We get a very atmospheric opening, with Jon and Tyrion wandering the ruins. The burned, shell-shocked man plodding past like a walking corpse was eerie as hell. D&D’s preference for no-dialogue scenes is on display yet again, and perhaps goes on slightly too long given that we don’t actually see that big a range of emotions from Jon or Tyrion - if there ever was a time to have these men break down and weep at the horror of war and the pain of a loyal follower who has seen everything they fought for betrayed, this was probably it.
After Grey Worm gets his Nazi on, Tyrion goes to the Red Keep and we get a very nice symbolic shot of the Westeros floor map cracked and covered with ash. Tyrion finding Jaime and Cersei is another non-verbal scene, which was okay, but it might actually have been nice for Tyrion to deliver some kind of goodbye monologue musing on their character journeys and his true feelings for them both (well, Jaime at least...Cersei’s tried to have him killed way too many times. Maybe the irony of her vs Dany instead). The Lannister theme on a slow, sad cello was the perfect accompaniment.
I don’t know if Dany planned to rule from King’s Landing, given how little of it was left, but the long stairway and the seemingly endless ranked soldiers (how many of them should be left exactly? Meh) certainly looked imposing. Drogon raising his wings behind Dani so that she looked like some kind of bat-winged monster was an awesome visual, even if it was about as subtle as we’ve come to expect.
The victory speech being purely in two foreign languages was a good way of emphasising how alien Dany now seems to Tyrion and Jon - some people have compared it to General Hux’s spit-flying rant in The Force Awakens but really I thought it was the same rousing style she had always used; Dany still sees herself as the hero, which is how it should be. Mentioning freeing the people of King’s Landing from a tyrant felt a bit off though, since we’ve seen about five survivors so far and four of them have been executed. I feel like this scene (and a few others in this episode) would hang together a lot more seamlessly with just some minor changes to the bell tower sequence last episode. Perhaps if Dany had merely burned the Red Keep (which dialogue tells us was also full of civilians), and we see the rest of the city alive but in obvious fear, which Dany would recognise if only she stepped out of her ash-shrouded ivory tower. You know, something that would give her at least a fig leaf of justification.
After Tyrion resigns and there’s some more patented D&D overly-long meaningful stares, the scene between Tyrion and Jon is actually pretty good. Kit Harrington conveys a sense of not believing what he’s saying, and is only making excuses for loyalty’s sake, though I’m not sure someone as moral as Jon would really need this extra push to know what was right and wrong - again maybe if Dany had burned the Red Keep with collateral casualties; something less black and white than leveling an entire city after a lull in the fighting where they had clearly surrendered. Meanwhile Tyrion succinctly explains Dany’s character arc, though again several lines would have sounded better if the context had been slightly different. “We cheered her, because they were evil men.” Yes. “Wouldn’t you kill anyone who stood between you and paradise?” Yes but...95% of those people weren’t in the way… And of course “Who is more dangerous than the rightful heir to the Iron Throne?”
I can actually understand Dany’s reasoning on this last one. There really is no rational interpretation of Jon spreading his secret except he does in fact want to be king. By the same token, of course, I don’t understand why Jon told his sisters at all. Ned Stark was just as “honourable” and “honest” and he kept the same secret for seventeen years rather than risk Jon’s life (and a possible civil war). That said, the obvious solution is still a purely political marriage (love - or in this case the lack of it - is the death of duty, Jon…) or Jon simply abdicating. Regarding the latter, was the threat of a massive pro-Jon uprising ever real at all? If so then would they have meekly accepted him being sent to the Wall at the end of the episode? The whole Jon / Aegon plot just kind of got dropped after Dany’s death. In this it goes the same way as a lot of other “prophesy” based plot threads - which would have been okay if the show had gone the same way as the books and explicitly said that prophesies are essentially meaningless, and pursuing one because it’s your “destiny” usually leads to trouble (which would have been a good monologue from Jon when confronted by Grey Worm for killing his dragon queen). As it is, it feels more like they’ve been simply dropped for time.
The callback to Dany’s vision of a ruined throne room in season two was pretty nice, and again the accompanying music is lovely. I appreciated that Dany, in this lonely final scene with Jon, was played as mostly sane and sympathetic again - though by the same token, her attempts to address what happened last episode come across in the same awkwardly meta way as Littlefinger trying to explain his (equally nonsensical) season five actions to Sansa. I would have liked to have seen more from this scene - perhaps Jon bringing in the bones of a burned child so we could contrast Dany’s reaction to when she was presented with the same thing back in Meereen. However, there was still some emotional resonance to the scene, and the fact that Jon was obviously going to kill Dany added to it rather than took away.
