Game of Thrones Finale - The Iron Throne

"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." - Sansa Stark.

Thoughts on the Game of Thrones finale, "The Iron Throne". Spoilers and more ahead...


"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." - Sansa

I think a lot about television shows, probably too much really. In the grand scheme of things, they aren’t important, simply blips on the artistic or entertainment radar and nothing more. Hell, most of us don’t even watch the same shows anymore. There’s so much stuff *on* to choose from (some of it good, a little bit really good, most of it very bad) that generating *water cooler* talk about television these days is nearly impossible. It really just doesn’t even happen. Gone are the days of a show airing on Sunday night and you made damn sure you caught it because if you missed it you’d be out of the loop. Except for this one.

So before we start to pick apart the Game of Thrones season finale or final season for any of its missteps (and there were some, kind of a lot) let’s just stop and give the show some deserved props. I’m not sure another will come along any time soon (or even ever again) that is legit *appointment* television. The kind of show that if you missed watching in the moment, there was a solid chance you’d be out of the discussion the next day in an uncomfortable way. Entering the zeitgeist in this way is next level shit and for that GOT deserves monumental praise. In the era of prestige television, Game of Thrones sits up there with the very best simply because of what it’s been able to capture as part of the public consciousness. Whatever you thought of the final season/ episode/ moments, you have to give it that. Any feelings about the ending are built solely on how amazing it was for such a long run. Bad shows end all the time and no one gives a shit. This season finale mattered.

The finale, aptly title “The Iron Throne” is for sure going to be polarizing, or maybe even worse in that I think more hated it than loved (or liked it). I suspect many will be disappointed in the ending. After some fumbles leading up to the finale, it was going to be difficult getting viewers all the way on board almost no matter the outcome.

But let me start by saying, by and large I felt satisfied with “The Iron Throne”. And I’m picking my words carefully here. I didn’t shut the TV at the end and think, “Wow, they nailed it!” or “Wow that sucked!”. My feelings lie somewhere in between. I felt it was an episode bookended by a beautiful sense of self that got a little sloppy in the middle. That maybe even sums up the show as a whole.

Visually, “The Iron Throne” was near a masterpiece, of this I don’t think there’s any debate. It had some downright stunning moments, almost too many to name. In fact, the first 45 minutes of the episode, amidst the fallout of Daenerys’s fire breath on King’s Landing were a satisfying slow burn. Jon walking through the ashen streets, Tyrion finding Jamie and Cersei buried, Jon walking up the stone steps with the tyrant-rule feeling of evil all around, Tyrion tossing the The King’s Hand emblem down the steps. These were all meticulously shot and executed.

Really everything up until the moment Jon meets with Daenerys in the ruins of the throne room, held such a fantastic feeling of a world upended. The lighting and music were gorgeous. You can tell D.B. and D.B.W. took their time with these moments and it paid off. This just isn’t how television looks, this is how award-winning movies look. The difference shouldn’t be lost. Game of Thrones changed the way we look at the scope of what television can be. The mark has been set ultra-high from a production point of view. On this GOT is a clear winner. On the story they left some things hanging.

“Love is the death of duty” - Jon
“Duty is the death of love” - Tyrion

The dude made every wrong choice in the book, until he made the right one. It took him way (way, way) too long to realize Dany was out of her mind, but when he finally got his shit together and his head out of the love fog he did what needed doing. It was a bit of a schmaltzy scene, replete with the high camera angle so we couldn’t see him plunge the knife, but I suppose Jon’s final win was just not fucking things up until the very end. At best it’s damning with faint praise, at worst it’s a backhanded compliment.

And being sent back to the Wall, essentially a cast off bastard criminal was also a fitting end, made bittersweet with the understanding that this is where he belonged from the beginning. Dude never wanted much from the Lords and Ladies of Westeros, couldn’t be much bothered with the pomp and circumstance of castle life and had lived his life an outsider even in his own family. Now, he starts a new watch on the wall, once again guarding the realms of men, but ultimately becoming a Free Folk when it was all said a done.  As he was led back North to the gates of Castle Black, a single horn sounded - the Watch’s code for “Ranger Returning”. This blast, along with Ghost waiting for him was all the parade the dude needed.

“You were exactly where you were supposed to be.” - Bran

From the very beginning of the show / book the Stark children are a battered bunch. Bran is chucked out of a window and paralyzed in the fall. Sansa meets Joffrey which begins a run of relationships in which she’s abused (almost) beyond recognition. And Arya witnesses her father unceremoniously beheaded. Their mother is killed. Two brothers offed as well. Honestly, the list of bad stuff that happened to them throughout the course of the show is too long (and sometimes too grizzly) to mention.

That these three spent so much time bruised and broken only to *win* in the end, heading into the unknown mostly of their own terms is fitting. Bran’s reluctant acceptance to be King of Westeros struck me more as him *seeing* the future and taking the job because that’s what the universe intended rather than actually wanting it. (I’ll get to this scene later btw, spoiler alert - I hated it.) Prophecies and gods and lineages be damned, the path sometimes is just the path and the Three-Eyed Raven *sees* what needs seeing. Bran the Builder was the first Stark, the builder of The Wall and Winterfell. Now Bran the Broken becomes King of a *new* Westeros.

