Game of Thrones episode review — 8.4 — The Last of the Starks
By: Patrick J Mullen
Tags: Drama, TV, Fantasy, Game of Thrones, Television

Original air date: May 5, 2019

Director: David Nutter

Writers: David Benioff and D.B. Weiss

Rating: 5/10

This episode has the unenviable task of trying to get us to care about Daenerys’s quest to take the Iron Throne after a war to preserve humanity against zombies. It’s a quest doomed to fail. Not Daenerys’s, but the show’s. Shoving both of these stories into the same abbreviated season definitely seems like a mistake.

The political intrigue is incredibly forced. Sansa having suspicions about Daenerys are fair (and were Arya to also be suspicious, it would make sense as well). And Sansa actually has a great point about the army’s need for rest.

But Varys, man. What the hell? This comes out of nowhere.

Anyways, Daenerys tries to surround King’s Landing, but gets one of her dragons killed, and her fleet is basically entirely destroyed, with Missandei getting captured.

For some reason they’re certain Missandei is captured when they just can’t find her body after a shipwreck. Like they turn out to be right, but that wouldn’t have been my assumption, especially when we don’t see Euron make any effort to recover anybody from the sea.

I will say, though, that despite most of the character drama being bad, there is one outstanding scene here. It’s dumb, it’s incredibly silly, but it’s also awesome. And it’s the scene where Bronn shows up.

This is the Bronn I had been missing for a few seasons. He’s hilarious and pragmatic as he demands that Jaime and Tyrion promise him a better reward than Cersei can.

Other than that, though, there are a few highlights. Jaime starting a relationship with Brienne only to end it later in the episode seems like a waste of time. Though I will say that Gwendoline Christie absolutely kills it. She gives a performance that almost makes you believe the relationship didn’t come out of nowhere.

And since I know the ending to the series, there is something I want to focus on for a bit, and that’s Daenerys’s heel turn. For about a season now, we’ve had characters worried that she’s just going to end up destroying King’s Landing, and to be honest, there hasn’t been much in her character’s actions to show that.

Like she killed the two Tarlys when they refused to bend the knee, and for some reason that made Tyrion incredibly worried, even though the series has shown that kind of thing to be normal and expected of a leader (Ned Stark, the most noble man in the entire series, executes a deserter in his first scene).

Yet this episode makes it less about her desire for power, and more from her personal sense of loss. We open with a mass funeral that focuses a bit on Jorah, whose death she talks about with Jon. And then Missandei’s killed.

I see two main problems here. The first being that nobody’s encountered more personal loss than the Starks, so if I’m supposed to buy into Daenerys’s heel turn as coming from her being the most wronged person in the kingdom (a woman “more sinned against than sinning” to borrow a phrase from King Lear), I’m just not having it.

But the other problem is the performance, honestly.

When Missandei dies, Emilia Clarke’s reaction is actually kind of funny. It’s clear that they wanted this to be the moment where she snaps, and is all of a sudden capable of committing evil deeds, and just…she just looks all pouty. She’s doing her Kit Harrington impression.