True, Dany still does have two dragons to the White Walkers’ one: her own Drogon, and the currently riderless Rhaegal. Can it breathe fire, and if so, will that fire have any special properties? Will someone ride it? Can it fly over the Wall? How can it be killed?īut the loss of Viserion - named for Dany’s late brother Viserys, who himself died back in season one - does a great deal to level the playing field between Team Humanity and Team White Walkers. There’s much we don’t yet know about the wight dragon. The otherworldly invading army that wants to wipe out human life now has its ultimate weapon. The Night King will have no such scruples. She could have quickly and easily killed Cersei Lannister and taken over Westeros, but she and Tyrion feared that unleashing the dragons will kill too many innocent people. Much of Game of Thrones’ seventh season has been devoted to discussing - and, occasionally, showcasing - the immense destructive power of Dany’s dragons. So Game of Thrones’ showrunners needed to raise the stakes.Įnter the wight dragon - Dany’s "child" Viserion, killed and reanimated. It’s true that dragonfire may not be able to kill White Walkers, but if their ground troops could be so easily decimated, this final battle for humanity probably wouldn’t be all that difficult. And then Dany’s dragons came along and torched the wights in great numbers. Except for a few redshirts (and Thoros, who wears a red cloak) our heroes hacked away at them relatively easily. In “Beyond the Wall,” the threat of the wights was less impressive. The best our heroes could do was fend them off for a while and then retreat. Game of Thrones has staged terrifying spectacles featuring attacks from the wights, most notably in season five’s “Hardhome” and season six’s “The Door.” In both instances, the apparently endless supply of wights simply kept coming. Martin’s books, but Game of Thrones writer Dave Hill confirmed in a recent interview that the show has deliberately changed this.) Finally, we also learned in “Beyond the Wall” that, if a White Walker is killed, all of the wights it has reanimated will collapse en masse. On the TV show, dragonglass also has a special power to destroy wights. They appear to take direction from the Walkers.įire can kill wights, as we saw in grand fashion this week when Dany unleashed her dragons, and they apparently won’t touch water, either. What they lack in intelligence they make up for in relentlessness and sheer numbers. They’re mainly humans, but we’ve also seen horses and giants among them - and, in this episode, a bear and a dragon. Second, wights are the zombie reanimated corpses that populate the vast majority of the White Walkers’ army. Indeed, there are signs it can’t we’ve seen White Walkers walk straight through fire, apparently extinguishing it by the power of their cold. It is not clear if fire - even dragonfire - can kill them. Game of Thrones has established that White Walkers can be killed with either Valyrian steel or dragonglass, and we’ve seen four killed in total (one by Samwell Tarly in season three, one by Jon Snow in season five, one by Meera Reed in season six, and another by Jon in “Beyond the Wall”). The Night King appears to be the first White Walker and their leader. White Walkers are created from living humans through some sort of magical process. It is not clear how many of them there are, but there don’t appear to be very many - we rarely see more than five or so together at one time, but we don’t know how many groups of them are roaming around. Let’s start off with a vocabulary reminder:įirst, the White Walkers are the blue-skinned, otherworldly beings that have the power to reanimate the dead. A primer on the White Walkers, wights, and what kills them A White Walker on the left, the Night King on the right. For now, that remains an untested theory (Jon’s party didn’t get close enough to the Night King this week), but it sure seems to be a way that Game of Thrones could wrap up this final conflict very neatly. 6 winners and 7 losers from Game of Thrones’ "Beyond the Wall"īut Jon Snow and company also came to an important realization in “Beyond the Wall” that could well be setup for the eventual climax of the series: They noticed that if a White Walker dies, all of the corpses it reanimated collapse as well.Īnd through a leap of logic that wasn’t entirely explained, Beric Dondarrion suggested that all it would take to stop the entire undead army would be to kill the Night King.
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