The third of the six final episodes of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” on Sunday night featured an epic battle that moved the series and cultural phenomenon closer to its inevitable end.

Fans had high expectations going into the episode, “The Long Night.” Who would live? (And who would not?) Would the Night King, absent from the season’s first two episodes, finally appear? Would the citizens of Winterfell actually be safe in the crypts with all those corpses waiting to reanimate?

As soon as the nearly 90-minute battle sequence began to unfold, viewers turned by the thousands to the communal water cooler we call social media, where they shared memes, thoughts, spoilers, praise and grievances in thousands of posts on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube. And as dawn arrived on the first workday of the week, many were searching Google for answers.

Fans soaked up the epic confrontation, years in the making.

The New York Times recap called the episode “a masterpiece of tension and release, goose bumps and heartbreak, grandiosity and intimacy.”