Dave Fixes Game of Thrones

So, I doubt this post will age well, but it satisfies an intellectual itch I have right now.

I'm not linking this page to anyone. If anyone finds it and reads it, congrats, you are among my blogs most faithful.

This is my attempt to quickly rewrite Game of Thrones to have a more satisfying conclusion. Two caveats before I begin:

1. I will change as few details as possible, and try to respect the showrunner's characterizations and desired conflicts where I can.
2. I'm going to paint a broad picture, and not focus too much on fleshing out details. With this in mind, I'm not going to pretend my version fixes all problems or is without its own. However, Ihope it illustrates a narrative path that could have had less problems to begin with, with successive rewriting cleaning up my version and making it more coherent.

Without further ado, we begin where things really started going off base:

The Light of the Seven

The Sept of Baelor sequence plays out exactly as it did in the show, with one exception: Kevan Lannister is not there. Cersei watches it blow up, drinks wine, Tommen commits suicide. Cersei sees her son's dead body, realizes what she has done, and slowly descends into hysterical laughing/crying. She is now the mad queen. Kevan realizes what she has done, has her ushered away to the dungeon/house arrest. With nobody to sit the Iron Throne he and Jaime become defacto regents in Cersei's stead. The rest of Season 6 plays out as written.

Season 7

A Plot: Dany shows up in Westeros, and many of the same beats of her trying to balance out conquering and ruling through fear/being a benevolent ruler play out. We see her struggle, fuck up, and there is always an intimation that she's another Mad King waiting to happen were it not for advisors at her side. She makes decisions about who to ally with and who to fight, and suffers consequences for these. Euron comes to her and offers his fleet for his hand in marriage which she rebuffs, and Euron becomes a mini-antagonist for the rest of the season, seeking independence for the Iron Islands out of spite and harrying her efforts to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. Kevan and Jaime are the other mini-antagonists and lead the Lannister/KL resistance to her, you can even have them score victories like taking Highgarden. Maybe Euron attacks Dragonstone or Oldtown at some point. You get the picture. Jaime meanwhile is trying to come to terms with his sister's madness and figure out his place in all this. Similar beats to season 6 can play out in terms of Jaime getting lords in the Reach to defect, maybe Edmure Tully appears as a loyal Lannister vassal, etc.

By about the mid-point, Dany takes KL and goes on to subdue most of the resistance to her rule. However, she refuses to sit the Iron Throne until she actually rules all seven kingdoms. The plot tension doesn't come from if she will rule the Seven Kingdoms, but rather what kind of ruler she will be and what sacrifices and decisions she will make along the way.

B Plot: Jon goes to Dragonstone, and many of the same beats play out as far as an awkward developing romance between him and Dany. You can have the same conflict of whether or not Jon will kneel, alongside his attempts to her to recognize the threat of the Others. She is irritated by his refusal to kneel at present, but he's not actively opposing her, and she kinda likes him, so he remains by her side for quite some time as she goes about trying to subdue the Seven Kingdoms. Maybe being around Jon encourages her to be a more merciful leader to try and impress him/win him over. The culmination of this arc comes when Jon hears the Others are besieging a section of the wall (maybe Eastwatch), and he begs her to bring her dragons north and stick a cork in the bottle before it can get away from them. He promises to kneel and hand over the North if she does stop them. Still doubting the Others are real, but seeing the opportunity to consolidate her rule at last, she agrees. Jon remains consistent with his characterization of wanting to stop the Others at all costs.

C Plot: Tension at Winterfell. But this time its not between the sisters because that was dumb and forced for the sake of the audience. Littlefinger is Lord of the Vale, and he clearly doesn't care about Sansa more than as means to an end (as shown by his letting her slip into Ramsay's clutches). Make him want to be Warden of the North, and secretly working behind her back to bring these only recently reconciled Northern Houses over to his side. Sansa is ostensibly one of the smartest characters in the show and has never really got a chance to show it off. She also studied under some of the finest manipulators and politicians there were in KL. Have her beat LF at his own game, and secure Winterfell for the Starks through political maneuvering. Jon won the battle for the castle, let her lead the Starks to victory in the political battle. At the end of the season, it should be clear to the audience that Winterfell is under the Stark banner through her efforts. This is the home that she once wanted desperately to leave and now is determined to keep. Sansa has truly become the Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North while Jon was away.

