She didn’t follow the plan exactly, but plans have to change when their enemy changes. I’m not going to take all the credit here, but if Grey Worm hadn’t had seen that the trenches were not getting lit from the arrows and helped Melisandre get there to light the trenches, then they’d have been in big trouble. Sometimes, you just have to improvise.

That’s what Dany was doing with the dragons. They were sort of betting on the dragons being the thing that would ultimately take out the Night King, but then obviously that did not work! The plan had to change. In the fog of war, you never really know your enemy properly. There’s no way to know what they’re going to do. She did her best with what she had — if I had a dragon, I’d be on my dragon.

I always just worry when they ride the dragons without saddles or safety precautions. That’s just me.

And they should have a helmet as well! Everybody should have a helmet! I think the show just falls apart if you try to apply that kind of logic. But you do, because you believe in the characters.

What did you think about the moment when Arya killed the Night King?

I was surprised, but I like the way her story arc is set up in the show. The thing is, her last enemy is death. She has to face death. So to me, as a character moment, it seemed like there was a really beautiful poetry to that. She faced and conquered death. That’s what I’ve wanted for Arya since the beginning, really. Especially when you think about what happened to Ned, it’s been about having to face this thing that she’s terrified of and seen too much of, so that moment felt good. It felt really satisfying.

In the episode when Missandei and Grey Worm got to talk about their future, there was a beat there that showed what it was like for them to be othered in the North. I was wondering if that came about because you two ever discussed race issues with the showrunners?