Review of 'Game of Thrones' 8.2

Among my favorite scenes in tonight's episode 8.2 of Game of Thrones, in which every scene was a memorable gem, Jamie was pivotal in both of them:

First, at the beginning, when Jamie refuses to apologize for what he did to everyone, including Bran, and Brienne comes to his defense.

And then, a little later, when Jamie apologizes to Bran, and Bran explains he is no longer Bran, but something else, a living keeper of all memories and human history.

Apologies are obsolete with the Night King and his dead forces approaching. But memories are everything. Bran understands this—as does Sam—so Bran offers himself as bait to draw out the Night King. As Sam explains so well, death is absolute forgetting on the part of the individual who has died. Therefore, the Night King, in his quest to destroy humanity, needs to destroy the keeper of all human memories—Bran. Just as the Nazis burned books, and millennia earlier, retrograde forces burned the ancient Library of Alexandria.

This is the essence of the Night King's quest. But, though almost all the humans defending Winterfell and thus humanity—and an impressive force they are, including the newly knighted Brienne, and Arya being with a man for the first time, in two other great scenes—expect to die in the upcoming battle, I'm with Tyrion in being something of an optimism. Certainly not all of the heroes, male and female, will die. Is it too much to ask that it be none of them?

One quibble (as always): why was there no discussion of the dragons in the approaching battle? We saw the two surviving dragons last week, right? Where are they now? And, where exactly is the dragon who is now with the dead?

See you next week.