Season 7 Finale

I actually like the story beat that Dany loses a dragon, as it gets at her sense of safety and invulnerability and gives her visceral stakes in the War for the Dawn - she's lost something.

Let's keep that plot beat. They try to stop the Others. They can't, Dany loses a dragon. The wall comes down - not with a dragon, the NK has some other way to do it. Maybe he has an artifact weapon or something like that. Maybe Arya has a side quest this season trying to prevent him from acquiring it. Bran could send her on it, Brienne and Pod could go with her.

Anyway, Jon and Dany retreat south, Jon kneels, incest sex, basically keep all the plot points. The season ends the same way with the Others marching south.

Season 8

Winterfell is a weird place to fight the Others, it's a forbidding Castle to take, to be sure, but once the Others are past the wall. they could honestly just ignore it if they wanted and keep going south. Let's play with that.

The tension in Season 8 should not be: "are we going to team up to fight the Others?" but instead "how are we going to fight the Others and what sacrifices are we going to need to make to defeat them?" Jon and Dany are both like: yo, let's abandon Winterfell and fight them south at this continent's natural bottleneck: Moat Cailin. We can bring all our allies from the south there and try to keep the Others from reaching the south of Westeros.

Meanwhile, Sansa is not thrilled about Jon bending of the knee, and is not going to abandon Winterfell after fighting so hard for it last season. She fights with Jon, say's he can't understand because he's not a Stark, etc. In the end, her and most of the northern lords elect to hole up in Winterfell. Jon gave up his kingship to get Dany to fight the Others, and now he has lost the loyalty of much of the North and his cousin. This actually gives Jon and Sansa something to fight over rather than the milquetoast conflict they have now.

And just like that, you have this season's B plot: The siege of Winterfell. We really needed a multi-episode siege in this show at some point. There's nothing saying that the Wights can inherently pile on each other and climb walls a la World War Z. Maybe castles present an actual problem for the Others. At any rate, the Others encircle the castle and we have a siege and can have lots of siege plotlines (running out of food, maybe an Other figures out a way into the Castle and Arya/Royce, whoever can fight them).

The A plot is Jon and Dany trying to rally everyone together to fight the Others at Moat Cailin, and get everyone who they can out of the North in time. Don't have a Battle for the Dawn, have a War for the Dawn. There are easy set-pieces you can generate out of this. Maybe Jon leads troops up north to escort civilians heading south from White Harbor, they get attacked by the Others and have to fight a battle that they lose etc. The point should be that there is a steady drumbeat of human losses both on and off screen, ramping up the tension and increasing the desperation of the main characters. Maybe Dany refuses to send her dragons out anymore after losing the one and Jon and her have a conflict where he argues people are dying as she hoards her trump card.

In the background, you have the entire north to have C plots for other characters to go on missions to try and secure miniscule advantages versus the Others, get people out, etc. Maybe Sam, Arya, Tormund, etc. are engaged in an effort to uncover secrets about the Others and find a way to defeat them. Maybe they are seeking a powerful artifact. Maybe Euron heard about a secret weapon in his travels and they have to compromise with him to get access to it. Maybe an elite team of named characters has to spend a couple episodes questing into a zombified north to try and find something/someone. Meanwhile, Tyrion heads south and schmoozes with southern lords to get them to aid their fight versus the Others. Dany's choices come back to bite her in the ass or make her quest easier.

Season 8 Finale

Season 8 finale is at Moat Cailin. Not the most cinematic location, but appropriate. Big final battle of everyone they have managed to assemble. They fight. Oh what, the Children of the Forest are back!? What, they flood the neck again just like they did back way back when to help carry the day.....

You get the picture.

Fun bonus idea: The CotF actually flood the neck and cut off the North from the rest of the South. At the end of the show Dany decided the North has earned its independence. Sansa becomes Queen in the North, etc.

Anyway, I'm going to avoid getting too specific, I just want to focus on overarching ideas/themes/character arcs. I think this structure keeps the focus more on the shows underlying theme, while still having satisfying arcs for each season. At the end of the show, our heroes prevail through grit, luck, sacrifice, supernatural assistance, and secret knowledge about the Others gained over the course of the last couple of seasons. I know in my heart of hearts what inevitably defeats them is going to be inherently a little silly, but there's no reason to think it can't be less silly than what we got.

