Sunday’s episode of “Game of Thrones,” titled “The Long Night,” just became the most-tweeted-about television episode of all time.
The show led users to pump out more than 7.8 million tweets ― which is more tweets about “Thrones” than any other TV episode in history. (A spokesperson for Twitter noted that this record is only among scripted television shows.)
Fans of the fantasy series are clearly gaining momentum on social media as the eighth and final season continues. The season premiere, which aired April 14, is the second-most-tweeted-about television episode of all time; that show garnered more than 5 million tweets.
If you’re all caught up with the show ― yes, this is your spoiler warning ― then you can surely understand why Twitter was abuzz. With its 67 minutes of intense fighting, the nearly hour-and-a-half episode was rife with undead warriors, dueling dragons and the deaths of adored characters.
Additionally, the key villain of the entire series, the Night King, was finally taken down by one of the fan favorites, Arya Stark. That event involved the two most-tweeted-about characters of the evening: 1. Arya and 2. Night King.
Of the extremely talked-about moment, the actress who plays Arya, Maisie Williams, told Entertainment Weekly that she “thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn’t deserve it.”
“The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them,” Williams told the publication.
“It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, ‘Well, [the villain] couldn’t have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.’ You gotta make it cool.”
Williams later realized that her character’s arc had been intentional to lead up to that scene of her taking on the Night King so she was pleased she was the one who got to deliver the jab to end the Great War.
“It all comes down to this one very moment,” she said. “It’s also unexpected and that’s what this show does.”