Game of Thrones failed the Night King, and I’m still mad about it

After almost a decade of hype, the show's biggest villain was a big disappointment

Furdik responded bluntly:

“No, they didn’t give me [much]. There were a couple of discussions with the directors, but nothing particular about what he was supposed to do. They built the Night King step by step. It’s something like how you put a plant in the ground, and you’re waiting to see how the plant [turns out].”

Furdik’s words sum up not just the Night King’s trajectory across Game of Thrones, but the show’s entire final season. It often felt like showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were making up the story episode by episode with no overarching plan — especially after they blew past George R.R. Martin’s original, unfinished book series and began to chart their own course toward an ending. And the Night King is perhaps the most egregious example — an embarrassing, unforced blunder I’m still mad about seven years later.

The issues with the Night King date back to his earliest appearance in Game of Thrones, and that’s because he was entirely invented for the show. There is no Night King in the books. There is a character known as Night's King, but the two don’t have much in common.

The Night King is an immortal ice zombie who was created by the Children of the Forest (magical non-human creatures) as a weapon against humans roughly 10,000 years before the events of the show. During that time, he raised an army of undead White Walkers in an effort to wipe out all living beings.

The Night’s King, meanwhile, was a Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch who fell in love with a female White Walker and brought her inside the Wall. He then ruled for 13 more years while carrying out human sacrifices at the behest of his undead bride, until House Stark and an army of Free Folk united to defeat him. This all happened roughly 8,000 years before the events of the Song of Ice and Fire books, and the characters consider it a legend, not historical fact.

The point being, Benioff and Weiss made up the Night King by riffing on a minor detail from the books, but they don’t seem to have had any clear idea what they wanted to do with him. This became increasingly obvious in the show’s final season, once the Night King and his army breached the Wall and began their invasion of Westeros.

While the White Walkers had been framed as the show’s ultimate “Big Bad,” the existential threat that could finally unite Westeros, none of that ever happened. Even after Jon Snow (Kit Harington) schlepped a White Walker all the way to King’s Landing, Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) still refused to send her forces north to help defend Westeros from an undead invasion. Humanity seemed doomed, and many fans speculated that the Night King would steamroll through the northern stronghold of Winterfell and head south for the capital, leading to a final all-out confrontation between the living and the dead.

Instead, the White Walkers showed up in Winterfell in episode 3 of Game of Thrones’ final season for a big, epic, too-dark-to-see battle that ended somewhat anticlimactically when Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) stabbed the Night King with Valyrian steel and killed him. Seconds later, his undead army crumbled into dust.

While the Night King’s death mostly made sense from a plot perspective, it was a letdown on a thematic level. After years of hype, the existential threat that cryptic prophecies had been warning of for centuries was suddenly dealt with, leaving seven more episodes to slog through until the finale. And the fact that Game of Thrones only got worse from there seemed to underline how Benioff and Weiss had squandered their best tool far too quickly.

The fact that the show never addressed the Night King’s motivations directly was an extra blow. This was no brainless zombie, after all. Furdik’s villain was cunning and clever, often outwitting his human enemies. There was clearly some intelligence behind his eerie blue eyes. But none of that ultimately mattered.

If it’s any consolation, Furdik did attempt to explain the Night King’s motivations in a post-finale documentary aired on HBO.

“I think he’s angry; he did not want to be the Night King,” he said. “The Children of the Forest, they’ve changed him, and now he’s [like], ‘Okay, you want me to be Night King? I’m going to kill you.’”

There’s something interesting about this answer, and the idea that the Night King isn’t some ineffable force of evil, he’s just a guy stuck in a zombie body, lashing out for vengeance. But that was never actually confirmed in the show itself, and it’s cold comfort (no pun intended) for Game of Thrones fans who spent almost a decade obsessing over the Night King and his evil intentions. After building up the villain as a monumental prophesied force of evil, the best explanation we got was, "He's an angry dude."

The fans deserved better. Furdik deserved better. But most of all, the Night King deserved better.