Alas, this blog post will forever be nothing more than a dream of spring.

"The Long Night"

We're going to take a break from board games this week because I watched "The Long Night" last evening and have a lot of thoughts. Suffice it to say, Danielle and I saw two giant pop culture finales this weekend and while we loved one (Avengers: Endgame), but on our way home from watching "The Long Night" with friends yesterday we could not stop ranting about how much we disliked it. Two notes before we go on. Danielle deserves a lot of credit for this post, I wrote it but many of the ideas are hers. Additionally, this review will contain spoilers for all seasons of GOT; you have been warned.

As many of you know, I've been generally unhappy with the direction of Game of Thrones since about mid season 5. The first four seasons of Game of Thrones are a tight, intriguing political drama with memorable characters and a looming threat from the north that renders all political machinations pointless. As the series began moving beyond the books, I increasingly felt like the writers didn't understand some of the key themes of the books and TV series to date and began making decisions based on audience reaction. Indeed, I ultimately feel like Game of Thrones has gotten too popular for its own good, and audiences reward spectacle even if it compromises overarching themes and character development.

I will get more into themes and how this episode massively fails to respect them later, but for now, let's talk about:

Death and Game of Thrones

People like this show because it doesn't pull punches with its protagonists; the emphasis on "anyone can die." In adaption, George R.R. Martin has been turned into a bloodthirsty author who hates his characters and wants them to suffer, something that the show ostensibly reflects.

I will posit this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Martin wrote GOT. Characters don't die randomly. I can't stress this notion enough. Characters die as a result of actions they take. Let's look at a few prominent examples.

1. Ned Stark - Dies because he is honorable and noble, qualities that make him ill-suited to playing the political games of King's Landing.
2. Robert Stark - Dies because he marries for love instead of shoring up a crucial alliance.
3. Oberyn Martell - Dies because he gets cocky on the brink of victory and allows his quest for revenge to supersede winning his fight versus the Mountain.

I can go on, but these are three deaths everyone remembers, and every one is earned by the character's actions up to that point. Put more succinctly, protagonists in GOT don't have "plot armor," they are not immune to their own bad decision making. If they are in a situation where they would die, they do.

What Benioff and Weiss apparently concluded in the aftermath of "The Mountain and the Viper" was "omg, audiences love it when we kill off major characters," and with no more books to adapt, they started leaning wholesale into just killing off characters whenever it suited them to get a reaction out of the audience. Ser Barristan Selmy is a fantastic example of this, as are Jojen Reed, Marjorie Tyrell and Osha. Conversely, at the same time they start killing off protagonists willy-nilly, they start giving plot armor to the villains. Ramsay Bolton is especially egregious in this regard, being granted the ability to overpower the experienced and battle-hardened Stannis Baratheon with his "twenty good men" and retaining the loyalty of the northern lords after killing his father. If this was earlier Game of Thrones, Ramsay would have been a loose cannon of a villain who immediately pays the price when he makes a mistake. But at this point, Benioff and Weiss were trying to recapture the magic of Joffrey, and were willing to sacrifice logic to do this. However, there is no more glaring example of a villain with plot armor than Cersei Lannister.

The Problem of Cersei

Oh boy....I can only conclude that WB really like Lena Headey, because now apparently she is the final villain for GOT. I can't emphasize this enough to people who have not watched the earlier seasons of GOT. Cersei is not smart. She thinks she is, she tries her best, but she is repeatedly and consistently undone by her own pettiness and shortsightedness. She makes mistake after mistake and pays the price for it: losing all of her children and having to endure the walk of shame for her bad decision making.

The Sept of Baelor should have been where her plot line ended. Driven to the end of her rope, surrounded by her enemies, Cersei kills them all and self-immolates, capping off her descent into insanity and becoming the mad queen. Instead, she survives and becomes Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.

This is weird because it's not like her assassination of half of the nobility of King's Landing alongside her own uncle and cousin is a giant secret. Her culpability is abundantly clear to everyone. So let's be charitable and say that the city is too terrified of her to resist at this point and the Gold Cloaks support her out of fear. Are there also no rival Lannisters with a claim to Castlery Rock? Even so, that's still just 1.5 kingdoms on her side, and she rules with this?