If you think that he saw all of this from the beginning, that the only way to truly “Break the Wheel” like Daenerys wanted was to burn this mother to the ground and then start over again anew, then Bran *seeing* all the angles and letting them play out accordingly makes sense. Maybe that’s more credit than is due the storytellers, but I’m sometimes overly apologetic for this show. The pieces fall into place a bit better if this is the angle. Danny’s vision of the world was something she wouldn’t have ever been able to fulfill, but by lighting the fire she got the wheel started. Bran taking over, in the end, was Westeros’s best chance to actually attain peace.

If you watch the scene of Arya getting into her boat, and hum the opening melody to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America”, the scene works a lot better. What’s west of Westeros? I suppose Arya is now going to find out (in a spinoff maybe?).

Game of Thrones’ best character got surprisingly little play in the final episode, barely registering a blip on screen when it was all said and done. In many ways, this was disappointing, though after offing the Night King and barely surviving the fire-scorched streets of Kings Landing, I suppose there wasn’t much else for her to do (not every character gets to kill Daenerys). Arya Stark, a girl who truly became No One, only to return to Westeros to finish the job of saving the world, mostly avenging her family now sets off across the sea.

It was something of a hokey way to end her character, turning her into a bystander for much of the end only to ship her off to parts unknown. It makes sense she’d fly solo from here on out, I guess I was just left wanting more from a character whose arc was as good as anyone on the show.

And finally, Sansa. Sansa who started a girl wanting to be a lady and ended up seeing all of the angles. She, correctly, sections off the North in the end, making it a free state and working to remove it from the drama that will undoubtedly unfold when people get back to being people again. Such is the cycle of the world. But in the end, Winterfell and the Starks are basically the only original House left standing. And it was because of Sansa.

The rest of the episode? Well…

Apart from the Starks, this episode had plenty of awkward moments and some clear narrative fumbles. Basically, everything they tried to do outside of the Stark (and Snow) kids was, to me, a mess. The Seven Kingdoms Board Meeting with the first item of business being “Kill Tyrion and Jon” somehow turns into Tyrion getting the floor and Robert’s Rules of Order go right out the freaking window.

Bran chosen as King, while kind of a nice story, seemed out of place and awkward. I get that it was a chance to pile key characters back on to the screen for one last moment, to remind us they were important at some point. But man did this whole scene ever feel out of place.

They tried to infuse it with some comedy here to really no avail. Edmure Tully makes an awkward case for his own claim to the throne. Robin Aryn looks every bit of awkward. The new Prince of Dorne throws off that blasé Dornish swagger. Samwell pitches an ill-suited case for democracy (oh the hilarity!). And Tyrion’s plea for a storyteller to take the throne, someone who the people could rally behind, wheelchair and all seemed the writers throwing their hands in the air and letting their indecision come through the Imp’s words. Who should rule Westeros? Fuck if we know. How about Bran? Cool. Cut, print, end of show.

The same can be said for the first King’s council meeting. This scene alone, with its little bit of hijinks and tongue-in-cheek attempts at humor was nearly record-scratch, bring the show to a halt territory. It was so poorly conceived and so obviously shoehorned in so as to A: get Bronn and some others back on screen for 3 minutes and B: make a commentary on how the more things change and burn into fire and ash and get everyone killed and there aren’t many happy endings, the more things stay the same (or however that saying goes). I hated this with such a fiery passion that when Bran said he was going to find Drogon I hoped the scaly beast would actually just fly through the window and end things once and for all.

And I suppose that’s the theme of this last season of Game of Thrones and the finale in general. To me, it was a series and show of incredible hits and incredible misses. Game of Thrones took the “go big or go home” route and when you do that, there are going to be mistakes along the way. Time spent on overdone and excessive battles could have been given to these characters.

We spent too much time on some characters and not enough on others. The story meandered at times only to go into crazy sprint mode at weird moments.

Prophecies came and went without meaning much of anything (which may very well have been the point of prophecies). Magic is real, and it also kind of isn’t (which maybe is the point of magic). Your house name and your family really matters (except maybe in the end, it doesn’t).

These ideas were all central to Game of Thrones and mattered, until they didn’t. If they really mattered to you, then I suspect this ending was a massive disappointment. And it’s tough to blame you on that accord. The show worked real hard to make you believe some things were of the utmost importance, that some characters were absolutely critical, that the show hinged on every little piece mattering.

I want to believe, at its core, Game of Thrones was about three kids, a bastard, their wolves and unrelenting commitment to family. I feel better about the show when I think of it that way and judging by the ending I think the writers wanted it that way too. They took a circuitous path to get there with plenty of blood (and boobs) along the way. They made errors aplenty. It wasn’t a perfect show, far, far from it. But I left satisfied by the ending, knowing “the pack survives.”