Most of the battles in “Game of Thrones” are between massive armies, but the battle out on the ice in “Beyond the Wall” is a bit different because it’s an army of White Walkers and Wights attacking a bunch of individuals. It’s chaos, and eventually dragons show up to make it even more chaotic, but the most riveting part for many fans comes when Tormund nearly dies and it appears, for a moment, that he’s really gone. Taylor explained that there were only seven characters to focus on but they were all important to the audience, so they decided to make the battle more of a “matter of intimacy” instead of scale. Tormund’s near-death makes the stakes feel so much higher, and then it serves as a perfect one-two punch when Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is in much worse peril. Taylor told Vulture:
“When Tormund almost gets killed on the island, that wasn’t in the script. That was something we fabricated because we wanted to use the fact that the audience cares about these characters and is sort of expecting somebody to die. I did a calculation thing: ‘Well, it’s believable Tormund could die here. [Laughs.] No one thinks Jon Snow is going to die in the penultimate episode of season 7.’ So we didn’t go into that a lot. He had some wonderful action, but we didn’t put him in peril the way we did Tormund on the island. Even when Jon falls into the ice, I think you sort of think he’s coming back again.”
Jon Snow miraculously survives, perhaps because of the fan theory that he’s the true Azor Ahai reborn or perhaps because it just didn’t make sense to kill him off twice, but it’s scary anyways.