Warning: This post contains mild spoilers for season seven of Game of Thrones

It’s hard to reinvent the zombie given these creatures have had near-infinite variations in the decades since George Romero took the undead mainstream. There’s no real incentive to drastically innovate today, either. Come up with a clever spin (say, The Girl With All The Gifts with zombie-dom as a genetic trait passed down through generations) and people may still ultimately dismiss a work as “just another zombie thing.” Indulge our basest, most well-tread zombie desires (Walking Dead) on the other hand, and you could comfortably attract an audience.

But when I recently started watching Game of Thrones through osmosis (aka sharing the same living room with a show obsessive), I found my attention drawn to a single entity. George RR Martin seems to have baked in an olive branch for outsiders wading into Westeros waters late: a certain soulless, frigid, nightmarish species. And the way they work is fascinating for anyone, series diehard or otherwise, who likes the greater body of zombie fiction.

Choosing the right details for winter

Game of Thrones likely benefits by only recently having the White Walkers and wights come to the forefront. You may call it a “dragon show” or an “incest and murder show,” but Game of Thrones is described as “zombie fiction.” Genre expectations (or, at least, zombie-specific ones) don’t exist here. Thus, the show is free to embrace only the tropes that work for this story and to implement more interesting wrinkles on the form otherwise.

Gone, for instance, is the insatiable hunger for human flesh. The White Walkers/wights still possess the capability to overwhelm and recruit near infinite numbers, but fear comes from the seeming inevitability of their arrival and insurmountable size of the force, rather than any jump-scare near-misses of teeth or drops of blood. Here, the dead may still be converted into undead, but it seems to be a more intentional process. The White Walkers need to consciously choose to convert someone or some thing they slay. Accordingly, the group prioritizes things like zombie dragons, zombie giants, and zombie bears rather than mindlessly being driven to consume and convert every bit of flesh.

At the same time, Thrones does well to maintain perhaps the two most defining characteristics of good zombie drama: representation and understanding. In the best zombie works, the undead always represents something more than meatless bones. World War Z seemed to speak to xenophobia. Romero saw societal-threats like racism and the Vietnam war in his masterworks. 28 Days Later evoked the potential for viral outbreaks (while hinting at post-9/11 government and military control enabled by terror). Great zombies exist as an analogy for whatever mindless, rapidly spreading thing is taking over the population at a given time. Thrones implements its White Walkers well in this regard, too.

“This isn’t about living in harmony; it’s just about living,” Jon Snow of the cold, frigid North tells the adversarial Cersei of the “seems fine here” South. “If we don’t win this fight, then [death] is the fate of every person in the world.” It doesn’t take a rocket (or climate ) scientist to see a force capable of causing extreme, unexpected weather events that threatens all of humanity as something more than swords and skeletons.

This larger metaphorical purpose is typically more impactful when it goes hand in hand with understanding—trend X is sweeping the nation, let’s depict the struggle to figure it out in the face of its potential danger. The very best zombie films of the past 15 years get this, and everything from modern classics (28 Days Later) to parodies of the form (Shaun of the Dead) is driven to some degree by characters’ motivation to understand the chaos unraveling around them.

In 28 Days Later, the zombie virus (called “rage” in the film) jumps to humans in a lab where scientists study chimps suffering from bloodlust characteristics. And after the apocalypse begins, the four survivors the film follows constantly push on, hoping to find a military base broadcasting messages of safety and cures. You can probably guess how that turns out (the military’s grasp on the virus is limited at best, and the zombie they’re “studying” isn’t helpful in the end). But the plot is unquestionably propelled by the survivors’ desire to understand what’s going on around them. (The film’s radical alternative ending only furthers the necessity of understanding—as the four survivors eschew the military and find a scientist who offers them a true, albeit seemingly fatal, solution.)

As for Shaun of the Dead, Shaun and Ed discover the means to fend off the undead through TV news reports (theoretically seekers of knowledge), and the film’s ending is entirely based on the premise that understanding a zombie apocalypse is feasible. So even if the logistics of Jon Snow’s season seven plan make little sense, the motivation stays true to the genre. That quest for knowledge dictates decisions (and a tad of irrationality, perhaps), so of course Snow is willing to risk physical harm beyond the wall or down in King’s Landing in order to further understanding of this societal threat.

Making a good war The Great War

If Thrones used zombie best practices and called it a day, it wouldn’t necessarily have stuck with someone who, at best, only tangentially follows the series. But instead, the show introduced new (or at least little-used) zombie characteristics to keep viewers guessing.

When it comes to the best zombie innovations the show has to offer, the Night King embodies all of them. Through his appearances, we learn White Walkers possess organizational hierarchy and some degree of sentience. Zombie-thought has definitely been shown before (see The Returned, original French version, or Warm Bodies), just not to this degree. Wade even into the shallowest of Game of Thrones-theory Internet, and people begin to question whether The Night King can see the future. Did he intentionally coax humans beyond the wall in order to secure a dragon and have it do what a dragon can do to a certain wall in the season finale?

White Walker wiki After peppering fan friends with semantics questions, I have worked out the following GoT zombie definitions: After peppering fan friends with semantics questions, I have worked out the following GoT zombie definitions: White Walker refers to the leaders of the army of the dead. They’re visually distinguished by a coat of armor and faces that appear ice-like (accented even by icicle-like horns or crowns). Wights refers to the infantry of the army of the dead. They are a mindless, seemingly infinite mass like many classic zombies. The Night King is the leader of the White Walkers who calls all the shots. You may be familiar with his work tossing ice javelins or riding a certain creature in the season finale.

Even without that level of otherworldly foresight, The Night King clearly makes tactical decisions mid-battle and has other Walkers and loads of wights waiting on his command. His intellectual prowess is apparently so revered among the zombie-ranks that his colleagues won’t even question the King when he calls for an ice javelin and takes aim at a flying oncoming dragon, rather than opting for one on the ground immediately in front of him. (“The Night King’s spear? Most effective anti-aircraft weapon ever,” Ars’ Sean Gallagher said when we discussed this decision in Slack recently. “That fecker was like the equivalent of a Patriot missile.”) The show’s final season appears primed to dive into the Night King’s thought process and potential motivations for good reason; that’s nearly uncharted depth territory for a zombie character.

Perhaps coolest of all, Thrones’ take on how to dispose of a zombie works on a number of levels. It’s another subtle nod to this show as a melting pot for fantasy genres (Valyrian steel taking the place of werewolf-destroying silver bullets; fire that kills witches works here, too). But narratively, the show offers a potential for resolution seldom available in other zombie works. In this season’s penultimate episode, Jon Snow and his small capture unit discover that killing a Walker appears to immediately disintegrate the wights that an individual converts. So within a fictional canon where “solutions” tend to be red herrings at best, suddenly the people of Westeros actually discovered a small, hopeful chance to eliminate their zombie threat once and for all.

Understanding why long-time GoT fans may feel uneven about an inhuman force possibly becoming the ultimate big bad is easy (GQ has said all season long the show deserves a better villain). After all, Game of Thrones ultimately focuses on human drama and is undoubtedly interested in the weight of history and the decisions of forefathers. Maybe the rise of the White Walker is kind of like the end of Breaking Bad: an immensely destructive greater evil shows up to give even the show’s most immoral and unlikable characters something to fight against and possibly earn redemption.

But as a dedicated fan of Breaking Bad, I’d offer Game of Thrones watchers a quick rebuttal. The White Walkers may or may not ultimately get their own epic backstory to play with, but they’re already more interesting than the pure evil Walter White came across—even more so if you’re familiar with and happen to enjoy the zombie back catalog.