This week, episode 8 of season 5 of “Game of Thrones” aired. What made this most recent episode special (spoiler alert) was the fact that it’s the first look viewers have received of the white walker’s army of the undead. I was a bit confused with the setup, but there’s something satisfying to the inner fantasy geek in me getting to watch a ferocious and unstoppable horde of zombies attack a town.

In previous episodes, everyone’s favorite bastard Jon Snow is headed off to a wildling camp with his wildling friend Tormond Giantsbane in an attempt to convince the free folk to come through Castle Black’s walls to escape the white walkers and help the night’s watch fight them.

I can’t exactly remember the events that took place in this episode ever taking place in the books, but it started to get exciting right around the time a mysterious fog started pouring off the sides of the mountains behind the camp. The walkers were coming.

Sure, some other things happened in this episode that were noteworthy, including the long awaited meetup of Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. But zombies are more important.

I think this episode faithfully portrayed what it would really be like to suddenly find yourself under siege by corpses animated by some evil powers. The walkers looked relentless and moved very quickly, attacking literally anything that wasn’t a walker.

In typical badass Jon Snow fashion, he fights a white walker and is about to die, only to discover that his sword, Longclaw, can block the blows from the walker he is fighting, and ultimately explode it into tiny glass pieces.

The episode ends with Jon and five others rowing away just in time on a boat, with an entire horde of undead eerily staring out at home from the docks of the wildling encampment, which was burning bright with fires at the beginning of the episode, but is now silent. I’ve been waiting for season 5 to deliver an epic, focus-shifting episode all season, and it finally delivered with episode 8.

Rating: A-