Going into this final season, I feel like the Game of Thrones writers had two choices: they could either follow through on what was dramatically satisfying for the show, or intentionally subvert those expectations to make a point about the pursuit of power and the inevitability of corruption. The former ending is fairly predictable, but also feels right for the show: Jon Snow’s parentage is revealed, threatening Dany’s claim, but they get married to solidify their claim. Dany’s predilection toward “fire and blood” is tempered by the good people around her, including Jon Snow, just like it has been throughout the whole show. The prophecies about Azor Ahai/The Prince Who Was Promised all come true in the form of Jon Snow, the man born from fire and ice (as in, a Targaryen and a Stark), who ultimately defeats the Night King using Lightbringer, a sword forged in flame (you could even argue that Longclaw fits this description, since it’s made of Valyrian steel). Cersei and the throne is merely an afterthought, and she is ultimately killed by Jaime, who has turned over a new leaf and realizes that there will never be peace as long as his corrupt sister is in power (you know, what happened with Jon and Dany in the finale, basically).
But the showrunners (and, presumably, George RR Martin, although we can’t be sure) chose the other route. Instead, the prophecies were meaningless, and any similarities to events onscreen were just coincidences. Jon Snow’s parentage was a giant red herring, its pointlessness actually being the very point: that lineages are meaningless, and a terrible way to choose who should rule. Daenerys, who always showed an inclination toward violence and easy solutions, proved that absolute power corrupts absolutely when she chose mass murder over a well-considered approach to her rule. The White Walkers, despite being talked up in the previous season as the greatest danger the realm has ever seen, are dispatched halfway through the season and then rarely mentioned again. Jon technically does the right thing by killing Daenerys, but is punished for it, the way good deeds tend to be in this world.
This ending is a lot less satisfying, but it’s hard to say, in broad strokes, that it’s wrong. It’s actually thematically consistent with the beginning of the show, sort of a “what you need instead of what you want” ending, which George RR Martin has said he was aiming for. The bigger issue is that the show did a terrible job actually building to that ending, either out of a desire to surprise audiences and subvert expectations, or because the writers were simply rushing the story. A lot of things, like the danger of the White Walkers and Dany’s heel-turn, feel directly contradictory to the points they were making in S7. There’s little internal logic in terms of why people are doing certain things, and most moments seem to be happening because the narrative requires it, rather than out of any natural progression.
I have major issues with how the season played out, and the finale is certainly a result of those mistakes, but taking all of those mistakes into account and simply judging the finale on its own merits, it’s not that bad. The first 40 minutes or so are, frankly, excellent. It gives weight to Daenerys’s decision in the last episode, again showcasing the horrific destruction in her wake and her cruelty to survivors (even those who surrendered). The imagery of the giant staircase and the wall draped with the giant Targaryen banner was awesome, as was Dany giving her tyrannical speech to the perfectly organized troops of soldiers below, her dragon roaring beside her. They did an incredible job taking people you’ve been rooting for for most of the series and portraying them in the scariest way they could. I also loved when her buried dragon revealed itself below the snow (or soot?). It lent a feeling of tangible danger to the environment, like everything around was tainted by some cruel power.
The events of that half were a bit rushed (this probably could have been two episodes), but I thought the scene with Tyrion and Jon was well-written and convincing. Jon’s final scene with Daenerys was mostly solid; I have a little trouble buying that she’d suddenly be so positive about Jon Snow after having killed Varys the episode before and having committed so fully to killing any “threat” to her reign, but I think their conversation did a decent job of rationalizing Daenerys’s actions, while solidifying the reason why Jon needed to kill her. I don’t know why the dragon decided to turn into a living metaphor by burning the Iron Throne (maybe it’s ridiculously smart and knew internally that her pursuit of the throne was ultimately her undoing?), but it was a well done scene.
The second half was mostly solid, except for perhaps the biggest blunder of the season: that Bran is chosen as king. I get why there’s not really a good choice at this point; Jon is out of the running because he’s seen as the Queenslayer now (well, kinda…the people who hated him the most, the Unsullied, took off for Naarth and won’t ever be back anyway), Sansa wants to rule the North instead, Arya’s probably not going to want it, and most of the other choices are essentially irrelevant (it’s not like the show is going to make Edmund Tully the King, or the Prince of Dorne, who the show literally never even named or explained).