So, having written themselves into the corner of going into Season 7 with Cersei barely holding onto power and Dany coming in fully-loaded, WB have to take it upon themselves to start buffing Cersei and engineering weaknesses for Dany. Enter Euron Greyjoy, a character who I hate every time he's on screen, and in quick succession they eliminate the Tyrells, Yara's Ironborn, and Dorne from playoff contention. It's especially galling because the plan that backfires is Tyrion's, who has been suffering from "artificially induced stupidity syndrome" since Season 6. Anyway, at end of season 7, Cersei is a force to be reckoned with, or whatever. Dany still has dragons so it seems like she should be able to win this thing whenever she wants.

After the brain dead and pointless wight quest, the whole purpose of which was to get Cersei on their side and end the War of the Two Queens, Cersei fools the smartest person in the show and decides she cares more about preserving her power than saving the world.

This is the ultimate short-sighted decision.

And this is why the "Night King Flies Down To KL" fan theory was so good - Cersei would actually cease having plot armor for an episode and actually pay the price for her decision making. But no, the most interesting potential twist they could have done they left on the cutting room floor, and we get a Phantom Menance-esque ending to the show's apparently not arch villains.

Overarching Themes

The very first scene of Game of Thrones is Night's Watch being butchered by the Others. They have always been the looming threat, the thinly veiled climate change metaphor that threatens to plunge the world into eternal darkness. The overarching plot of the show has always been people slowly becoming woke to the threat and having to put aside their differences to prepare for the only war that matters. The plot tension has derived from the question of if they bring it all together in time. By the last season or two, the general plot direction seemed to be that all the political machinations of the earlier seasons would be long since past, a summer diversion that only distracted from the real threat of winter. At the end of it all, it would not matter who was sitting on the Iron Throne but merely if the dead or living ruled Westeros.

This is why Jon is more or less the primary POV character for the audience, because he is the only one who truly understands the threat and has been in a desperate race against time to get everyone on the same page. It's why Sansa's spitefulness and push to make sure the North retains its independence in Season 8 is so frustrating for the viewer, because we know it doesn't matter, and moreover that she should know it doesn't matter. GUESS YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT FEEDING THEM NOW, THEY ALL DIED. But apparently we needed plot tension in the allied camp...

By far, the biggest mistake made with the Others was the reveal that they were created by the Children of the Forest from men, a WMD run amok because "bad humans cut down trees." I won't go into how fucking short-sighted the Other decision was from a race that literally lives millennia.

In the books, the White Walkers are heavily implied to be a separate race of intelligence creatures. Graceful, inscrutable, and deadly demons of cold. It's also heavily implied they worship a god of ice and death and that their arrival from the North and attempt to bring about the Long Night is part of a cosmic battle between light and dark. IMHO, the Others are much more fascinating, interesting and intimidating as another form of life, a true Other. They already passed on the most interesting possible ideas about the Others long before this episode, but I was hoping against hope they wouldn't go full Mass Effect Reapers and get us with one last surprise or reveal.

Can You Talk About The Episode Already?

My point in all this set up is that the problems didn't begin last night, they have been building for literally years. Last night the bill came due and the check bounced. Without further ado, let's talk about the episode itself.

For starters, I hate how this episode was shot. I get what they were going for, dark confusing, spooky, it was pretty clear they saw all the positive feedback to the "Battle of the Bastards" and decided to go all in on some of the camerawork from that battle. The shots nicely convey the disorienting and terrifying fight against the Others. However, I'm still the viewer, and you can only watch shakey cam and Dutch angles for so long before it becomes really irritating. I want to see what's going on, and I just had to trust at a certain point that if they were going to kill a named character, they would light up their face for me. This is a big critique and while more appropriate camerawork would not change my overall opinion of the episode, it feels like the crap icing atop the crap cake.

So last episode by mentioning that the Crypts were safe six times, they transparently set up that they were not. This episode we got to see the dead Starks rising up to kill the living. Cool. What galled me about this scene was that after all that set up about the Crypts, no named characters die, just a bunch of extras. What was the point? Just to ramp up the tension?

Theon dying was really unsatisfying to me. The show has already spent seasons making him suffer and pay for his mistakes. I don't buy that it was a satisfying redemption for him, HE WAS ALREADY REDEEMED 2-3 TIMES. Bran saying he was home didn't make me misty-eyed, he should have already died at that point doing something useful or been told to leave by Bran before the NK arrived. It was all ultimately pointless and if anyone deserved to live through the end of GOT, it was Theon.

