The GoT Finale—One Year Later.
By Michael Isenberg.
The short answer: yes. The widespread criticisms were richly deserved—with one big exception.
For eight years, well, six, anyway, we were hooked. Not since the original Star Wars trilogy were we so immersed and united in a shared pop culture experience. We were thrilled by the triumphs of our favorite characters—and we all had our favorites. We shared their frustration in defeat. We laughed at their jokes. We mourned at their deaths—and there were too many of those; it’s been said that author George R. R. Martin was the greatest serial killer in history. We couldn’t believe it when Ned Stark wasn’t rescued from the executioner at the last minute. We admired Olenna Tyrell for facing death with resignation and defiance, the Queen of Thorns’ acid tongue not failing her, even as the poison went to work in her veins. She made a good end.
We delighted in the wonderful one-liners and catch phrases. Some were merely good writing. “I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards, and broken things.” Some were insightful. “Everything before the word 'but' is horses—t.” “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” Many became part of our daily speech. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” “Winter is coming.” “Hodor.”
In between seasons, we theorized endlessly. Whatever happened to Rickon Stark? What about Gendry? How will Jon Snow be brought back from the dead, and will it have something to do with the Red Lady showing up at Castle Black? Who are Jon’s real parents? Will he and Dany end up together? And most important of all: who will sit on the Iron Throne in the end?
We nagged our friends who weren’t into it to give it a try for just one episode. And then, when they finally relented, we fretted during the slow and confusing opening scene—surely we were going to lose them. We needn’t have worried. The moment they saw Bran Stark shoved from the tower window, they were as stunned and horrified as we were the first time…and hooked for the duration.
And so it went for six seasons.
Then came Season 7. The source material of the published novels had been exhausted. As George R. R. Martin struggled to finish the next installment (he’s still struggling), the writers of the series ran on ahead. It was an okay season. We had the warm glow of the reunion of the surviving Stark children—not really children anymore after so many long years of separation, adventure, and character arc. And there was the “oh, s—t” moment when the White Walkers started dragging chains into the lake where a dead dragon lay at the bottom, and it became clear what they were going to do.
But something was off. Characters acted out of character. The honorable Brienne of Tarth, for whom the code of chivalry—the code of battle, honor, and loyalty—was everything, turned her back on that for a throwaway joke, “Oh, f—k loyalty.” The brilliant Tyrion “I drink and I know things” Lannister, advisor to kings and queens, was suddenly not so brilliant as his advice repeatedly proved disastrous. And the writers seemed to have lost sight of the geography of the Land of Westeros. Where once a character might spend an entire season traveling from one part of the country to another, now entire armies crossed the land as easily as if they were just popping over to the neighboring castle for a quick siege and some looting.
The downward spiral accelerated in Season 8. Armies practically teleported, and miraculously repopulated their ranks after being decimated in battle. The trickle of out of character incidents became a flood. Arya goes off to discover America for absolutely no reason. The cunning spymaster Varys, so often compared to a spider lying in wait, attempts a coup against Daenerys that is so clumsy, it's hard to believe this is the same guy who knew absolutely everything going on in Westeros and beyond, and patiently waited decades for revenge on the man who castrated him. Jaime Lannister, who tried to murder a child in the series premiere to cover up his incestuous and toxic love for his sister Cersei, was inspired by the noble Brienne to embark on an eight-year journey of redemption. He was taken prisoner, lost a hand, and mourned the deaths of every one of his children. And just when he finally reached the pinnacle of love and honor, he was like, “Sorry. Changed my mind. I’m going back to Cersei.” A painstakingly well-developed character arc wiped out in an instant.
And speaking of character arcs, there’s the dragon in the room: Daenerys Targaryan. She came a long way from the mousy teenage girl who submitted to an arranged marriage in order to further the ambitions of her brother, a brother who routinely quashed any attempt she made to assert herself by threatening to unleash his temper. “You don't want to wake the dragon, do you?”
From those inauspicious beginnings, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps, overcame every obstacle, and transformed herself into a ruler and a liberator. Her whole story is captured in her string of titles: “Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Protector of the Realm, Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons.” She was so beloved, and her story so captured our imaginations, that hundreds of parents in the United States named their daughters Daenerys and Khaleesi.
A choice which they regretted when, with one episode to go, Daenerys turned irredeemably evil. Using the firepower of her dragon, she set King’s Landing aflame—after the city had already surrendered to her. Thousands died a horrific and painful death. Burning is a bad way to go. For Daenerys, there was no coming back.
Viewers hated it.
And this is where I part company with most viewers. I thought it was a brilliant arc for the character, one that was well-developed over the course of the series. We knew from the beginning that insanity ran in Daenerys’s family. Her father, the “Mad King,” was assassinated when he was on the verge of incinerating King’s Landing himself. There were signs of Dani’s ruthlessness as early as Season 3, when she bought the slave army, the Unsullied, from the “Good Master” Kraznyz. The price she agreed to in exchange was Drogon, one of her dragons. The transaction complete and the Unsullied under her command, she reneged on the bargain and ordered Drogon to burn Kraznys alive. Kraznys was an evil man, a slave trader after all, and couldn’t control Drogon anyway, which is perhaps why we didn’t notice the evil that was growing inside Dani. But evil it was and by Season 7 it couldn’t be ignored. “Bend the knee” became her new catchphrase as she demanded submission from everyone she encountered. Season 8 brought her slow burn over Jon’s growing popularity; she couldn't stand it that he was better liked than she was. Unlike Jaime Lannister, Daenerys didn’t subvert her character arc in the final episodes. She fulfilled it.
Not only is it a well-crafted storyline, it’s profoundly philosophical. As Lord Acton warned us, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Dani was a sweet girl at first, and when she first tasted power, she used it for good—she postponed her own ambition of taking the Iron Throne in order to liberate slaves across the Narrow Sea. But as her armies swelled, and her enemies fell before the might of her dragons, the power went to her head. As it inevitably will when even those with the best of motives—which she had—are able to act with impunity. It’s a valuable lesson. To those of you who say that it's only a TV show, that the burning of King's Landing was a fictional atrocity, I remind you that recent history is littered with real ones: the Armenian Genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the Gulags of Soviet Russia and Red China, the ISIS Caliphate, to name but a few. A hundred million people and then some were murdered by dictatorships of one form or another. Not in some distant, less enlightened past, but as recently as the lifetimes of our grandparents, if not our own. If we learn anything from Game of Thrones, it should be to keep a close eye on our public servants and stand up against any effort on their parts to accumulate power. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
In the end, with Daenerys dead and the Iron Throne melted, the nobles of Westeros were wise to make Bran Stark their new king. Not for the reason that Tyrion gave, “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story…Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?” That was pathetic. It reminded me of the bookmobile guy from South Park. “Hello kids! I see you’re discovering the maaaaaagic of reeeeeeading.” Rather, Bran is the best choice because he has no interest in power. There’s something to be said for a king who tells his Small Council to “carry on” and leaves to incarnate the three-eye raven.
When you don't play the game of thrones, you win and you fly.
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): nme.com |
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