“Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life.” — Aretha Franklin
I came back from The Odyssey yesterday and it was a spellbinding piece of cinema, but among everything that worked, the thing that stayed with me was Ludwig Göransson’s score during the invasion of Troy. It reminded me of the last time music took over a scene that completely, which was Game of Thrones, season eight, “The Long Night.”
I was late to the show. I hadn’t watched a single episode until July 2017, when a friend I was working with in China told me to start. Behind the great firewall there was no Google, no Facebook, no YouTube, so downloading was the only way to watch anything, and Game of Thrones was what everyone kept telling me to download. My friend in China, my brother back home, another friend living in the States who said I was missing one of the best things ever made for television. I’ve never seen peer pressure like it, before or since, and nothing has come close to that level of aura around a series in the years since it ended.
By the time the final season arrived I was back in Pune, and three friends and I made a watch party out of it for six weeks. Three of us were fanatics and one had never seen a minute of it. We’d download the episode, agree on a time once everyone was done with work, and gather at my flat. Some episodes we watched more than once, just to take the moment in. We complained endlessly over drinks about how dark everything was, how the writing was coming apart, and none of it stopped us gathering again the following week.
Say what you like about that final season, and we said plenty, but episode three, “The Long Night,” was its saving grace. It took eleven Primetime Emmy nominations and won five, including picture editing, sound editing and music composition. The last stretch of that episode is unforgettable. Winterfell has collapsed into chaos. The dead have overwhelmed the living. Jon Snow and the others are fighting a battle that increasingly looks unwinnable, and Bran is sitting in the godswood waiting while the Night King closes in.
Then the battle goes quiet. The fighting and the screaming and the dying all fade back, and what takes over is Djawadi’s piano, slow and haunting and almost peaceful. Set against men being torn apart, the calm of it turns the sequence into something closer to a funeral than a battle. Theon stands between Bran and the Night King knowing there’s no surviving it. Bran tells him he’s a good man. Theon charges, and the Night King kills him without any real effort. Theon’s arc is something worth studying, one of the best pieces of writing in the whole show. Whatever they did to the other characters by the end, and I have complaints, Theon was perfection.
Now there’s nobody left in between. The Night King walks towards Bran and the music keeps building. Elsewhere Jon is trying to reach the godswood and can’t get past Viserion, Jaime and Brienne and Sam and Tormund are barely holding on, Jorah is dying to protect Daenerys, and it feels like everyone you’ve followed for years is seconds from the end. Through all of it, that piano keeps going. The Night King reaches Bran. He looks at him, Bran looks back, and he reaches for his sword as the music hits its crescendo.
Then Arya comes out of the dark. The Night King catches her mid-air, one hand at her throat and the other around the arm holding the Valyrian steel dagger, and for a second it’s over. Then she drops the dagger, catches it in her other hand, and drives it into him. He shatters. Every White Walker shatters. Across Winterfell the entire army of the dead collapses at once, and a threat that had been marching south for seasons is finished in a moment.
All four of us sat in that flat and nobody said anything for a while. I’ve watched it many times since. The cinematography is fantastic, the editing is brilliant, and Arya’s kill is one of those things fans will argue about forever. But the intensity of the whole sequence comes from the music. Take “The Night King” away and it isn’t the same scene.
Djawadi doesn’t stop there either. After the chaos comes silence and dawn, and Melisandre, her purpose finally served, walks out beyond the gates alone. She removes the ruby necklace that’s been sustaining her, her real age catches up with her, and she goes down into the snow. The long night is over.
Across eight seasons Djawadi wrote some extraordinary music. The main theme became inseparable from the show, and “Light of the Seven” is another piece I can listen to endlessly, notable for being the first time a piano appeared in the score at all. But “The Night King” is his magnum opus. Eight minutes and fifty seconds carrying dread, desperation, sadness, hope and finally release, and that composition Emmy was his second in a row.
It’s on the playlist I ride to, and the one I put on when I’m deep in work. I’m not good at describing music, but I know I have a thing for scores that start slow and climb to something near the end, because it feels like a story arriving at its conclusion, a hero’s journey compressed into a few minutes. If you’ve watched the show, listen to it again without the scene attached. If you’ve never seen a single episode, listen anyway. Every time the piano starts I’m back at Winterfell, watching Theon charge and the Night King walk towards Bran and the dagger fall out of Arya’s hand.
