Sifting through the ashes: Game of Thrones series finale

By now you’re either so tired of reading about these final episodes of Game of Thrones that you’re ready to hurl yourself from an open window, or you’re just so desperate for validation of your own reactions that you’re willing to read anything - even this! 

We’ve been obsessed with this show since 2011, and it’s only natural that after such a long, intense ride - that when the breakup finally happens, there’s confusion, there’s accusation, betrayal...and a fair portion of grief. So how did I react to all this? 

Things started to go south for me this season with Brienne and Jaime. His decision to leave her and go back to Cersei – and more than that, Brienne’s weepy reaction to his leaving, essentially turning her into a male-dependent rom-com character. This only galled me all the more on Sunday, where she dutifully fills in his pages in The Book of Brothers. This undermined her character so much, depicting her as a mopey and delusional torch-bearer. Oh, what I would have rather seen her write about him! Or better yet, rip his page right out of the book and burn it to ashes, which would then settle among the countless other ashes that fill the remains of King’s Landing. 

I would have rather had it that Jaime came back to put an end to Cersei and try to kill her himself. Essentially seeing her as the vampire that she is, who’s ruined his life, and that the only way he can ever be free would be to put an end to her. Because the entire doomed lovers rubble burial for those two was beyond lame. Cersei’s last great act of evil was ordering the execution of Missandei, which was a heck of a moment, one of the best of the season (despite the improbability of her being captured by them in the first place – but then improbability and convenience have ruled these last few episodes more than anything else). Cersei is an epic character, and she cried out for an epic demise. Some final last stand act of malice, that needed to surpass her destruction of the Great Sept at the end of season 6. What she got instead was a totally anticlimactic and unsatisfying demise that left the audience wanting mightily. Then Tyrion so easily finding their bodies (huge face-palm). They were in the subterranean basement of the Red Keep when colossal tons of brick and stone came crashing down on them. Yet somehow their corpses magically floated up to the top of said tonnage, so Tyrion only had to remove a few stray bricks to reveal them?! Come ON….!

 

I have to ask myself what the point of this story was all along, and how crazy it felt to dispatch the Night King and his legions so early in the season. Because the only theme I can see is “the leopard can’t change his spots” – that your fate is sealed and you can never escape it. Jaime was fated to love Cersei no matter what. Jon Snow is fated to spill his guts and blurt out the truth no matter what. Daenerys is fated to succumb to her family’s curse of fiery madness and rage no matter what – despite seven previous seasons positioning her to be a liberating force for good. For me, she’s emblematic of those plot decisions that are just so vexing. We’ve invested ourselves in her so heavily for so long, to have her just freak out and commit mass genocide is a complete betrayal. It wasn’t “Red Wedding” clever, or “Stabbing Littlefinger” clever – it felt like a cheat. An act of duplicity that felt like a slap in the face to everyone who’s been cheering her on to victory, and symptomatic of how the writing has undermined most of the female characters on the show this season. From Sansa’s jaw-dropper to the Hound that her abuse helped build her character, to Missandei being put back in chains, to Cersei’s narrative lack of climactic action – ending with Daenerys being forced to fulfill the eye-rolling trope of all powerful women being too emotional to lead, therefore they must be insane. That women can’t be trusted with authority because they feel their emotions too much. Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, The Unburnt, Breaker of Feminism.

 

But if you’re going to turn our deliverer into an angel of the apocalypse, the penultimate episode The Bells was without a doubt tremendously well executed. If you’re going to obliterate King’s Landing, the director and effects teams involved depicted it in amazing fashion. We finally got Cleganebowl, which was visceral and exciting, yet somehow nowhere near as intense as Brienne’s big fight with the Hound, or the Mountain’s clash with Oberyn Martell, both from the exceptional season 4. Having these two brothers finally have at each other after years of audience expectation is at least one example where the writers made sure to deliver the goods. In contrast, the fight between Jaime and Urine – I mean Euron – Greyjoy was disposable and perfunctory.

 

What we’re given is that Daenerys gives in to the dark side – well and fully. In the finale, the Queen of Ashes is depicted in Third Reich conqueror imagery, her legions arrayed before her in perfect symmetry, a massive red Targaryen banner draped across the ruins of stone. In a phenomenal bit of shot composition, her last dragon spreads its wings behind her, a final symbol that this Queen is fully possessed by the supernatural shadow of her family’s predisposition to fiery wrath.

 

The last big moment of the series is Jon Snow’s murder of Daenerys, abetted by a hefty dose of narrative convenience. The Queen has gone to survey the Iron Throne, when Jon finds her – alone. There is simply no way in conceivable reality that Daenerys would ever, ever be alone and vulnerable to attack like this. She’d be surrounded by Unsullied soldiers wherever she went. But she is, with Drogon lurking outside evidently meant to be sufficient protection – and she’s completely unsuspicious of Jon’s intentions when he kisses her – then stabs her. Then the rest of this final episode collapses like the Red Keep. Like many an event that might have seen implausible to depict, we don’t see Jon discovered by the Queen’s troops. Presumably Jon just blurts outright that “I’ve just killed the Queen,” because that’s what Jon does. But all that just happens offscreen, rather than him being immediately killed for matricide. Drogon inexplicably flies off with Daenerys, so Jon could have told any story he wanted. Then we have tiresome scenes of expository dialogue which end with Tyrion nominating Bran to be King. Then we roll through a series of Return of the King mini-endings, with Jon being sent back to the Night’s Watch, Tyrion again being Hand of the King, Sansa ruling over an independent north, etc.

 

I guess like a lot of viewers, I’m still coming to terms with the choices they made and the closure of this story.

Will I warm up to more of it over time? Possibly. But for now, those are my gut reactions. It’s been a long, passionate relationship, Thrones. You rocked me hard, and kept me up nights. When you turned on me like you did, it hit me hard. But here’s the thing: While I might have wanted you to act differently at times, and I wish you didn’t have those problems you don’t like to talk about...I still love you, baby - and I guess I always will.