WicNet Awards: And the Most Dramatic Moment of Season 5 is…
…the Night’s King resurrecting all the recently fallen Night’s Watchmen and wildlings as wights. Down with humanity!
Despite all the heavy lifting the show did in the last half of Season 5, this moment was likely always going to come out on top. While our writers sang the praises of a number of other intense scenes, the final beats of the Massacre at Hardhome dominated our poll, with the burning of Shireen providing the only real competition.
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Ani Bundel effectively summed up why this bit hit viewers so hard.
In that moment, that one dramatic glorious moment, everyone saw the real enemy and the real stakes. The game of thrones? It’s bupkis, a distraction while the cold fires burn high in the North.
Whether you’re a fan of the books or the show, or both, you’ve been told that “Winter is Coming” for years now. And yet, for five books, George R.R. Martin has been content to let winter rage way up north while various characters jockeyed for power down south. David Benioff and Dan Weiss, on the other hand, are looking toward the ending of the show, so they decided to bring winter down a bit early. The Night’s King’s mass resurrection gave winter a frightening, implacable presence. It was, to again borrow a phrase from Ani, “a cold dead-headed bitch slap across the faces of book readers and show watchers alike.”
We’ve always known that, ultimately, the political maneuvering that makes up the heart of both the show and books wouldn’t mean much once the White Walkers breached the Wall. It’ll be hard for Cersei to maintain a grip on any kind of power, for example, when her supporters are freezing to death in their own hearths, and Daenerys’ attempts to control Slaver’s Bay are going to seem inconsequential when the Others are stampeding through the land she hopes to conquer.
And yet, before “Hardhome,” we’d seen so little of the White Walkers that it was almost possible to treat them as some of those disbelieving southron lords did: as a fairy tale, a vague threat that could be put off, if it even needed to be dealt with at all. However, after seeing the Night’s King turn a field of freshly fallen dead into an unstoppable zombie army, it becomes much harder to ignore. Winter is coming, it’s bringing a lot of friends, and unless these lords and ladies miraculously band together to face it, it’s going to catch everyone unprepared.
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