Revisiting the end of Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones currently ranks as my favorite TV series of all time. The show fleshes out several interweaving narratives that are nearly always compelling. These stories take place in a rich and thoroughly realized world that rewards viewers who want to go deeper (I had to look up “What happened to Old Valeria?” and “Who were the Andals and the First Men?”) but never boring those who didn’t.
My son was curious about the show, so after he turned 15 I decided it was time to rewatch the entire series with him. This is a show that is best enjoyed all at once because of all of the nuances and minor characters that fade from memory with a year (or more) between seasons. But most of all I wanted to know if watching all of the seasons together foreshadowed the shocking ending better than I remembered how it felt the first time I saw it.
**Major Spoilers Start Now**
The Conventional Wisdom is that Game of Thrones ended badly. Some argue that the show lost its way after George RR Martin stopped actively working on the show (season 5) while others point to when the show completely ran out of source material (season 6). I don’t buy into either of these narratives because while season 5 is the darkest and most difficult for me to watch (Ramsey rapes Sansa, Theon is castrated, Arya is blinded, Jon is perforated), season 6 has some of the show’s best moments (The Battle of the Bastards, Cersei nukes the Sept of Baylor, Daenerys gets her dragons back).
Season 7 also has some top notch moments (The Loot Train Attack, Viserion is killed and resurrected) however this is when the showrunners really start playing fast and loose with time and distance (a raven flies half the length of the continent in less than a day, the Iron Fleet teleports from one side of Westeros to the other) in order to speed up the narrative.
It’s really season 8, the last of the series, where the audience really got upset with the show, particularly with the penultimate episode where Dani decides to burn King’s Landing to the ground, along with thousands of civilians.
After rewatching the series I still feel like Dani’s turn to becoming a homicidal crazy person wasn’t the right place for her character arc to end. Clearly she was being set up to make a bad decision (Varys betrayed her, Jon rejected her and Cersei had Missandei executed right in front of her), but I still don’t see how all of that anxiety would turn her from someone who loved being the hero of the people to someone who felt the need to burn woman and children alive after the battle was won.
In that moment her beef was with Cersei. It would have made much more sense for Daenerys to have ridden Drogon directly to the Red Keep and killed her true enemy. If she had done this with total disregard for civilian casualties it still would have been chilling for Jon to realize that he had now helped to install another ruler who cared more about their own grandeur than those they ruled over.
No one who was paying attention should have believed that the series was going to end happily ever after with Daenerys as a benevolent monarch. From the beginning the strongest moral this series was trying to impart is that heads of state should not be determined by heredity (The Mad King) or by who wins the most battles (Robert Baratheon), and Daenerys was both. She seemed noble because she abolished slavery and selected wise advisors (Jorah, Missandei, Tyrion) but her goal from the moment she had her husband pour molten gold over her brother’s head was to take the Iron Throne for herself and once she hatched three dragons she knew she would have the means to do so.
Dani was never shy about using violence or intimidation when it served her purposes. In Essos her actions were justified because they were used against slavers, in Westeros they were justified because they were used against the corrupt Lannisters. But when Jon Snow arrived to ask for her help to defeat the White Walkers, she didn’t agree to divert resources away from conquering her enemies to the greater existential threat until the Night King killed one of her dragons (who she saw as her children).
She also insisted that Jon bend the knee and pledge the North to her rule because… why? Because her ancestor took the North by force centuries ago so dammit it belonged to her! Never mind that it was a region populated by farmers with a completely different cultural heritage.
In the end, I find the most brilliant aspect of this show is how it got us to root for this conquering hero and turn a blind eye to her ever-escalating violent tendencies until the end. This is an important lesson we all need to learn because this pattern repeats itself over and over again in the real world. Sadly because of the message’s clumsy execution at the very end I don’t believe that it landed as well as the writers had hoped.
Perhaps GRRM will deliver it better in the books… if he ever finishes them.