I’m not sure how intelligent dragons are supposed to be - I don’t know if Drogon actually understood that Jon had killed Dany and if so why he spared him. Burning down the iron throne was certainly convenient for the themes of the plot, though I interpreted that as Drogon simply lashing out in grief at everything that happened to be nearby, so it’s at least believable. I do feel like they skipped over the aftermath - perhaps because, since I doubt Jon would try (and succeed) to lie his way out of what just happened, there really is no reason why Grey Worm, or whoever found Jon, wouldn’t kill him on the spot.
After that, all that’s left to do is wrap everything up, with Tyrion being hilariously meta (“What unites people? Good stories”) and Sam even more bluntly so later on (“The song of ice and fire”...yeah, revealing it as an in-universe book didn’t work quite as well as in LOTR). Most of the survivors end up in pleasing if not wholly logical places (Bronn on the small council? The Dothraki and Unsullied just...go home?). The final small council scene was a bit cheesy, but to be honest the episode needed some levity after such a bleak season.
I’m not so sure about Jon’s ending - I guess putting him back in the Watch brings him full circle (having achieved nothing...sigh) though I don’t see how Grey Worm or anyone else would see this as a punishment. The White Walkers are gone (as far as anyone knows), there’s peace with the Wildlings, and the Wall is broken anyway. What’s left for the Watch to do now, act as a trading post and visa-stamping service for the Wildlings? Jon probably just spends alternate weeks chilling with Tormund and visiting Sansa in Winterfell. I also don’t get why the Wildlings went “home” north of the Wall again, given that finding a better home south was their whole objective, and it kind of undermines the “stronger than our differences” theme that the show is supposed to be pushing. If the idea was they want to show men going north to “reclaim” the land, what if the permanent winter of the north was just an enchantment of the Night King, and as Jon and his buddies leave the Wall the camera pans up to show a landscape slowly melting into spring? It would explain why the Wildlings don’t want to stay south of the Wall, at least.
No complaints at Sansa becoming queen in the north. She’s fucking earned it at this point. Arya however, seems to turn on a dime this season. Does she want to be with the family she loves? Does she want to be a killer? Or does she want to fulfil that dream she mentioned once while wounded and doped up in Braavos? Ah well, she’s Christopher Columbus now, and I guess we might get a spin-off series out of it.
I liked that Dany’s dream of breaking the wheel was fulfilled to a degree - Sam’s suggestion of a full democracy would be too unbelievable even for this mostly-upbeat ending (though realistic or not, it still irked me to see all those privileged fucks simply laughing him off) so elected kings was a feel-good compromise. Succession in a feudal setting was of course created to avoid the feuds that electing leaders tends to bring, but maybe we’re supposed to hope that they’ve moved past that now.
Slightly surprised that Brienne ended up as Bran’s kingsguard rather than Sansa’s, though again it’s hard to argue she hasn’t earned it - and it was nice to see her try and put a positive spin on Jaime’s butchered character arc in the book.
And now of course, the big one: Bran. Umm...on the one hand I don’t get why Tyrion would think that the metahuman who does nothing but stare creepily and give cryptic speeches with seemingly no real attachment to the humans around him would make a good leader. How much of him is still Bran, and how much is the Three Eyed Raven who answers to the weirwoods, not to any mortal? Of course, if he can act and communicate like a normal person, which the final scenes indicate he can…was this little fucker simply letting things play out in this horrible way so that he could rule? No-one seems to ask these questions. Everyone present (including the randoms who probably have no real familiarity with Bran) simply goes along with it.
Speaking of questions no-one asked, I’m very surprised that Yara and the new Dornish prince didn’t demand their own independence right after Sansa (these two cultures being almost as divergent from the other kingdoms as the North is). At the very least, some of the lords present should have been spit-taking at Bran’s first act being one of blatant favouritism towards his sister. Oh well, they only had so much time to wrap things up, and there would be little benefit in seeding new conflicts now.
The entirety of the plot could have benefitted from being properly played out over more episodes, really. Does anyone know why the decision to shorten seasons 7 and 8 were made? Were there scheduling conflicts for the actors, or were the showrunners simply eager to wrap things up as fast as possible?
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