Many Game of Thrones fans were anticipating some last minute White Walker action from the season seven finale and the show certainly delivered. In the closing moments of the episode, the Night King’s undead dragon huffed and it puffed and it blew the wall down with an ice beam. At least that’s what it looked like.

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Although the beam was blue, director Jeremy Podeswa has revealed that zombie Viserion was actually shooting a new form of mystical fire from his mouth.

“The way I looked at it was, when the Sept burned down [in the season six finale], that was green fire, and so then the dragon is going to have some kind of blueish fire,” Podeswa told The Huffington Post.

“It’s certainly still fire — it has the ability to burn the Wall and melt snow. But it’s going to have a different kind of magical quality to it, because it’s coming from an undead dragon.”

And it makes perfect sense that the flame is fire rather than ice – it would have been very awkward if the Night King flew to the Westeros border just to add another layer to the Wall.

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But while this explains the blue hue, there are still some questions that need answering about the weapon and its magical properties: do its flames harm wights and White Walkers? How does it impact on the living? And, most importantly, is it more powerful than the fires used by Daenerys’s two remaining dragons?

Authors

Thomas LingDigital editor, BBC Science Focus

Thomas is Digital editor at BBC Science Focus. Writing about everything from cosmology to anthropology, he specialises in the latest psychology, health and neuroscience discoveries. Thomas has a Masters degree (distinction) in Magazine Journalism from the University of Sheffield and has written for Men’s Health, Vice and Radio Times. He has been shortlisted as the New Digital Talent of the Year at the national magazine Professional Publishers Association (PPA) awards. Also working in academia, Thomas has lectured on the topic of journalism to undergraduate and postgraduate students at The University of Sheffield.

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