On that note, holy shit Bran is worthless. What was even the point of warging into those ravens this episode? Fans have been speculating for years that he would warg into a dragon for this battle, and he doesn't. He just sits there, gets all the Iron Born killed, and I guess "baits out the NK" (don't worry, we're getting to that). I guess at this point I don't understand the point of Bran, he was suddenly set up last episode to be "the memory of this world" and the the ultimate objective of the NK because he represents the living. But for all intents and purposes, he has done nothing for the last season and a half but sit around and occasionally dispense cryptic prophecy.

Mellisandre's death bothered me, but it's a minor gripe. I liked her returning for this battle, I like her fire mage powers actually being used against the undead. I would have found it more fitting for her to die to the wights or self-immolate rather than just disintegrate into the wind. This is a comparatively minor though. Time to get to the meat and potatoes

Dave And Dani Get Pendantic About Battle Tactics

Game of Thrones has never been the best about showing believable battles. And indeed, I don't generally hold it against a show when it sacrifices realism for drama or gets little things wrong. Any one of these choices by itself is not particularly annoying, but the net sum of all the stupid decisions the defenders make in the Battle for the Dawn took me and Dani out of the action constantly. Let's make a numbered list, shall we!

1. Waste your shock cavalry and some of the finest warriors you have in a pointless charge that gets them all killed against an enemy who doesn't suffer morale damage. (It did do a great job setting the mood though).
2. Setting up your catapults and trebuchets outside the walls and not even behind the infantry, having them fire one volley, and then do nothing else the entire battle.
3. Fighting zombies on open ground when you have walls, possibly the best tactical advantage you can have against an opposing force.
4. Putting your best infantry in front of your spike fire trench so they just get slaughtered to the man and can't retreat.
5. Having only one spike fire trench.
6. Not constantly using your dragons to baste the wights in fire and getting lost in the snowstorm.
7. Not constantly barbequeing wights with your dragons as they came down from the north.

These are the most egregious. And its not like these people don't know what's coming. Why bother fighting outside the walls if you know you'll probably be just overrun? Lots of people present in the planning session had fought the Others before and should have known better than to fight outside the walls. But no, the heroes are artificially stupid for the sake of making it seem even more hopeless.

The battle was weirdly paced, and if you want to know what I mean, go watch the Battle for Helm's Deep. Coming into the episode, I expected that we would have an outside phase, a walltop phase, then an increasingly desperate struggle inside the fortress. Critically, the struggle inside Winterfell should have begun about 70-80% of the way through the episode. Stretching it out too long taxes your suspension of disbelief that your favorite characters can live so long after the primary defenses have fallen.

But no, by a little over the halfway mark, they are in a desperate fight for their lives inside Winterfell. At this point, I thought: Oh, maybe the dead just win. Do they expect us to believe that all of these characters can keep up their resistance for the next 35 minutes?

Yes, yes they did.

At the end of the day, Winterfell is a castle of a dozen named characters and basically no extras. We repeatedly show Jaime, Gendry, Brienne, Tormund, Sam, pushed to their limits, backs to the wall, fighting 2 or 3 vs. infinity. And they all live? For a show that has long eschewed plot armor for its main characters, this was really weird. Episode 2 of this season was one of my all-time favorite episodes of Game of Thrones - people who we have grown to care about sitting around and talking. Multiple character arcs came to a conclusion, the tension was built, and for what? For everyone to just live no matter how unbelievable? When Jon revealed his parentage to Dany, I expected something would happen to one of them this episode that made it a moot point. Now the writers are going to have to find some way to wrap that plot element up in a satisfying manner, good luck there.

Why does Dany land her dragon and keep him on the ground long enough to get overrun by wights, if you needed to get her on the ground there were plenty of other ways to do that?

Jon sees the Night King and charges him, to which the Night King responds by simply raising all the dead - underscoring the pure hopelessness of their situation. In this moment, Jon is completely surrounded by the undead - a la the conclusion of the Wight Quest last season. And he lives? Jorah (shout out to one of my favorite characters) and Dany somehow live on the ground when completely surrounded long enough for Arya to destroy the droid control ship?

This all could have been avoided if they were a little more slow and deliberate with the pacing, but the last half of the episode feels very bloated. If they didn't feel like they could fill 82 minutes of battle satisfyingly, why not cut it shorter?

