Did Games of Thrones Steal Night King’s Death Scene From a TV Show?

It’s one of the most memorable moments of Game of Thrones‘ final season: Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) launching out of the darkness to stab and kill the Night King with a clever, skillful knife drop even as the Night King held her aloft by her throat. It’s an impressive feat, but now a fan theory suggests that Arya wasn’t the first to do it and that the epic moment was copied from a Bollywood television series.

On Reddit (via Esquire), user Jugal0707 shared a video found on Instagram that features a scene from Sony Sab TV’s drama Aladdin: Naam Toh Suna Hoga — which translates to Aladdin: You Must Have Heard My Name. In the video clip, which you can check out below, a male character moves to attack skeleton who, just as the Night King did with Arya, catches him by the throat, prompting the “hero” to drop his blade into the opposite hand to complete the kill.

Low quality CGI aside, there’s definitely some similarities between the Aladdin scene and Arya’s epic defeat of the Night King — especially the whole throat grab, knife drop thing, though we’re not exactly sure how stabbing a skeleton “kills” it. However, despite the similarities, it’s pretty unlikely that Game of Thrones took its inspiration from the Bollywood series. The episode of Aladdin in which this scene was featured aired in mid-2018. Game of Thrones was shooting its final season at roughly the same time, meaning that there would likely have to have been quite a bit extra effort in order for things to have been changed to line up.

And there are also differences in the Game of Thrones scene that makes it much, much more likely that the two scenes are similar by coincidence. The Aladdin scene seems to have the hero merely leaping at the skeleton while in Game of Thrones, Arya vaults herself off a pile of dead Wights in order to attack the Night King, as revealed in Game of Thrones: The Last Watch.

What do you think? Are the two scenes so similar that they have to have some overlap or is the knife drop surprise attack just so cool that it’s culturally universal? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.