I, like many people, did not like how Game of Thrones ended. I really, really wanted it to finish on a good note, or at least have moments I could appreciate even if the whole didn't quite do what I was hoping for. But nope, all I've got now is the need to do an autopsy on a show that I liked, if never quite loved.
There will be many think pieces dissecting what happened in this season, but ultimately I believe it comes down to the fact that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss just didn't understand the work they were adapting. I've never read the books, but I think you can back up the idea that D&D don't understand the material just by looking at the show in isolation. Beginnings are important, and the first thing we see is meant to build the context of the world, and the threats facing it. So it's important to remember that our first experience in Game of Thrones is three rangers, members of the Night's Watch, finding a bunch of dead things in a quiet area of the woods before they're all brutally murdered by a White Walker. It's only after that that we get to see the Starks and Winterfell, and King Robert Baratheon with all the political intrigues and conspiracies and murder that will follow.
If the story was meant to be about those things, than that's where the story would've started. The entire reason that we get the White Walkers first though is so we remember that all this drama over who killed Jon Arryn, is Joffery the son of Robert, all of that is just flashy noise distracting us from the true enemy coming out of the dark with the dead coming with them. But it's clear that D&D believed that the real action of the series was found in the machinations of who sat on the Iron Throne rather than, you know, the war to save stave off the extinction of mankind. That's why in the final season the White Walkers are dealt with first, the apocalyptic threat they represent is only a speed bump to the more important question of who's going to rule Westeros afterwards.
This bending of the the conflict to the Iron Throne is why everything feels petty and unfulfilled. Jon's entire arc is about discovering that borders and kingdoms are arbitrary boundaries that lead to fragmented, incomplete responses to existential threats, all of which gets thrown out the window once the reveal of his parentage starts spreading. Bran gets hit with this too: he becomes the living memory of the world, able to see past present and future at will, which only matters because it will give him a unique perspective a king. It's like D&D looked at George R. R. Martin's work that the world was bigger than what ass parks itself in a fancy chair and said "Ah, no, it's not."
A large part of this is how D&D never really got a firm grip on consequences or ever bothered to treat character development as anything more than guidelines to be blown off whenever they needed rather than the underpinning of their entire show. Jamie is a good example of the latter- remember how he spent season 3 tied up, realizing how he's kind of a piece of shit, and how he had that moment where he opened up to Brienne about why he killed the Mad King to save literally millions of people? Remember how all of that made him seem like a conflicted anti-villain trying to find a legitimate way to live as honorably as he could? Remember how a season later Jaime rapes Cersei in front of their dead son and D&D saw no friction between his attitude to try and be better and that action? So it's not all that surprising that in the end they would chuck Jamie's development out a window so he could march his way to King's Landing and die with Cersei because... well, just because, that's why.
Which, speaking of her; Cersei's plot is the worst example of the show's habit of just forgetting that consequences are a thing. This is a woman who has no real claim to the throne, who only got it after assassinating every rival to her power by blowing them up in the Sept of Balor which caused her son to drop himself out a window so, yeah, she's got problems. This doesn't even begin to take into account how palpably hated she is for sleeping with her brother and all the naked contempt she has for the people she wants to rule over. All these problems, compounded by Arya annihilating the Freys in the Riverlands, should have Cersei up against the wall, under siege in the Red Keep from enemy and ally alike even before Daenerys shows up because well, she murdered her way to the top and that tends not to go over very well when you're already hated and your machinations kill noble and civilian alike. Trying to survive making an enemy out of everyone should be an intense, high tension drama, but the show can't even bother to show her doing anything other than stand aloof getting drunk for two-and-a-half seasons.
This isn't just sloppy oversight but outright sabotage. Tryion and Varys, for example, know firsthand how much money the Iron Throne owes to the Iron Bank of Braavos which, in early seasons when they were still competent, would've been something they would have worked to apply as much leverage as possible. It's even more galling that this doesn't happen because it dovetails so nicely with Daenerys goal of winning Westeros without massacring everything in sight with the dragons, Dothraki, and Unsullied. Leveraging how unpopular Cersei is and how tenuous her hold on power is would be a pretty significant coup- get the Iron Bank to withdraw their money, and Cersei collapses under the weight her rule by paranoia has brought her.
