How Arya's tedious arc in Game of Thrones paved the way for the show's most satisfying moment

Having spent eight seasons at the centre of some of the HBO show's most yawn-inducing scenes, Arya deserves this triumph, writes Nick Hilton

Monday 29 April 2019 07:00 BST
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Game of Thrones - Season 8 Episode 3 - trailer

*Spoilers follow – you have been warned*

You can find our review of the episode here

So, in the end it was Arya Stark in the Godswood with the catspaw dagger. Who saw that coming?

Just when hope looked lost and the Night King was closing in on a helpless Bran Stark (“Bran… I am your father,” I half expected him to say), Arya appeared out of nowhere, catching the White Walkers’ head honcho off guard by dropping her knife from one hand to the other. It’s a very human trick, almost a cheat, and one she learnt in the show’s first season. “You said right,” she replied indignantly to her “dancing master”, Syrio Forel, when he knocked the sword from her hand during one of their first classes, “but you went left!” “And now you are a dead girl,” he replied coolly.

Arya has learnt her lesson, and it’s been a long time coming. This episode was the culmination of eight seasons that have seen Arya slip from her plum narrative position into the turgid depths of the Essosi quagmire (the same geographical separation that kept Dany’s storylines from being truly interesting until the arrival of Tyrion), only to make a heroic return to Westeros as a fully-fledged assassin. If anyone deserved such a triumphant moment, it was Arya.

It is easy to forget that, at the end of Game of Thrones’ fourth season, Arya set sail on a ship to Braavos, not to set foot on home soil until the final episode of the sixth season, when she serves Walder Frey his own sons in a pie. The most exciting things to happen to Arya during those two seasons abroad were her occasional forays into wearing other people’s faces, some short-term blindness, and a smattering of theatre watching and oyster selling. There has been little on Game of Thrones more yawn-inducing than her antagonistic relationship with The Waif (a character whose undercooked dullness is typified by her lack of name), which climaxed when, once again, she recalled Syrio Forel, and murdered her in the dark.

It felt at times like Arya’s spell in Braavos might leave her like her brother Bran – dead behind the eyes, speaking ominous truisms, and certainly not getting it on with a hot blacksmith on the eve of battle. It was a huge relief therefore, when she slit the throat of Meryn Trant, breaking her covenant with the Faceless Men. That was the old Arya, the Arya we knew and loved. The Arya who made a list of the enemies she would kill, who showed mercy to The Hound, who – I’ll say it again – would serve Walder Frey the meat of his own children in a delicious pie before cutting his neck.

In this episode, “The Long Night”, Arya’s journey unravels against the chaos of fire and swords. She starts on the battlement of Winterfell with her sister Sansa, side by side where, at the show’s opening, they had been strangers in the same place. Either end of a horror-soaked sequence in Winterfell’s library (which was burned during the attempt on Bran’s life, which would be recalled later on), she spends the episode in the company of The Hound, Beric Dondarrion and Melisandre, the Red Woman. All three of them were on Arya’s list, but, it seems, all three of them have been forgiven (not that it helped the latter two, who both met valiant deaths during the battle). Game of Thrones is always very precise about which characters it teams up at crucial moments (see, for example, the shot of Jaime and Brienne fighting back to back, their two Valyrian steel swords raised to remind you that they are two halves of the same whole, Ice, which was forged to protect Winterfell). Here, the balance is between Arya’s vengeance and her mercy.

It is Lady Melisandre who echoes the words of Syrio in this episode (seriously, have her and Bran been bingeing the box sets? They seem to know all the best lines). “What do we say to the God of Death?” she asks Arya. “Not today,” Arya replies now, as her instructor taught her all those years ago, when she was just a child with a wooden sword. That was before she went to Braavos, Syrio’s home, to serve the Many-Faced God, a god of death.

When Arya finishes the Night King, saving Bran’s life (and, let’s face it, all of humanity), it is fitting that she does it with the Valyrian steel catspaw dagger that was, way back in the first season, sent by Prince Joffrey to silence Bran. Like Arya, the knife has been on a journey; in many ways it sparked the War of the Five Kings, with the Starks believing it proof of the Lannisters’ malign intents. Its true purpose, however, was not the petty squabbles of lords and ladies, as Bran knew when he gave it to Arya, but the fight between the living and the dead.

Syrio Forel is only in three episodes of the show’s first season, but he taught Arya everything she needed to know. Her arc has been a punishing one – for viewers too – that came full circle in “The Long Night”. After the euphoria of stabbing evil incarnate in the void where a heart would be, it might be hard for Arya to top that moment in the show’s final three episodes. But hey, at least Gendry survived the battle.

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