreshadowing. While the very act of Arya Stark killing the Night King with her Catspaw Dagger was momentary in duration and unfolded rather too hastily for the benefit of the episode, the killing had been foreshadowed throughout the previous seven seasons of the HBO show.

Arya put to use the skill of Lightfootedness that she had picked up during her time with the Faceless Men. The murder weapon, i.e., the Catspaw Dagger, was portrayed throughout the show as having extraordinary significance. Arya was also, in a way, set up by the narrative to be destined for this act, with lines like "what do we say to the God of Death" lingering in the background and prophesying about her ultimate destiny.

Despite building up to this huge showdown moment throughout seven seasons, the confrontation between Arya Stark and the formidable Night King came and went rather unceremoniously in front of my eyes. It seemed immensely irrational to me at the time that Arya could jump down from a pile of wights and draw her Catspaw Dagger on the Game of Thrones villain, and the latter would resist only in so far as grabbing the dagger, by which time the blow had already landed, and he was dead.

It also seemed convenient to me that with the death of the Night King, Arya had single-handedly defeated the huge surrounding army of the White Walkers. The attack scene itself underscores this point. As the scene unfolded, Arya was seen using the heavy mist to her advantage in approaching her target. I was always under the notion that when it came to executing epic fantasy-based battles on screen, Game of Thrones went in all guns blazing. It felt uncharacteristic of the HBO title to invest so little time in depicting an event that held such strong narrative importance.

With the release of the GOT season eight making-of documentary, the whole creative process that went on behind the scenes during the filming of the show's eighth season came to the forefront. The documentary is titled The Last Watch and portrays a script reading session involving the cast during which a passage highlighting the scene in question was being read:

"The Night King walks with methodical, terrifying calm. He stops before Bran and raises his sword to strike, but something is hurtling towards him out of the darkness. Arya. She vaults off a pile of dead wights, leaps at the Night King and she plunges the dagger through the Night King’s armor. The Night King shatters."

While the scene may come across as convincing and even shocking enough on the page, it likely lost some of its impact in the translation from script to screen. You will also notice that the gesture of the Night King grabbing Arya Stark is not there in the script itself, suggesting that it might have been incorporated during the filming.

Even after the attack, Arya's whereabouts and her eventual purpose weren't clearly established by Game of Thrones season 8, after she embarked on her travel to the west of Westeros. All in all, I felt that the final season of an otherwise great show had somehow bit off more than it could chew to mark its farewell.

Game of Thrones stunt co-ordinator opens up about Arya slaying the Night King

It is on account of the exceptionally talented stunt co-ordinator Rowley Irlam, who leads his division of stunt performers, that the action sequences of Game of Thrones went on to assume epic proportions. Irlan spoke in an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter back in 2019, wherein he dissected the much-talked-about scene of Arya killing the Night King:

"We built on Maisie’s skill set and Arya’s story over the previous seasons. Her and Kit’s stories have been running at the same time. Once she knew she had this pivotal part to play, we needed to give her a story to get her there — hence her quarter-staff fight turning into double sticks, then getting attacked by the big wight, who is actually Dave Bautista’s stunt double, a guy called Rob de Groot. He came in for one night only at the request of Miguel. We had done an original gladiator fight with him in Croatia in season five, and Miguel wanted him."

He further added:

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"We filmed this whole journey of Arya jumping over the roof, followed by three wights chasing her. Then she falls off and into the library. There’s a whole story there that builds up to her attacking and killing the Night King, played by Vladimir Furdik, who I’ve worked with in an excess of 20 years. It was a challenge. We shot the end piece twice. We shot it on location. It was never as clean for us as we wanted, purely because of the crane and how we could rig it. We did half of it on location, but the actual impact, we reshot and fine tuned on a stage."

Game of Thrones is exclusively available on Max.

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