In a Game of Thrones Season 6 post-mortem interview with Deadline, Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss laid out their vision for the rest of Game of Thrones , shedding light not only on the series’ future, but also its most enigmatic leader, the undead Night King north of The Wall.
There are two more seasons of Game of Thrones remaining, with 13 episodes between them. According to Benioff, Season 6 ends with all the conditions in place for the final conflict.
“We’re trying to tell one cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end,” Benioff said. “Daenerys is finally coming back to Westeros; Jon Snow is king of the North and Cersei is sitting on the Iron Throne. And we know the Night King is up there, waiting for all of them. The pieces are on the board now. Some of the pieces have been removed from the board and we are heading toward the end game.”
The coming conflict has been narrowed to four combatants, down one from the War of the Five Kings that consumed Game of Thrones ’ early seasons. We’ve come a long way from Renly, Robb, Stannis, Joffrey and Balon.
But while we have become intimately familiar with Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, there’s one leader in the coming fight from whom we’ve never heard a word: the Night King (known as the Night’s King in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series).
And it seems we never will. According to Weiss, the Night King will never speak. But Benioff says he’ll find a way past The Wall:
“What is laid out in this season is, very clearly, that the wall isn’t just a physical structure keeping the army of the dead out. If the Wildlings managed to make it over, which they have, and the Night King has so much more in the way of both power and troops who’ll do literally anything he says…we’ll keep it at that for now.”
The bigger surprise (and a bit of a disappointment) is that the Night King will not be much more developed as a character. Unlike everyone else in the world of Game of Thrones, he’s not a shade of gray.
“I don’t think of the Night King as a villain as much as, Death. He is not like Joffrey, or Ramses. He’s not really human anymore, Weiss told Deadline. “In some ways, he’s just death, coming for everyone in the story, coming for all of us. In some ways, it’s appropriate he doesn’t speak. What’s death going to say? Anything would diminish him. He’s just a force of destruction. I don’t think we’ve ever been tempted to write dialogue for the Night King. Anything he said would be anticlimactic.”
It seems the Night King will remain silent, even as the dragonfire melts his face.
