HBO's GAME OF THRONES has become a direwolf's breakfast
I should warn that this post contains HUGE spoilers both for the books and for the TV series right up through its penultimate episode last Sunday night.
I should say at the outset that I do not have HBO and have only seen a few episodes of the show in their entirety. But I have hung on every episode, avidly watching the multitude of highlight and review videos on YouTube and reading what has been written online. What follows is based on these, and on the events of this final season of the series. If not having seen the episodes in their entirety, but only watched highlights with the rest described, deprives what follows of any degree of credibility, then so be it. But I think that everything I say is valid. Some, perhaps, may disagree.
The HBO series Game of Thrones is fan fiction. It became that, and nothing more, the moment it went beyond the books which George R.R. Martin had written. It would have been unpopular and doubtless economically problematic, but it's as clear as crystal that once it became clear that it was going to take this long for Martin to finish The Winds of Winter (much less A Dream of Spring, which is supposed to be the final book in the series), the best move would have been to suspend the series.
Yeah, I know. The actors would have aged. It might even have been necessary to have recast some of the major roles. But the price would have been worth it. It would have meant that the TV show could have eventually picked the story up and carried on with the integrity and quality that had made it one of the most popular TV shows in the history of the medium. And if Martin never finished the series, it was a damn fine story even if it had forever remained half-told.
Which it wouldn't have. Somebody would have stepped in to finish the tale. It would have been a poor second best, but if production weren't suspended and the project simply went on, HBO owed it to Martin, to the fans, and to everything that had gone before to have the writing done by the best available talent, and with as much advice or involvement from Martin as possible.
Above all, it would have behooved HBO to have taken however long it took to finish the tale in a way that made sense, that provided closure, and that allowed the series as a whole to have some integrity. It was a fine enough piece of work to deserve that. And HBO owed it to the audience.
It should even be noted that HBO reportedly offered David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and the others in whose hands the project was placed more than the six episodes in Season Eight. They are said to have refused the offer. That decision is incomprehensible. There is so much material in the story as it is that there is no way that justice could be done to it in two seasons even of normal length. They needed every moment of plot development they could film.
To be fair, the decision by HBO to end the series after eight seasons almost certainly guaranteed that what had been carried forward for so long with such style and quality would end in disaster. It could have used not only a full seventh and eighth seasons, but probably a ninth and even a tenth to do even a superficial job of bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion. I'll get to this in a moment, but even two or three more episodes might have helped enormously. But it was not to be.
Martin provided the showrunners with the "major points" of the ending. It is unclear at this point how closely the ending the series awkwardly and ineptly reaches will resemble Martin's, though, all the more because of what Martin calls the "butterfly effect" of the changes Benioff and Weiss have made in the story. Catelyn Stark, in the books, survived as a half-resurrected, vengeful. ghastly nightmare as Lady Stoneheart, who became a significant player in the books. Robb Stark's wife survived the Red Wedding, and he may have had an unborn heir we don't know about. Sansa never married Ramsay Bolton; instead, he marries Arya's childhood friend Jeyne Poole, who is masquerading as Arya. Sir Barristan Selmy is still alive, and the character of the Night King doesn't even exist.
That in itself would have precluded the comically abrupt, easy ending to the whole White Walker threat the show had been so ominously foreshadowing for seven seasons. There had been absurdities before, like Arya being gut-stabbed by the Waif (a wound which probably would not have even been survivable given the state of Westerosi medicine and would have immobilized even a seasoned soldier) and then leading her assailant on an acrobatic chase through the streets of Braavos, for example. Or Rickon's incomprehensible failure to zig-zag while Ramsay Bolton was using him for target practice. But every change from the books moved the story in directions Martin hadn't necessarily intended, and the consequences had an increasing impact on the story as time went on.
There were moments when we received what seemed to be clear indications that things were going to happen that didn't. I'm not talking about intentional misdirection here, but things which virtually scream that Benioff and company had decided to go in certain directions with the story, and then suddenly changed their minds. There was that scene when Arya was about to sail for Westeros from Essos and seemed to be rather pointedly mimicking Jaqen H'ghar's facial mannerisms, even conspicuously catching a tossed purse of coins with the wrong hand. Aha! This wasn't Arya at all, but Jaqen, wearing Arya's face- until it turned out not to be. I could be wrong, but it certainly seemed like the writers had decided to go in a certain direction, and then changed their minds.
But then, they were calling audibles from the moment they departed from the books. The came off the show a week ago with the White Walker fizzle, but Sunday night, in the penultimate episode of the series, the whole thing turned into a train wreck.
