GAME OF THRONES Kind of Forgot It Was a Good Show…
Tags: Television, TV, Features, Culture, Game of Thrones

GAME OF THRONES Kind of Forgot It Was a Good Show…

How the final season disappointed its loyal fanbase…

Starbucks coffee cups aside, Game of Thrones has, for the past eight seasons, been a visually and narratively groundbreaking piece of television. From the beginning, leading characters were shockingly killed off and unfortunate prophecies went fulfilled. As one of the show’s worst (or best?) villains, Ramsay Bolton, said: “if you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” He was right. At Game of Thrones’ worst, it was a campy fantasy adventure. At its best, it was a compelling political thriller. Now after the last episodes have aired, the most intense fans are unsatisfied with the final season…

Reactions on Twitter and Reddit are largely negative and vitriol is mostly aimed at the writers (Bryan Cogman excluded). We were warned that the last season would be “bittersweet”, but clearly the only thing many fans taste is bitterness. It’s not because the audience generally envisioned a different ending. Many fans online actually think the ending is valid. The problem is how the show reached its ending. It lost its dimension. Game of Thrones became so successful because it told intelligent multi-faceted stories that had meaning beneath the surface. It never dumbed anything down. Important themes and underlying character turmoils were never spelt out directly. The storytelling the show does was subtle. The show acknowledged viewers are smart for the majority of every season… leading up to its last.

Season 8 isn’t a complete washout. A few characters got the ending they deserved. Sansa Stark’s arc was perfect; beginning, middle, and end. Her slow-burning growth is one of the most significant changes a character on the show underwent. She fought tooth and nail to get where she lands and the audience was present every step of the way. Even more importantly, we’re shown exactly how her history affected the way she thought and made decisions, even down to her hairstyle. Sansa’s hair has long been a subtle nod to who is influencing her. Only when she’s finally Queen of the North does she let it completely down without any braids or embellishments, aside from a crown that signals she’s achieved her long-desired goal of independence from the control of other men.

Theon Greyjoy also got a satisfying ending. His arc was mostly fuelled by his internal identity crisis. He flipped between Stark and Greyjoy and did horrible things along the way. He literally lost his identity when he became “Reek” after Ramsay Snow’s psychological torture, but the audience read that as a metaphor for losing his Stark identity and his Greyjoy identity and being utterly lost in between. After he saved his sister and returned to Winterfell to fight alongside the Starks, he found himself. He was both a Stark and a Greyjoy. The audience knew this is where his story needed to go because they could read between the lines. It was therefore very satisfying to see him welcomed back to his childhood home as a prodigal son.

Where things started to go sideways is with fan-favorite Jaime Lannister. He starts the series as terribly as any Game of Thrones character can: throwing a defenceless child from a tower window for seeing him in an incestuous relationship with his sister Cersei, a married woman and the Queen. Jaime continues to do bad things. He even killed his own cousin to escape being a prisoner of war. But his original sin was killing the Mad King, someone he’d sworn to protect. It’s not until he meets Brienne, a woman loyal and noble to her core, that Jaime becomes vulnerable enough to reveal he only killed the king to save the innocent people of King’s Landing. He tired of maintaining his bad boy facade. Seeing someone unbroken by the petty politics and harshness of Westeros helps Jaime imagine that he can be honourable too. His reveal to Brienne is the crux of his character and his redemption arc.

Once Jaime had his realization, his actions followed suit. He saves Brienne from being raped and loses his hand as a direct result, and never resents her. Instead, he arms her with his own sword and armour and sends her off to protect the children of his enemy because he wants to keep his word. He returns to Winterfell for the first time since nearly killing Bran Stark, despite knowing there may be consequences, all so he can keep his promise to fight against the army of the dead. The story the show tells the audience is a bad man becoming a good one, leaving his vices behind. It’s cheap for the show to have him return to those old vices, and to poisonous Cersei, without exploring his emotional journey to return to that state. By all means, he’s supposed to be a changed man. A good portion of the audience assumes he is going to kill Cersei and says hurtful things to Brienne only so she won’t follow, as he will likely die doing it. Instead, he meant what he said, even though it doesn’t track with his character. This wasn’t a clever twist. It tricked the audience, which is the worst betrayal the show can make against its invested fans.

And then there’s the biggest offence of this kind: Daenerys Targaryen. Her transformation from idealistic conqueror to genocidal tyrant confounded viewers. It even confounded the fans who held on until the end, defending the Battle of Winterfell episode, because it was still mid-season and there was time to answer crucial questions. But what happened with Dany is indefensible. The story the show actually tells, and the one the audience ingests, is of Dany growing from a timid young girl (married off by her abusive brother) to a determined queen-in-training… always willing to make sacrifices and compromise to do what is best for her people and achieve her aim. She may not always make the best decisions (like when she fed possibly innocent men to her dragons and left one behind to tell the tale), but the audience could still understand the rationale behind her decision-making. In this season, that was no longer the case…

Up until the burning of King’s Landing, the show had played out for the audience exactly how Dany came to her conclusions, and the internal struggle she experienced getting there. This is where the show has always excelled, in laying out the internal struggles of its characters. In seasons 1–6, we saw all of Dany’s struggles and learned the same lessons she did. She struggles with her awful brother because he’s family but also a monster… and when he’s murdered she doesn’t stop it. She struggles to lock up her dragons when they kill an innocent child… but does it anyway. She struggles to forgive Jorah for betraying her… but shows him mercy.

This season, none of her emotional conflicts played out on screen. She and Jon Snow had no discussion about his Targaryen parentage, nor do they ever have a meaningful conversation in which the audience feels their romantic connection. She never got to finish her conversation with Sansa. She never spoke directly to the people of the north about her goals and intentions as their ruler. She never spoke directly to royal rival Cersei, even though they both have an incredible amount of hate for one another. The show left the audience to do the heavy lifting and to imagine what she thinks or what she says when the cameras weren’t rolling. Even the previous episode recaps work harder to sell “Mad Queen” Dany than the episodes actually did!

And when Jon killed her, the emotional gravitas of the scene was absent… partially because the character who got a dagger in her heart isn’t the Dany the audience knows, and partially because not enough was done to solidify the romance and tension between her and Jon. The only narratively satisfying moment for her this season is when she finally touched the Iron Throne. She reached what she’d been moving towards throughout the entire series, but the moment was tainted by the hollowness of everything else around it.

Another character completely retconned was Bran. And to make the offence more egregious, in the final episode of the series, an entire meta-monologue is devoted to explaining how Bran supposedly has the “best story” of everyone else on the show. Tyrion almost addressed us directly, which felt so out of place in a show previously built on reading the subtext of scenes. It was a slap in the face to an intelligent audience trained by the show to read the entire frame for meaning.

To be told directly that Bran’s is the best story on the show was incredibly insulting. Apparently, his was such a good story that he was missing from the entire fifth season? The show ran out of source material for him and let him sit one out while they used their limited effort to invent interesting paths for other characters to take. Bran’s transformation from a child with personality and emotional stakes to the utterly boring Three-Eyed Raven happened largely off-screen during a “missing season” for him. Since then, every scene with Bran in it has been uncomfortable. He repeated the same lines constantly and contributed little to the story’s overall resolution. It’s for those reasons the audience divested their emotions from him as a character.

Throughout the final season Game of Thrones, audiences searched for layers beneath the surface that inspired so many fan theories and predictions… but there was nothing there. We were promised complexity and instead given a shallow broad-strokes ending. The show forgot what made it so incredible in the first place: its trust in the audience to see more than the face value of its stories.