We Need To Talk About That Huge Wight Bear On 'Game Of Thrones'

One way you could describe Game of Thrones Season 7 is "the season where we learned about different wight species." For example, we learned that giants can turn into wights (RIP Wun Wun) and, on Jon Snow's wight-capturing mission, we also learned that wight bears exist. Jon Snow, Beric Dondarrion, Tormund, Ser Jorah, The Hound, Gendry, and the rest of the gang encountered one of the creatures and just barely fought it off. So is the wight bear dead on Game of Thrones? We lost track of him just as suddenly as he arrived.

In a scene that was straight out of The Revenant, a giant polar wight lumbered out of the distance toward Jon's search party. It was seriously so massive. Like, bigger than regular bears, which are already huge. It reared up on its hind legs and attacked several of the men, even though Beric successfully set fire to him with his special fire sword. (Needless to say, this was not a super fun battle for The flame-averse Hound.) Unfortunately, the fire didn't seem to kill the bear on contact. He even chomped down around a flaming blade and kept attacking, thrashing poor Thoros within an inch of his life. (Spoiler alert: Thoros later died, thereby suffering a worse fate than Leo did in The Revenant.)

But somewhere in the scuffle, between tending to their wounded, trying to kill the bear, and trying to survive, Jon's band of scruffy men lost track of the bear. The last shot we see from the battle is a set of paw prints in the snow, leading away from the group. So presumably, the bear survived, even though it took several hits and walked away still on fire.

Eventually, Jon Snow and company find a White Walker with a small group of wights and decide that this is their moment to snatch one of them. They even discover that killing a White Walker immediately destroys the wights he's turned! But this fight somehow attracts what looks like the entire Army of the Dead. Jon and his men are quickly surrounded, but we never see the bear again. Probably it's off somewhere tending to its wounds. We're also introduced to an even bigger wight species in Episode 6: ice dragons. Yes, in the melee after Daenerys' dragons predictably come and save everyone, one of her sons goes down and is later resurrected by The Night King. So now we have both wight bears and ice dragons in our midst. Stay tuned to see if they become zombie friends!