The result is that after the battlements fall we end up with a lot of weird scenes to fill time like Arya in the library. Scary, yes. Obvious Alien/Jurrasic Park/Walking Dead shout out, yes. What purpose did it serve in the ultimate narrative other than raising the tension again? Furthermore, this fortress is crawling with both the living and the dead, Sansa was recently noting they had too many people to feed. You're telling me there is a single room in this fortress that is empty and has nobody in it?

This scene and the following scene with Beric and the Hound feel like something out of The Walking Dead, the difference being there that everyone is already dead any anyone you encounter will be a Walker. These empty, creepy scenes in the halls and rooms of Winterfell are a stark contrast to the crowded exterior spaces with our characters desperately fighting tsunamis of wights.

What was the ultimate point of the Others in this battle? To merely serve as an entourage for the Night King? Why didn't we have "mini-boss" fights? We spread out so many Valyrian Blades prior to this episode (Oathkeeper, Widow's Wail, Heartsbane), with the clear intimation that these people would be equipped to deal with the Others themselves. Think of how cool it would have been to see Jorah or Brienne go out taking one of these things with them in a moment of supreme badassery. But no, the Others are window dressing, nothing more.

I want to be clear that I don't want them to kill characters for the sake of it, but there were a lot of earned character deaths that were not paid off this episode purely because they want to save them for the fight versus the ultimate villain that apparently is Cersei. To recap who dies:

1. Dolores Ed - I'm pretty okay with this one.
2. Lyanna Mormont - Really surprised by this one considering how much fans love her, but it was earned (she was essentially warned by Jorah last episode that she would die if she fought), and she went out in a pretty legendary fashion killing one the few unique wights we saw this episode (seriously, where were my ice spiders?).
3. Beric - This was fine, I'm honestly surprised he survived the Wight Quest
4. Jorah - Captain Friendzone, dead at last, but his arc more or less finished last episode.
5. Theon - As noted above, I didn't like this one. Weird how much they hated this character.
6. Melisandre - Weird tone for her final scene, but whatever.

The last episode clearly set up for at least 3-4 more named characters to die. I mean, we couldn't even kill the prophesied to die and pointless character at this stage Varys. At least that would have paid off THE CRYPTS AREN'T SAFE set up and made those events matter.

The Night King Blows His Million To One Lead

Arya killing the NK was one of the most badass things I have ever seen and the room I was in cheered for it.

And then I thought about it for a moment, and realized how unsatisfying it was on a number of levels. It honestly feels like the writers just threw it in there to say "WHAT A TWIST  BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING." You're right, I didn't, that doesn't mean it was good.

I'll start with what I liked: I liked that the Dagger that began the show ended the apparently not main villain's reign of terror. I will say it would be more appropriate if the dagger that began the War of the Five Kings ended the War of the Five Kings, but I'll get more into that in a minute.

Arya killing the NK is not inherently unsatisfying, indeed I can imagine ways it could have been better. Maybe Jon is fighting him, is on the brink of losing, then Arya ninjas in and saves Jon. That would been a good scene and paid off both their relationship and the ending refrain from last season: "In winter, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." It could even be a scene that showcases Jon's Stark identity and prompts him to remain with his adopted family rather than seek the throne.

Her killing NK was unsatisfying for two primary reasons:

1. She has never had any scenes, interactions, or lost anything to him. (Unlike Jon and Dany)
2. Killing him didn't require anything specific to Arya's skillset acquired in Bravos. While at least the move she used to kill him was foreshadowed last season, she didn't have to be a Faceless Man to do it.

All this time Arya has been the obvious person to kill Cersei, both based on her skillset and due to Cersei being the last person on her list. So in the aftermath of this, I'm left to wonder: Damn, is Arya just going to kill Cersei too? Is Arya going to kill everyone? What was the point of Jon or Dany this battle, they basically did nothing.

So all that build up about Azor Ahai and his/her flaming sword was for nothing. All the talk of the Prince who was Promised didn't pay off. The ending of "Hardhomme," spooky and ethereal as Jon and the NK face each other with a future conflict between them clearly intimated is now ruined.

If you wanted to do a bait and switch like this, it needed to be Arya coming in to save Jon. Alternately, Dany should have sacrificed herself to kill the NK to pay off this contrived "Would she sacrifice the throne to save the realm?" build up from the last two episodes. Either one of these would have been a lot better. As things stand, its surprising but not earned or satisfying.