There had been hints for quite a while that insanity ran in the Targaryen blood. Daenerys is the daughter of the Mad King Aerys II, who burned people alive in fits of psychotic rage and was prevented from burning down all of King's Landing (believing that he himself would be transformed into a dragon) only by Ser Jaimie Lannister breaking his oath as a member of the King's Guard and killing him. The possibility that Dany, too, might eventually go mad and turn evil had been much-discussed in GOT fandom. It made a certain amount of sense, and Benioff and his associates seemed to foreshadow it in various ways. I have a strong hunch that it was even what GRRM intended, and what will happen in the books (if we ever get that far).
But what happened Sunday night was a cheat. Dany had been something of a Mary Sue throughout the show, a charismatic leader with a heart of gold determined to right wrongs and use might in the service of right. Yes, she was capable of being ruthless- but always in a good cause. She was, after all, the Breaker of Chains, the queen who freed the slaves of Essos and had their masters killed, and crucified the slave traders- but the latter two only because they were necessary. She burned the soldiers of defeated armies who refused to bend the knee alive rather than let them live to fight against her again because the cause required it. And while she was driven primarily by dynastic ambition, wanting to reclaim the crown of the Seven Kingdoms for her family because he saw it as her birthright, it was never for the sake of power alone. It was always for the sake of the good that she could do with it.
She was all about "breaking the wheel" of oppression by which the noble houses of Westeros oppressed the weak. That is what drew the cynical yet ultimately idealistic Tyrion Lannister to her cause. She was the ultimate "good guy," the embodiment of social justice. She was the woman whose heart was broken by the necessity of chaining one of her beloved dragons who had killed a single child in order to protect the lives of other children, but who did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.
A slow transformation wherein her ruthless side became more prominent and her compassionate side faded into the background would have made sense. What did not make sense was what Benioff describes as a "spontaneous decision" on her part in Sunday night's episode to act in a way 180 degrees opposite from everything the previous story had led us to expect from her.
Leave aside how the "scorpions-" gigantic anti-dragon crossbows which had killed Rhaegal, one of her two remaining dragons, the week before but somehow was unable to touch Drogon, the dragon she was riding- suddenly were powerless against her. Daenerys- understandably embittered by the loss not only of Rhaegal but of her faithful friend and advisor Missandei, who had been (inexplicably) captured by Queen Cersei and executed- came within sight of the Red Keep, where Cersei was- and rather than going after Cersei= which would have made sense= she suddenly and impulsively strafed the city, setting it ablaze and burning countless innocent men, women, and children alive. Her father's caches of wildfire, concealed beneath the city in preparation for his own act of psychotic rage, were ignited and finished the job of devastating King's Landing.
With some help, it should be noted, from Greyworm, Missandei's lover, who in a fit of rage began massacring Cersei's surrendered troops. Soon, a wholesale sack of the city was underway. Children were murdered, women were raped, and what can only be described as a massacre of innocent people took place- and all because of a sudden transformation on Dany's part from a character with one of the strongest moral compasses in the show into a psychopathic monster.
Oh. And by the way... if Dany and Drogon could wreak such havoc on the capital and largest city of the Seven Kingdoms at will, why couldn't the Night King, riding Viserion, have made very short work indeed of Winterfell- a mere castle- even without his army of the dead?
It just didn't make sense. There was no descent into madness; she just suddenly snapped. Worst of all, there was no apparent reason for it to happen just then. A psychologist in a video on the episode I saw earlier today suggested that she was not, in fact, psychotic when she went rogue Sunday night. What we saw Sunday night, she surmised, was an episode of narcissistic rage, provoked in no small measure by the failure of the people of Westeros to adore her as the people of Essos had. She felt this with special force, the psychologist suggested, because the people of Westeros did treat her nephew and lover- Jon Snow/Aegon Targaryen, whose true identity she had recently learned and who was the real Targaryen heir to the throne despite his insistence on deferring to her- was treated by the Westerosi in exactly the way she was not.
That could have believably have been the turning point, the place where her love for Jon turned to hate and her ambition overcame her ethics. But there was no hint of that. Dany was content for Jon merely to be silent about his true identity- which, with his characteristic naive, stupid honesty, we wasn't. At the very least, Jon's revelation that he was really the son of Rhegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark should have sparked a visible change in Dany's attitude, whether Jon revealed the secret to his family or not.
But there was no sign of that. In fact, other than Dany's realization that for Jon to let the cat out of the bag would make him a rival for the throne whether he wanted to be or not, nothing seemed to change until Jon broke off the romantic aspect of the relationship after Dany's abrupt decision to become a war criminal.
