‘Game Of Thrones’ Recap: Let’s Hear It For “The Long Night” Director Miguel Sapochnik

The army of the living have won the Battle of Winterfell. That is not a sentence I ever thought I would type. The rampant speculation over the past two months all seemed to coalesce around a rather obvious fact, that there was no way the dead wouldn’t at least push our main players back. The castle would fall, and the Night King–the big bad since before we ever laid eyes on him–would keep marching south.

That didn’t happen. Arya Stark drove the catspaw dagger right into the Night King’s gut, and ended the Long Night before it truly began, a great many fan theories evaporating along with him. The requisite plot armor held fast around Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, Sansa, Arya, Jaime, Brienne, Podrick, Drogon, Sam, Gilly, Varys, Tormund, Davos, Missandei, and Grey Worm. Most strikingly, three months of continuous filming in the Belfast darkness brought us a 78-minute battle sequence that was nothing less than Miguel Sapochnik’s magnum opus as a director.

Directing for television is a thankless task a lot of the time. You are beholden to a style bible established by the showrunners and the pilot’s director. You work on an extremely tight schedule and an equally tight budget. There isn’t a lot of room to stretch your creative legs–or to stand out from the crowd.

Game of Thrones has always been different. Neil Marshall got a great deal of attention with his work on “Blackwater” in Season 2 and “Watchers on the Wall” in Season 4. Those two episode-length battles were distinctive in their visual flourishes and visceral intensity. Michelle MacLaren made her name on Breaking Bad, but her ruthless efficiency in the delineation of space carried over into four assignments across seasons three and four of GoT. David Nutter gave us the Red Wedding and so many other quieter, textured scenes across his eight episodes to date. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have allowed some measure of creative license to be taken by their directors, to the show’s benefit.

Marshall, MacLaren, and Nutter may have all put their stamp on the show, but nobody has stopped the heart the way Sapochnik’s episodes have. Among his five (with one more to go), he has carved out his own internal style within GoT‘s framework. “Blackwater” and “Watchers on the Wall” are stunning pieces of action filmmaking, but they don’t hold a candle to what Sapochnik accomplished in “The Long Night.”

Sapochnik’s episodes don’t look or sound like any others in the show’s run. “Blackwater” and “Watchers on the Wall” are intense, but still often keep the viewer at a remove from the action. The camera does drop into the middle of actual fighting, but still leaves some distance to ensure the viewer is given a full sense of space. Sapochnik doesn’t bother with that. What’s truly remarkable about “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” and “The Long Night” is the way in which we are given enough visual information to orient us in space, but are never released from the chokehold of the chaos. A director normally has to choose one or the other. Sapochnik gives us both.

The tropes of those three episodes start to emerge. When the Dothraki charge with their flaming swords, only to be snuffed out into silence, it reminds us of “Hardhome” when the wights overwhelm the wildlings on the other side of the gate. When bodies start piling high outside of Winterfell’s gates, ready to overwhelm the heroes at any moment, we can’t help but think of the mountain of corpses in “The Battle of the Bastards.” When our vision becomes literally obscured by snow, wind, and fire among the flurry of swinging swords, the pure, hopeless savagery of those two previous efforts can’t help but linger.

Sapochnik’s visual grammar for “The Long Night” is radical, but his sound design is even more so. His use of silence in “Hardhome” made that fight feel more like the horror movie a bunch of ice zombies truly belong in. The same goes for “The Long Night.” A mere thirteen discernible lines are spoken in the episode’s first 20 minutes, and we don’t get a full scene of dialogue until the 28-minute mark. The massacre of the Dothraki–their sword torches blown out far in the distance–is matched by the sudden silencing of their war cries. The vastness of the empty wasteland between the living and the dead is a chasm to the eye and to the ear.

Arya’s evasion of the wights inside the keep similarly uses silence to ratchet up the tension. The sequence is staged like the Velociraptor kitchen hunt in Jurassic Park. Its menace comes from a sharp and foreboding series of stagings, and the (literally) deathly quiet that consumes the war room. Arya hasn’t known much fear since she killed the Waif in Braavos; you can see and hear it all over her face as she tries to escape impending doom.

Sapochnik tends to bring out the best in series composer Ramin Djawadi. I often find myself irritated by the litany of variations on the main theme that pass for musical cues during most episodes. Djawadi’s pieces for Sapochnik episodes are darker, more menacing. He is at the full force of his powers in “The Long Night,” delivering a low rumbling of strings that suggest the imminence of armageddon. He works in a tick-tock rhythm to drive urgency at certain points. The orchestra hardly ever swells to a grand fanfare. They lurk, linger, and drive deep into your sense of fear.

Fear and horror aren’t Sapochnik’s only modes. He even allows for a serene moment of beauty amid the hellstorm raining down on every corner of Winterfell. Drogon and Rhaegal have taken Daenerys and Jon above the cloud line and beyond the Night King’s snow hurricane, in pursuit of the undead Viserion. This comes after a long zoom out from the battlefield, wights forging past the lit trench and ready to consume every last creature with a heartbeat. But then the camera cuts to Jon and Daenerys’s point of view, just above the clouds, looking at the stars. Viserion has evaded them, but the stillness–the peacefulness–of that sky, away from the horror below, is breathtaking. Following a brief attack by Viserion, the two living dragonriders pause, a wide shot giving us the texture of the clouds against the moon. (“We could stay here for a thousand years. No one would find us.”) That moment recalled the space-flattened shot of Jon, sword drawn, against the entire Bolton army in “The Battle of the Bastards.” Beauty and serenity can be found amid horror, if only for a brief moment.

That is Sapochnik’s greatest gift, and what makes “The Long Night” his greatest achievement. A few story issues still rankle: the plot armor silliness is frustrating, but expected at this point. What did Bran and Melisandre know, and when did they know it? Could they have informed some people beforehand to prevent extra slaughter? Who knows, and it doesn’t much matter.

What does matter is that Sapochnik has crafted a series of images and sounds that allow us to experience the full arc of war. There is fear. There is death. There is resignation. Every so often, there is beauty. Eventually, light arrives after the darkness.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• RIP Dolorous Edd, Lyanna Mormont, Beric Dondarrion, Theon Greyjoy, and Jorah Mormont. You fought well. You died well. We weep at your passing.
• Seriously though, how did all those people survive??? That is the thickest plot armor I’ve ever encountered. Sam and Podrick should be dead a thousand times over.
• Did anyone notice that Alys Karstark joined Theon in the Godswood? Just another woman showing off her power in this brave new world.
• After the dragons pause against the moon above the clouds, they dive back down into bedlam. I hope Sapochnik meant to reference the Batwing paused against the moon. That would rule.
• What might this mean for Arya? She brought down the Night King. Melisandre shepherded that event, as prophecy must have deemed it. Does this mean Arya has a larger role to play in the wars to come? Could she be Azor Ahai?
• Maisie Williams apparently began training for this battle several months before filming began. It showed. Arya has never fought in a battle, but Williams made her look positively poetic as she massacred a pack of wights.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports

Stream Game Of Thrones "The Long Night" on HBO Go