Who Died on Game of Thrones “Beyond the Wall”?

At the end of last week’s episode we saw Game of Thrones strain plot credulity in order to walk seven named heroes—Jon, the Hound, Jorah, Tormund, Gendry, Beric, Thoros—into a fight they could not possibly win. This was, everyone rightly surmised, a suicide mission. Seven men, however battle-tested, were not going to come out of a clash against the army of the undead unscathed.

But, hilariously, as Weiss was saying exactly how much that non-Drogon dragon mattered to Daenerys, the editors at HBO played clips of Daenerys scenes with Drogon because that’s literally the only dragon they’ve shown her bonding with.

And as little an overall impact this spare dragon has, the sacrifice of an undead barely-there character like uncle Benjen has even less. (Why, exactly, did he not have time to join Jon on that back of that horse? As showrunner David Benioff helpfully explains in the behind-the-scenes interview for this week: “There just isn’t any time.”) For a show that once built its reputation on killing anyone at any time, Game of Thrones has become surprisingly toothless in its old age.

And to Arya after multiple and terrible stab wounds to the gut in “The Broken Man.”

And again to Jaime Lannister in this year’s “Spoils of War.”

When giving interviews about the battle between Bronn/Jaime and Daenerys/Drogon, showrunners Weiss and Benioff proudly pointed out that they had arranged a showdown (between Jaime and Daenerys) where viewers would be upset if someone on either side died. But that kind of tension feels cheap if neither side actually suffers. Jaime wasn’t captured or even singed for his troubles. And, no, we won’t count the death of Dickon Tarly as a major loss in that battle when people weren’t even sure what his name was for most of the season.

That brings us to tonight’s episode where, again and again, heroes whom the show had no intention of killing off were put in impossible-to-escape situations. Whether it was Tormund buried in wights. . .

. . .or Jorah dangling off the side of Drogon.

The most egregious of all, again, was Jon Snow, who seemed to drown in an icy lake being pulled down by an army of wights. Even the King in the North couldn’t seem to believe his luck when, once again, he defied all odds and, with zero explanation as to how, emerged unscathed.

But unbelievable survival seems to be the new world order on Game of Thrones, where we would surprised if a battle episode didn’t end in a deus ex machina like the Knights of the Vale, a lunging Bronn, Daenerys and her dragons, or Benjen and his fiery flail. Instead, in this episode, it was up to the red shirts (a.k.a. the unnamed wildlings) joining Jon on this foolish quest to make up the “good guy” body count. The fact that every single one of them died this week is unsurprising but also very boring storytelling.

If Jon Snow is basically unkillable at this point, then the show needs to stop pretending it might off him and start killing off other major characters in the meantime. The high body count last season was mostly fed by recently returned characters who only had a flash of screentime before dying. Osha, the Blackfish, Balon, and, yes, Rickon all returned just to die. Side characters, both beloved and not, like Olenna, the Sand Snakes, Walder Frey, and the Tarlys are similar low-stakes fodder this year. And while last season’s blockbuster sept explosion felt massive, it was really only Margaery Tyrell who proved a significant loss.

I’d say the only deaths in the past three seasons that have truly felt like a tragic, Martin-esque twist of the knife have been Oberyn Martell in Season 4 and Hodor (a Martin-planned fatality) in Season 6. And we can have some sympathy for Weiss, Benioff, and the rest of the Game of Thrones writing staff here. How do you deliver poignant and unexpected deaths on a show where a) you’re out of source material to work with and b) your show has become famous for its fatal surprises. Truly, how can anything surprise at this point?

But still, I’d trace all this hollow-feeling carnage back to the resurrection of Jon Snow—which still feels like it has no enduring consequences in the world of Game of Thrones. Ditto the (admittedly welcome) return of the Hound. Sandor Clegane also doesn’t die in the books, but don’t all these resurrections make death feel cheap in Westeros when once it was the show’s most famous calling card? The show seems to be coasting on the audience’s expectation that anyone could die to try to make us swallow unbelievable cliffhanger after unbelievable cliffhanger.