The sudden, on-a-dime moral transformation from a saint to a monster, from the Breaker of Chains to the Burner of Children, simply didn't ring true. Layman though I am, I have a hard time seeing Dany as manifesting the self-centeredness of a narcissist prior to that moment. The transformation came across as contrived, unreasonable, and simply not believable.
There is no way to sugarcoat this. It was pathetically bad writing, plain and simple.
That and many other of the biggest flaws in the disastrous final season of Game of Thrones can perhaps be explained by the necessity of rushing things along now that we're only one episode short of the end of the series. The same might be said of the ludicrous, absurd ease with which the White Walkers- bogeymen who had loomed menacingly in the background ever since the first season of the show- suddenly evaporated (by the way, why was Arya, of all people, the one to kill the Night King? It would have been more effective, whenever it happened, for the deed to have been done by, say, Theon Greyjoy).
But these last few episodes of the show's last season are the payoff of the story, the time when shortcuts and cheap, unbelievable gimmicks in the service of plot advancement do the most damage to the credibility of the whole shebang. And they have abounded in this final, inexplicably truncated season of the show. Perhaps the White Walker story, with some clever writing, could have ended more plausibly with a few more episodes, A lost battle or two should have preceded the final victory of the living; perhaps the Night King could have exercised a little common sense and kept out of the fray, far from dragonglass and Valaryan steel, until somehow somebody managed to get close to him at a critical moment when his final victory seemed inevitable. Even though the theory that killing the Night King would result in the destruction of his entire army- by the way, tell me again why they even thought that might happen- would have been more credible if it all hadn't turned out to be so easy after all those years of dread and foreboding. If there was one thing the end of the White Walker story could not afford to be, it was anticlimactic. And that was precisely what it was.
Though the scene with those flaming Dothraki swords being extinguished in the dark as they were massacred by the dead was really well done. To bad the flaming swords- apparently no more effective against White Walkers than non-flaming ones- made absolutely no sense in the first place.
How hard could it have been to have given Dany another episode or two to transform from hero to villain? Character development was always one of the show's great strengths. But now, when it was needed the most, there was none at all.
Where was "the Prince that was Promised," Azor Ahai? Where was Nisa Nisa, his wife, who according to the legend and prophecy would sacrifice herself to produce Lightbringer, the mighty sword imbued with her soul that would save the day? Where was the valonqar, the Younger Sibling, who was supposed to choke the life out of Cersei? As far as I know, there was no prophecy about her being crushed by a falling building when the Red Keep came down.
I guess Dany was the younger sister of Rhegar, Jon's real father. Or something. I don't know.
Who was that Night King dude, anyway? What was his connection to Bran? There are so many questions that are doomed to remain unanswered- at least in the TV series- by the wholly unnecessary rush to wrap things up in a story which could easily have gone on at least a couple of more full seasons rather than being forced to a premature and unartful conclusion in a single truncated one.
All the "plot armor-" implausible coincidences and unexplained comings and goings which have protected major characters who by rights should have been killed in the last two episodes- might be forgiven; as we've seen, the kind of sloppy writing that can be expected when a story is being made up as it goes along and forced to an untimely conclusion make that inevitable, and the story has been filled with glaring absurdities ever since it passed the point where it was no longer following the books. But the end of the White Walker threat and the transformation of Daenerys from protagonist to antagonist were simply too rushed, too abrupt, too implausibly written, and in general too badly done not to guarantee an unsatisfying and implausible ending to a story which on the whole has been told so well.
The long-awaited "Clegayne Bowl" was, in the opinion of most, well-handled. The deaths of Cersei and Jaimie, on the other hand, were remarkably unsatisfying and lacking in resonance. Rather than killing the Night King- which made very little sense- perhaps Arya should have killed Cersei.
She's the younger Stark sister.
Or maybe it should have been Jaimie (wasn't Cersei born first?), as much as he loved his sister, completing his own, well-executed transformation from bad man to good one in a sacrificial act that would have saved the Seven Kingdoms once again, his killing of the Bad Queen resonating with his role in the death of the Mad King and bringing his story full cycle.
Whatever happens in the last episode, Game of Thrones will be remembered for the great storytelling especially of the early years of the series, the artful use of CGI, the exceptional cinematography, and the wonderful acting. It will be remembered for wonderful and well-rounded characters, some of which were actually allowed to develop. But the show will also be remembered, I think, as finally being a failure, that through a series of largely self-inflicted shortcomings was unable to give us closure by credibly bringing the tale to an end.
For that, I'm afraid, we'll have to wait for George R.R. Martin to finish the books, and tell the story as he intended all along. And when he does, I'm confident that the ending will give us the closure the disastrous final season of the show seems unable to give us.
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