It's thematically appropriate and fits with the goals the characters have in mind and how they would want to achieve them; Tyrion by using his knowledge of money and fiance and Varys could encourage a few riots here and there before making a pit stop in Braavos to talk to the Iron Bank. Instead, Tyrion becomes the dumbest person on the show and gets blindsided by every major event the plot takes and Varys just stands around waiting to get burned to death.
All that said, I don't think anyone got their character sacrificed more for plot reasons than Daenerys. What I always liked about Daenerys story was that she was a ruler who had at her disposal the equivalent of living nuclear weapons to use in her burning mission to reclaim her stolen destiny. There's a lot of temptation to just turn everything in your path to ashes because, why not? And while that temptation is certainly there for Dany throughout the series, she does seems to grow into someone who legitimately does want to make the world a better place, and who wants to rule by more than fire and blood alone.
Take this scene from season 6, for example. As terms for her support of Dany's war in Westeros, Yara asks for the independence of the Iron Islands, which Dany grants as long as the Ironborn quit their reaving and raping. It's a big moment, one that shows how Dany has learned from her time in Mereen that she can't take a no-holds-barred top down approach to ruling; if she wants to lead, she'll have to build coalitions of respect with those she seeks to rule instead of just demanding their blanket submission. Contrast that with the scene where she meets Jon for the first time- gone is the air of respect, instead, she's petty, demanding, and arrogant. Everything she should have carried over from her time with the Ironborn is just, gone, forgotten to set up the eventual turn where she burns King's Landing to the ground.
Which, yeah, Mad Queen Dany. The show really, really wants to retcon all of Dany's previous brutal actions as signs of foreshadowing that she totally had it in her to lay waste to innocent people and would do so given the right provocation. The death of Viserys, the killing of the warlocks in Qarth, the sack of Astapor, the crucifixion of the slave masters in Meereen, the burning of the Dothraki Khals, all these are shaded as the actions of a blood-thirsty tyrant who equates opposition to her as signs of inherent evil she needs to destroy. "All those people were against her and seen as evil, so that's how she sees everybody" the show tries to say, conveniently leaving out that literally every single example provided were people who explicitly wanted to enslave her to use for their own purposes, which are slightly different circumstances than being a surrendering civilian population which never acted against her.
The justifications for this aren't much better, either. In behind-the-scenes discussions and interviews laying out the reasoning for Dany's actions, D&D say that the setbacks she's faced in Westeros- the deaths of two dragons, Jorah, Missandei, the loss of Dorne and the Reach, and the Ironborn as allies, the revelation of Jon's true parentage, have all accumulated and pushed her past her breaking point. To borrow some language from my creative writing workshops, "I don't buy it."
On paper, I can see it- Dany loses everything she loves and has spent years protecting, the appearance and rejection of a male relative that jeopardizes the destiny she's built so much of identity on, all of this builds into a pressure cooker of grief and paranoia that she finally breaks under right at the moment she's won every thing she's ever wanted. Again, in theory, not a bad idea, but the lynch pins of this are the sudden stupidity and incompetence of her closest advisers or not being able to see stationery ships while she's flying above them in clear skies. In other words, she's only backed into a corner because the plot demands her to be so, with all the contrived mechanics grinding the story into a twisted, incompetent version of itself.
It's a shame really, for the show to end on such an ignoble note. But it makes sense that it would given that the lesson D&D took from some the shows most iconic moments- Ned's execution, the Red Wedding- was that they were big, shocking moments of heavy, world altering spectacle. They thought that's all they had to deliver but missed that what made those moments work was the long, slow work of characters making choices- choices they thought they had to make, or didn't want to, or felt perfectly justified in making, that no matter what, all bound them, trapped them in an inevitable moment they couldn't see coming.
And maybe that’s the most powerful, underlying bond between this show and its audience. We too made the choice we believed was necessary, to continue on the same path when only doom was on the horizon in the hope that somehow, somewhere along that path there would a turn, a fork towards a better end that we just had to press forward to see; until, finally, we met our inevitable, miserable end that was waiting for us all along.
