We have been building towards this for so long now.you think back the very beginning of the very first episode.and it’s beyond the wall where the white Walkers are stalking.They are a group of rangers .So this is the culmination of one of the key storylines in the whole show.and this is for everything.we are been talking for a long time.how night King’s forces have been growing in power and most of the living have been kind of openly disdainful of the threat,and now there is no choice but to fight it .

I really love the way the first ten minutes or so plays out,because there’s so much tension before there is any encounter with the enemy.you know,as much as they try to conceal it,they conceal people are terrified because this is death coming for them .You know ,so much of it is just kind of ,on one hand,setting the mood for episode,and the other hand,showing us where these characters are gonna be .the entire episode takes place in Winterfell. And u have 19or 20 characters all involved in very chaotic situation,that needs many ,many locations to service it,because it is such a long battle in this episode,it’s important that we feel the ebb and flow,And so,there are moments when you think thing are going a little bit better for the living.（Tell them to lift their swords)we felt like it was important to have that moment of  hope,when Mel comes in and lights up their arak and they all ride off into battle,we want our characters feel that this maybe this is gonna work out,maybe things will be going ok,we have seen how devastating a Dothraki charge can be just with their regular swords and now when they’re galloping into combat with flaming arak,what could possibly stand against that? What they see is just the end of the Dothraki essentially.

They have a plan and it’s important to wait for the night king to reveal himself,and the have two dragons against one dragons and a really good chance of defeating him,one thing that they couldn’t have foreseen was Danny’s reaction to seeing the Dothraki decimated.Jon is the person who wants stick to the plan,but the Dothraki are not Jon’s,they’re not loyal to Jon,they’re loyal to Daeny,and I think that Daeny cannot bring himself to just watch them die,and so the plan starts to fall apart,the second she gets on her dragon,so he does too,and then we take it from there.

We knew this episode was goons be almost entirely battle,and that can get really boring quickly,you can watch it for a certain number of minutes,before the effect starts to dampen,part of it was making sure that we really stayed focus on the characters,and so whether Ayria is ,or Sansa and Tyrion down the crypt,or Jon snow and Daeny up on the dragons,kinda like all these separate little battles within the greater battle,Leanna Mormont was supposed to be a one -scene character,and we met Bella Ramsay and we realized that we would not be doing our jobs if we kept her as a one-scene character we knew that u can’t give a big death to everyone who dies in this battle,cause it would’ve It just would’ve been too much.,but there also ,if she were to die,there was no way to to make a moment of it,so...that’s where the Zombie giant comes in,it just did add a whole level of complexity to that moment,that I am sure a lot of people,would’ve been ok with not having there if we had demanded to cut it,but I think they also understood why we needed to give one of the strongest smaller people in the show a chance to go out taking down one of the strongest larger things we’ve,we have ever seen in the show,In any situation where people are fighting,Arya needs to play a central role cause she is one of the best at it and she’s one of the most fun to watch doing it,even for Arya,she cannot take on a horde of wights by herself and especially when her head gets smacked,she is no longer at 100 percent,It’s just about survival at that point,otherwise,she’s completely unstoppable,and she never lose her cool,and it’s amazing,and it’s a lot of fun to watch,but it’s also,it’s one note,so we decided that almost rewinding the clock on who Arya Stark is to back before she became this sort of magical figure that she is become would really be interesting and would also give us a chance to change up,the nature of the story we were telling,we talked about winterfell as kind of the home for the show,and one of the things that always struck us as a horrific aspect of this is that these hallways and rooms where we spent a lot of good time and anquiet times with characters that we care about,has now become a horror set,because it’s been invaded by undead soldiers,before that point,there is sort of an agoraphobia to the whole thing,where you have this giant wide-open space and everywhere you look there’s something that could be coming to kill u,once you get inside winterfell,everything contracts,and the walls literally start to close in around you,and something is there in the dark with you,but you don’t know exactly where it is,and we thought that the pace change and the tonal change was really important to have that in this episode,otherwise the episode would start to feel monotonous.we thought that is important whatever the plan was,that it not just work out,cause that would be kind of dull.while there is no reason to know for certain that the fire would not kill or destroy the night king,there’s also no particular reason to believe that it would and then,a few moments after this happens,the night king brings them a whole new,larger undead problem by taking all of their own who have been killed in the course of this battle.

I mean,we talked about various endings for Jorah for a long time,but u know,u think about Jorah from the very first time,we met him,he was with Daeny,and from that time,he is been mostly by her side,part of Jorah’s tragedy is that he was in love with a woman who couldn’t love him back,but he is accepted that for quite a long time at the same time he was going to fight for her as long as he could and as well as he could,there’d never been a moment where she more needed someone to fight to protect her than this moment.if he could’ve chosen a way to die ,this is how he would’ve chosen to die,so,it was something we thought would be powerful to give him.

The reason the Godwood was chosen is because it’s such a source of power for those who believe in the old gods,and for Bran in particular ,so we know the weirwood tree and the three-eyed raven have a very deep connection.That was always the location where Bran was going to be waiting for the Night king,It’s not like the show is entirely about people redeeming themselves and then it’s all over,but if the canvas is big enough,there’re spaces for those redemptive moments,I think what was really important for Theon at the end was hearing that thank you from Bran.

I think it’s probably three years now or something we’ve known that it was gonna be Arya who delivers that fatal blow.she seemed like the best candidate,provided we weren’t thinking about her in that moment.