But…Bran? Really? Because he has the best “story?” Look, Arya, left King’s Landing as a little girl, survived being kidnapped multiple times, sailed to a foreign continent, became an assassin, and returned to kill all of the Freys AND the Night King. Sansa faced rape, cruelty, and hardship from multiple husbands and evil political manipulators, only to come out a strong leader and tactician of her own right. Jon went to the wall a bastard, created an alliance with the free folk, became Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, DIED AND CAME BACK, won back his ancestral home from the Boltons, convinced Daenerys to lend her armies to fight the White Walkers and LITERALLY SAVE THE WORLD, and ultimately ended the most recent tyranical regime. Bran…got carried around by three other people, two of which died and one of which was coldly dismissed, got turned into the “three eyed raven,” returned to be an annoying plot device, and just wargged into a bunch of ravens for no reason instead of actually doing anything during the battle against the dead. He was so irrelevant to everything else that the writers literally wrote him out for a season because they didn’t know what else to do with him.
Give me a break with your “best story” bullshit.
On a logical level, I do see some reasoning behind giving the most powerful position in Westeros to somebody who is all-seeing and all-knowing. But thematically, landing on “monarchies are okay if the king knows literally everything” is a little weird. So is “monarchies aren’t so bad, as long as they’re propped up by oligarchies instead of birthright.” Like, yay progress, I guess?
Past that, the endings felt fitting to me. Sansa splits off the North again, doing what no Stark could do since Torrhen Stark bent the knee to Aegon Targaryen around 300 years ago. She becomes queen, which feels like a natural progression for her character. Arya’s ending is a little more random, but frankly, what else were they going to do with her? They already had her turn her back on vengeance in the last episode (another moment that felt unearned to me, but I’m accepting it here), so having her kill Daenerys would have been a bit of a slide backwards, unless they really justified it as her doing what’s right for the realm rather than for her own personal reasons. Plus, they already gave her her “big moment” this season by having her kill the Night King, something that I don’t feel was the right call, but makes sense now given how little she got to do for the rest of the season. I think it would have made more sense for her to return to Winterfell and try to settle into life as Arya Stark again, but that would have been a little lame, so explorer it is! Plus it gives them the opportunity to do an Arya spinoff down the road if they feel like it.
Tyrion becoming hand again to make up for his mistakes felt right (even if those mistakes didn’t feel true to the character from the books and seasons 1-4 in the first place), we’d already established Bronn as the new lord of Highgarden, and having Sam and Davos on the small council felt appropriate. The “A Song of Ice and Fire” moment was a bit too on-the-nose (plus it basically stole from Lord of the Rings), but they did kind of set it up last season when the Maester in the Citadel said he was writing it and gave Sam his long-winded title. I like Brienne as the commander of the Kingsguard a lot, and her writing in Jaime’s extended biography was a nice way to wrap up a plotline that they kind of screwed up over the last couple episodes. Podrick…gets to push Bran around in a chair now? I guess that’s something.
As for Jon, he gets a pretty solid bittersweet ending. There are some logistical issues here; for one, I’m not sure how one is forced to “take the black” and join the Night’s Watch when there is no wall, there are no White Walkers, and the wildlings are friendly now. I’m going to be generous and assume that Tyrion was essentially using that precedent to send Jon into exile. In a way, it’s incredibly tragic, going from being a bastard, becoming one of the most important figures in the world, learning that you’re the rightful heir to the throne, to then being stripped of everything and sent back where you started. But also, Jon’s time with the free folk was when he was the most accepted for who he was; not as the bastard son of Ned Stark, or the son of Rhaegar Targaryen, but as a man of honor who cares about people, regardless of their differences.
It is interesting to see so many people angry about this ending, after the reaction to the penultimate episode was pretty split. I think it can be exciting when a show subverts our expectations, but when it comes to endings, we can’t help but want our stories to pay off in a satisfying way. This is why I was so sure that Game of Thrones was going to become predictable in its end-run. Part of me admires that they had the courage to buck popular expectations and further reinforce their themes. But I wish they had built to this ending more effectively, and I can’t help but think that the more predictable, satisfying ending was the right move.