It’s all fire and blood in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones
By: Simon Cocks
Tags: Game of Thrones, Television, Review, Culture, TV

It’s all fire and blood in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones

Forces have arrived at Kings Landing for the final battle. (IMDb)

Like so many of the best Game of Thrones twists, Daenerys’s descent into rage, destruction, and vengeance has been something that we should’ve seen coming. Many did see it coming. The narrative has asked for us to root for her because of the great things she’s done, the destiny she appears to have, and the power she commands. When you look back, though, the foreshadowing of what she does in this episode is all too clear. She’s always been just a few questionable choices away from making a turn like this. It’ll be hard to stomach for many fans, especially ones who have rooted for her and longed to see her take her “rightful” place on the throne, but this story has always been one about the corrupting influence of power, and that’s more evident here than it has been in a long time.

When George RR Martin has talked in the past about a bittersweet ending, it seems this is very much what he had in mind. I doubt the show has delivered exactly what Martin envisioned, it’s much too rushed for one thing, but the broad strokes are there. It’s a subversion of the kind of heroic narratives that are so prevalent in fantasy tales, and it’s one that focuses on the cost of power and how dangerous it is to believe in the myth of yourself. We’re left having to reevaluate our perceptions of our heroes. Daenerys is so consumed by power that she dismisses all of her principles, Jon is so blind and so loyal that he can’t do anything to stop her destructive attack on King’s Landing, Tyrion lets his emotions cloud his judgement, and Jaime is so human and so in love that his redemptive arc is cut short. This is not a tidy or familiar story, and that’s really in keeping with what this tale has always been. There’s a lot of tragedy, death and sadness here, and so much human life is wasted. And all for what? All for The Iron Throne. (Turns out HBO’s promotional #ForTheThrone hashtag was pretty accurate, after all.)

A battle that’s more of a slaughter

In hindsight, the odds were never even. The show told us it was going to be a fair fight, but it wasn’t. Daenerys may have been unfortunate to lose two dragons, but even with one, her conquest looks all too easy. The Golden Company are wiped out almost instantly by dragon fire, the same goes for the Iron Fleet and all of the ballistas that Qyburn built to take down dragons. Once those defences are gone, it’s hopeless for Cersei’s armies. The war we’ve been waiting seasons for is over in a matter of minutes. And then it gets much worse. The warnings were all there, and they were really clear at the start of this episode. Varys is becoming concerned about the queen’s thirst for vengeance, and she burns him alive for his betrayal. Tyrion is visibly frightened of the queen, and when Jon questions her she becomes icy cold. Even with the city captured, she knows she can have a more decisive victory by making the people fear her. Her logic is twisted and horrifying at this point. But, it’s not like this development came out of nowhere. It’s shocking, but very believeable.

Showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss have pointed out that she’s always shown a cruel streak and sadistic behaviour. An early example is her emotionless reaction to the death of her brother Viserys, but there are also numerous other examples. She has been responsible for a lot of death and the sacking of cities already, along with depraved punishments, she often uses Drogon to burn people to death, she has a history of personal tragedies, and loads of trust issues. Back in Season 2, she literally said, “When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who wronged me! We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground!” That’s pretty much exactly what happened. And for anyone who thinks this isn’t the direction the books are going too, consider some of Daenerys’s inner thoughts from A Dance with Dragons. “A queen I am, but my throne is made of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I.” It’s highly likely this is where George RR Martin has been building to for the whole series.

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention”

It’s really unlikely we’ll see a happy ending for Game of Thrones. That just simply isn’t what has been set up over these seasons. We’ve successfully been convinced that one might be on the cards, but it almost certainly isn’t. Especially after the events of this episode! The characters we know and love are going to have to make hard decisions, and they’re going to be compromised and do things that may be difficult to understand. What happens next may not necessarily be what we expect, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it feels right. Martin has carefully set up so many of the elements of this story, and he told the showrunners how he planned to end it years ago. They’re still working from the template, and we should be prepared for more of that “bittersweet” conclusion that Martin’s promised. If you’re hoping that happiness is in the future for surviving characters like Jon, Tyrion, Sansa, Daenerys, Arya, Davos and Grey Worm, there’s a real chance you’ll be wrong about that for many of them.