And so, the millenia old NK, the ostensible ultimate villain of the story, dies in the most punk ass way imaginable. Did you have questions about the Others, their motivations? Were you hoping for them to be more than a zombie horde for our heroes to face? Well too bad. That's done now. I see fans online hoping Bran divulges some fun details in the coming episodes, I think it's safe to say that's not going to happen and is wishful thinking. They were one-dimensional villains the entire time.

The resolution to the threat of the Others was always going to feel contrived. You can't set up an unstoppable force without giving your heroes some silly way to defeat it. My thought always was that at the end of GOT, through pluck, sacrifice, supernatural assistance and maybe knowledge of the Others gleaned by a character like Sam, our heroes would barely find a way to defeat them. Instead, we get a Phantom Menace ending. What was the point of all that Dragonglass? Nobody fought any Others this episode and wights already die to fire and steal. Was it just to get Jon to Dragonstone so he could fuck his aunt? Were the obsidian caltrops on the walls just there to set the mood?

Why Should I Care Anymore?

I'll sum this up with a Tweet, not my own:

At the end of the day, the NK was a pointless distraction to even the odds for a final fight versus Cersei. Talk about a let down, and talk about an unsatisfying final villain. The preview for next episode makes it look like its back to business as normal. Dany is talking about winning the last war, as her, Jon, and the 25 people left at Winterfell prepare to go deal with Cersei.

At this point, why should I care? The entire point of this series, a point hit over and over again by Jon and every character who has ever interacted with the Others is that who sits on the Iron Throne is immaterial. Now, after the battle for the continuation of human existence in Westeros, I have to once against care about who sits on the Iron Throne.

Whoop dee fucking doo.

How can you so profoundly misunderstand the core theme of Game of Thrones? How can you misunderstand the purpose of the first scene of the first episode? I have been waiting for 8 years to see the Battle for the Dawn, to see dragons fighting zombies outside Winterfell. As an episode of TV, it was good. Irritatingly shot, but with an exceptional score and some good performances. As a Game of Thrones episode, it massively fails to deliver on the themes and plot of the show and is a surprisingly weak payoff to seven seasons of build up. I'm especially surprised because these big action set piece episodes are generally pretty good. Even the Loot Train battle, as much as I was annoyed at the set up for it, was a really well-paced and good-looking action sequence. I'm also aware that a lot of people suffered through many weeks of shooting in the cold to bring us this episode, so hats off to them for sticking it out. The final result is simply disappointing though, a confusing and unsatisfying payoff to the television event of a generation.

I hope if nothing else, this examination has convinced you that the problems with Game of Thrones began a lot earlier than this episode. Story collapses don't happen in a single episode. This was the culmination, a moment to resolve a lot of outstanding questions, character arcs and themes. The bill came due and the writers came up short. Maybe it was impossible to do well, I personally doubt GRRM will ever finish his series. But many of the mistakes in writing feel bafflingly simple. And I don't buy that the ending of a series will always not live up to the hype. Series do it all the time, if you don't believe me, go watch End Game.

This is to say, I expect some backlash online for this episode. But WB won't care, the season is already done and I'm sure they're moving onto bigger and better projects after this. The general public won't think much of the episode, they'll describe it as "epic," maybe complain that it was a little dark, but overall not think about it too much. The most uproar will be on the internet. The Reddit fanbase is already hopelessly divided over the episode. Last night was the backlash, today is the insufferable backlash to the backlash. Partisans from both sides will hype up the positive or negative aspects of the episode, but they represent a tiny portion of the viewing public. Game of Thrones is too much of a cultural force now to get bad reviews, and only egregious episodes like "Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken" or "Eastwatch" garner the merest whimper of dissent. Just like the Star Wars and Mass Effect fanbases, there will be continued griping online for years, but it won't amount to much.

I'm really disappointed though, I will forever treasure seasons 1-4 of GOT, but knowing the ending cheapens even some of those exceptional early episodes. I think I'm done though, it's been a good run, generated endless plot speculation with friends, spawned a handcrafted table with an outline of Westeros, a selection of house shirts, and countless other accouterments. Its been clear for some time though where it has been headed. I'm just sorry to see the final story collapse and failure to pay off the themes of the show happen in an episode that should have been the culmination.