The Game of Thrones Finale

(Obviously spoilers ahead from the finale of Game of Thrones, though if you're actually reading this you must have seen it because if you didn't see it, what the hell are you doing on the internet-run away and get to your HBO Go account, friend, as finale secrets are literally the main story on CNN right now!)

I knew this is how it was going to end.  I mean, you could have seen it for weeks, if not years.  It was to be expected.  And no, I'm not talking about the crowning of Bran or the death of Daenerys by the hand of her lover Jon Snow.  I'm talking about the instant, inevitable backlash to the Game of Thrones finale.

I'd seen it before, and it feels like it's impossible to have major, pop cultural phenomena these days without having some sort of backlash to the end of the series.  In the infancy of social media & internet culture dominating discussions about major communal film and television moments, we saw the "satisfying" rip of proclaiming critically-acclaimed series like The Sopranos and Lost a "waste of time."  This continued with The Last Jedi and The Avengers and now even movies before they happen thanks to preconceptions about the actors (some are already writing off Robert Pattinson simply for being cast, even though he's about a thousand times the actor that Ben Affleck is, and has more than redeemed himself since his glittery vampire days).  One has to assume that had the internet been more formidable we'd have very different reactions to, say, the endings of Lord of the Rings and Friends considering their "everyone gets everything they want" sort of endings rather than building on, say, the late decision to have Joey date Rachel or forcing at least a bit more bloodshed at the end of Return of the King.  So I anticipated, with Game of Thrones making some creative leaps in its final season, that this was going to be an unpopular finale.

And I'm not saying that some of the criticism isn't valid.  There are gaps in this final season that might be a bit of a stretch to justify.  The Brienne & Jaime romance finally being consummated while he ultimately goes back to Cersei, as if the only thing missing from Brienne's life was a one-night stand...I could have done without it.  But I think the bigger problem for Thrones, the one that sealed this fate, was splitting the final season into two halves, making us have a year to anticipate only six episodes when, if they'd done this in one long loop of 13 episodes it might have received less vitriol.

Because one of the best parts of Game of Thrones was that it was a fantasy show that relied very heavily on mystery and watching for clues.  Think of Tywin Lannister writing letters to the Freys (which ultimately led to the Red Wedding) or Cersei's conversations about wildfire (which ultimately led to the blowing of the Sept of Baelor).  The show has always been very intentional in giving us clues about how it would ultimately end with seemingly dismissible scenes, and it's very obvious that the inconsequential death of Dickon Tarly was meant to be an indication of what Daenerys's true goal was-the destruction of what stopped her from having power in the first place.

The writers clearly knew that they'd made a mistake here, because they telegraphed this inconsequential moment over-and-over again this season with expositional dialogue from Sam & Tyrion.  After all, while every person that Dany had killed prior to this moment you could justify (slave owners and murderous Khal's and people who had hurt her people), Dickon Tarly was simply doing what Daenerys expected of her people-to serve his kingdom and queen.  He was just serving the wrong queen.  It would have been so easy to simply trap him in a dungeon, a prisoner in the way that, say, Tywin Lannister did to Sansa Stark.  But she didn't-she burned him alive, the same fate she'd given to terrible men, and as a result we saw the first hint that Daenerys's death-by-fire attitude was not about creating a moralistic world, but simply a world where she had power.  Had that episode been nearer to other episodes that clearly needed it as a hint of what was to come, perhaps some of this hatred might have been avoided.  Seeing the horrified look on Sam's face when he saw that Daenerys had killed his brother in cold blood only a literal three weeks after it happened rather than two years after would have shown that her moral compass was waning.  But here's where I'm going to diverge from popular opinion, and it's almost certainly because I'm not a TV person.  I'm a movie person, then a book person, and then someone who happens to watch TV.  And this shifts how I approach something like Game of Thrones.

Because as a movie person, I'm trained to look at TV series as a cumulative whole, not as individual episodes or seasons; movies are judged by their sum, not individual scenes.  And I think that, if you look at this not as six episodes you waited two years to watch, but instead as a long, continuous story, you'll find that it all makes a lot more sense and is a more satisfying ending than the writers/directors will be given credit for.  After all, the Dickon Tarly issue disappears if you watch all 73 episodes end-to-end, since "Eastwatch" is only a few hours away from "The Bells."  You also get to see some of the very clever circular aspects of the series, with Bran getting to be the beginning and end of the series, and the way that the Starks rise-and-fall-and-rise again.  Yes, you still have some problems (if you were Team Daenerys, the series will never be forgiven), but the conclusion is simply that-it's a story that finishes.  We see some of our heroes (Sansa, Bran, Tyrion) rise to be the people they were meant to be, while other figures (Jon, Arya, Drogon) slip into legend, their stories shared the way we speak of Alexander & Cleopatra-figures too large to ever be real, even if they were.  It borrows a bit heavily from Tolkien, more so that I think Martin would want to admit, but it's an ending that feels right, even if some characters don't get the fate you think they deserve.

And that last bit might be where I end this, because I think that's the problem with franchises like Avengers and Game of Thrones and Lost and The Sopranos-the problem isn't necessarily that you're not getting a good ending, it's that you aren't getting the ending you wanted, and I think that's a major problem if we want to continue to see high stakes in pop culture.  My brother and I discussed this the other day, and he made the good argument that we're getting to the point where artists aren't going to be willing to take risks anymore, to try different things to see if they might work.  It would have been very easy to have Dany & Jon rule alongside each other, Sansa as Warden of the North, Arya leading the Queen's Guard, and have Cersei beheaded at the end of the series.  But it wouldn't have been particularly interesting, and honestly I think most people would have complained about that too, that it was too predictable.  We don't want these stories to end, we want them to be exactly the way that they are in our heads, and that's not how art should work.  We need to judge it on what the writers and actors give us, not what we imagined in the fan fiction portion of our brain.

I get that this is hard to do, but it's essential for art to continue.  Film, television, books-these are not "Choose Your Own Adventure" (well, apparently on Netflix it is, a company that can always see a trend coming a mile away even if it isn't a healthy one), but stories that are crafted together and should be judged as a whole, not a predetermined mess.  Otherwise even endings that are considered classic today would be dismissed.  Put Twitter & Reddit into the past, and you can imagine the "consensus" conversations: "I didn't like it because I didn't think it would be a sled" or "I wasted four hours of my life and Rhett doesn't even get together with Scarlett" or "I just kept expecting Ilsa to parachute down and be with Rick-that wasn't really what I was expecting to happen...I guess I just didn't get it."  Art isn't bad if it isn't what we expected or when it doesn't match the book (as I imagine will be a complaint for this series if Martin inevitably finishes the novels)-it needs time to breath and needs to be seen in the cumulative, not bits and pieces.

So, yes, you're right that Game of Thrones didn't end with its finest episode.  It will not join the very select club of shows like Veep where the finale ends up being the very best installment of the series.  But looking at the show as a whole, and not thinking about what you wanted to happen (based on either your reading of the books or your own internal expectations of the series), I think it was a good ending to a show I loved.  It was certainly not a "waste of eight years of my life" as I've seen on Twitter being glibly thrown about.  And considering the memories and characters I got to meet along the way, characters I grew to love and cherish, writing and stories that were genuinely moving and made me change my perspective, I could never call it a "waste of eight years of my life" even if it had been a truly abysmal ending.  Game of Thrones has earned its place in the giant television pantheon, perhaps as the last towering series that made us all watch, hold our breath, and yes, even complain, together as a TV audience.