While Game of Thrones has received its fair share of criticism this season, I think it comes down to execution rather than content. The key issue with Season 8 (and Season 7 too, honestly) is that it all just feels much too rushed. It didn’t have to be this way. The showrunners chose how much they’d prioritise spectacle, and how quickly they’d race through character arcs. Imagine the developments last week building up over a few more episodes after ‘The Long Night’, or things that happen in this episode being given a little more room to breathe. It would really help. It didn’t have to be like this. Benioff and Weiss were the ones who insisted on ending it at eight seasons and limiting the number of episodes. “HBO would have been happy for the show to keep going, to have more episodes in the final season,” Benioff said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “We always believed it was about 73 hours, and it will be roughly that. As much as they wanted more, they understood that this is where the story ends.” They’ve even made it clear that budget wasn’t a concern, with Weiss saying, “They said, ‘We’ll give you the resources to make this what it needs to be, and if what it needs to be is a summer tentpole-size spectacle in places, then that’s what it will be.’”

The human cost of war

Perspective is an important thing. For so much of Daenerys’s major moments in the show, we’ve seen things from her perspective and been on her side. The freeing of the slaves in Astapor is a triumphant moment, with the slave master Kraznys mo Nakloz serving as an easy villain. When Daenerys uses her young dragons to torch the city and walks away with the Unsullied, it’s played as an uplifting turn of events. But we’ve seen the catastrophe that dragons cause, and for everyone in that city it would’ve been horrifying. She may have told her new Unsullied to kill “every man who holds a whip” but we didn’t see who really got massacred. How do we know they were so discerning? Daenerys’s action in Essos have been restrained by her advisors and the more compassionate side of her personality, but we really just don’t see the point of view of those affected all that much.

That perspective completely changes here, the camera stays firmly on the ground level for much of the carnage. The perspective is with the people of King’s Landing who are innocent and don’t deserve to be burned alive. The show uses the perspective of Arya to show us what it looks like to be in the middle of such a horrific event. In ‘The Spoils of War’, it seemed like dragons might be a parallel for military aircraft, but here the imagery is much more explosive, and clearly reminiscent of nuclear weapons or the aftermath of terrorist attacks. We see shellshocked people staggering around, covered in ashes and with blood and bodies littering the streets. This is as senseless and inhumane as violence gets. And, beyond the devastating impact that Drogon has by burning King’s Landing to the ground and killing so many of the people of the city, we also see many of the named characters die in this instalment too. Jaime manages to get past Euron (the less said about him, the better) and find Cersei, but the pair perish when the Red Keep crumbles on top of them. It may seem like a betrayal of Jaime’s growth and an anticlimactic ending for Cersei, but it reminds us how their character both want to just be together, defiantly standing against the world. Qyburn also gets killed by his own creation, the Mountain, and both Sandor and his brother die in a gory fight to the death.

Best scene of the episode

There’s a lot going on in this episode, but some of its best moments are when it pauses and catches its breath. Tyrion and Jaime’s goodbye scene is my favourite of the episode because it really does bring their relationship throughout the whole series to a touching and heartbreaking climactic moment. “If it wasn’t for you I would have never survived my childhood. You are the only one who didn’t treat me like a monster. You were all I had,” Tyrion tells his captured brother. He then sets him free from Daenerys’s camp, a callback to how Jaime set Tyrion free back in Season 4. At this point, Tyrion’s hope is hanging by a thread and will soon be completely gone. His fear shows. He knows that Daenerys will kill him if she works out what he’s done. And yet he does it all the same, believing Jaime might have some slim hope of saving the city and that if the bells sound, the queen won’t burn the city to ashes. Obviously, he’s wrong. But in that moment he’s just doing the only thing he can. And it’s capped off with a moving last hug between Tyrion and Jaime before they meet their fates. It’s a great scene, and a memorable end for the relationship between the two loyal Lannister brothers.

MVP of the episode

It’s got to be Sandor Clegane. He finally confronts his fear of fire and his fear of his grotesque older brother, and the show makes the fan theory of “Cleganebowl” really mean something right at the end. Sandor’s honesty about how revenge has consumed him saves Arya from his doomed fate, and we see that he really has compassion for her. He then faces his brother Gregor (aka the Mountain) in one of the most brutal fights ever shown on Game of Thrones. It’s a painful and bruising thing to watch, and it’s fitting that they both fall to their death at the end of it. Sandor used to be paralysed by the sight of fire, and at the end he plunges into it to kill his monster of a brother. Far from pointless fan service, the conflict is filled with character moments and ultimately shows that revenge is destructive and inevitably leads to a fall. In the end, though, the Mountain has to die for all the terrible things he’s done, and Sandor being the one to do it feels appropriate and right.

What’s next

The end. Next week we see the last episode of Game of Thrones ever, and there are still a lot of questions about just how exactly it’ll tie up all the loose ends. There are still clashes to be had, I’m sure, even after Daenerys has won. Or maybe it’s about the power-hungry Targaryen solidifying her position as the new queen of Westeros? There are a lot of questions to answer, and it’ll be very interesting to see how this all finally concludes.

The trailer for the Game of Thrones series finale

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