What a year for surprises it has been on Game of Thrones.Jon Snow is back from the dead (along with his immortal manbun), Reviews Ramsay Bolton has swapped places with him in the afterlife, girly Sansa Stark is blossoming into a mercurial manipulator with ice in her veins.
One bombshell has arguably overshadowed all others, however. We now know the origins of the White Walkers and of their spiky-headed leader. It has, moreover, been confirmed that he is named the Night King – rather than the Night’s King of the George RR Martin novels – and differs in fundamental ways from the character in the books. And, with the final episode of the season bearing the ominous title the Winds of Winter, it is likely this harbinger of frosty doom will have one final part to play before we are done until 2017.
Amid the usual bloodshed, nudity and Tyrion c**k gags, the Walkers have tended to fade into the background, a storm on the distant horizon. But make no mistake – in elevating the Night King from quasi-mythic figure to full-fledged Big Bad, show-runners David Benioff and DB Weiss have taken one of the most significant deviations yet from the source material and positioned the White Walkers at the very heart of the drama.
Fact of life the Night’s King was a folk tale to scare children in Martin’s original telling. In the new mythology, he is essentially Lord Commander of the White Walkers, a vengeful force planning to visit sub-zero death and destruction upon the Seven Kingdoms. That’s quite an upgrade.
One frequent complaint about Game of Thrones is that it lacks a central villain to drive the narrative. Certainly the series lost some of its energy when King Joffrey spent his wedding day sputtering to death between dinner and dessert and there are fears the doggie-mediated departure of Ramsay Bolton will have a similarly debilitative effect. It is thus tempting to conclude that the Night King was bumped up to nemesis-in-chief to compensate for the exit of some of our favourite Westeros evil-doers. He’s the ultimate impact substitution, to be sprung off the bench whenever the action in the Seven Kingdoms lags.
Television demands a relatively straightforward story arc and, where Martin’s novels could arguably get away without a glowering Sauron-esque figure, the show-runners have clearly concluded things are different on the small screen. Even in the morally complex world of Westeros, we need someone to boo – and after condemning poor Hodor to a door-based demised in episode five of the latest season, it’s hard to think of anyone more deserving of having pop-corn chucked at their head than the Night King.
The big reveal this year is that the Night King was the first White Walker– the ice zombie patient zero. He was an ordinary soldier transformed into an undead monster by a dragonglass dagger plunged in his chest (no coincidence, surely, that the substance is lethal to Walkers). The fateful deed was carried out by the Children of the Forest when their war against the First Men (colonisers of Westeros circa 12,000 years before the events on the show) had started to go badly and a secret weapon was required. So they created the Game of Thrones equivalent of the atomic bomb– an ordinary man become death, destroyer of worlds.
This was explained in one of Bran’s scariest flashbacks. In the distant past, we saw the Night King-to-be tied to a Weirwood tree, struggling in terror. Leaf – the Forest Child later to sacrifice herself so that Bran and Meera could escape the Walkers and their leader – stepped forward and pushed a magical blade into his sternum. He screamed as his eyes turn an inhuman blue-on-blue.
"It was you!" Bran said to Leaf, emerging from his trance. "You made the White Walkers."
"We were at war," she responded.”We were being slaughtered. Our sacred trees cut down. We needed to defend ourselves."
This is a seismic break with the lore of the novels – potentially the most significant the show has taken. In Martin’s A Song Of Ice an Fire, the Night’s King is described as a fallen Stark lord, seduced by a mysterious women with white skin and blues eyes (are bells ringing?) who installed himself as a despotic ruler of the Night’s Watch video game reviews.
However by this point in the history of Westeros the Wall that keeps the Walkers at bay was already completed, the Children’s war with the First Men long over. The Night’s King was, it follows, a recruit to the Walker cause rather than the original of the undead species. Furthermore, Martin has indicated the character may not even be alive during the span of the books. He is a remote figure, much like Bran the Builder, creator of the Wall, or Lann the Cleaver, founder of the Lannister dynasty.
In Benioff and Weiss’s alternate timeline, he’s very much an active player in the Game of Thrones. After briefly popping up in one of Bran’s Weirwood visions early in season four, he was introduced properly when taking delivery of the last of Craster’s sons, turning the infant into a Walker with a loving fingernail stroke (the King was initially portrayed by Richard Brake but recast with stuntmanVladimir Furdik, who also portrayed the Children of the Forest’s sacrificial victim).
It was in last year’s Hardhome episode, though, that he made his grand entrance. In one of the most chilling Game of Thrones scenes yet the Night King stepped from the undead throng that had just swept aside the Wildlings and locked eyes with the fleeing Jon Snow. A sneer flashed across his spectral features as he raised his arms, resurrecting the freshly-slaughtered Free Folk as obedient ghouls. It was a display of power and a pledge to Jon of further terrors to come. In the Winds of Winter there is every possibility the Night King will make good on that promise.
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