Why Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi used a piano piece to close out the Battle of Winterfel

Vulture

"The Long Night's" callback to the piano piece in the Season 6 "The Winds of Winter" finale "was 100 percent intentional," says Djawadi. "When I talked to Miguel (Sapochnik), the director, and when David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) came to my studio and we started working on this episode, we all agreed that it had to be a piano piece again, just like 'Light of the Seven.' That was the first time we’d used piano in the show; it really meant something different. You realize Cersei’s up to something and it all blows up. By using it again, we wanted to have the reverse effect. The piano comes in and people go, 'Uh-oh, here comes the piano again. Something’s unraveling!' There was little hope throughout the episode. They’ve fought and fought, but the Night King is just unstoppable. Then he comes walking in, and the piano itself represents, like, 'This is really it! It’s over!' Then there’s that big twist in the end. It definitely misled the audience because of what they knew from 'Light of the Seven,' back in season six. We always treated the music as another character in the show."

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• Westeros deserves a much better hero than Jon Snow: "Both as a leader and as a protagonist, as one of the series’s primary load-bearing characters, Jon is one of the most ineffectual people on the entire show," says Chaim Gartenberg. "He fails almost perpetually, blundering his way from one situation to the next until someone — usually a more competent woman, including but not limited to Ygritte, Melisandre, Sansa, Arya, and Daenerys — bails him out of his latest problem. Then he’s rewarded, and the cycle repeats again. The best, and really only, thing Jon Snow has going for him is that he’s a nice and honorable guy. In Westeros, this is not a good thing."
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