As you undoubtedly know, last night was the series finale of HBO's Game of Thrones. Unsurprisingly, considering the increasingly abysmal quality of the writing over the last few seasons, it was as unsatisfyingly dumb as the last couple episodes.
We'd warn about spoilers, but we don't care anymore. The writers ruined the show by phoning in this last season, and we have no respect left for the show or its so-called "secrets" anymore and feel no compunction to protect against spoilers. If anything, we'd probably be doing you a favor.
So, anyway, in the last episode Jon Snow kills his Queen and lover (and, apparently, aunt) Dany - or as she liked to be called, Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons. To make it even more dramatic, he unexpectedly stabs her to death while in the middle of a lover's embrace. That doesn't surprise or bother us - we thought Arya would be the assassin, not Jon, but whatever - because we knew Dany had to die.
What does bother us is that not five minutes before that, Jon was defending her as his Queen and commander, not to be questioned or second-guessed, however extreme her decision-making might seem. But then, after a short exchange with Tyrion Lannister ("But she's an evil person"), he apparently forgets all his convictions, not to mention his heart, and goes out and kills her in cold blood. Now, an interesting show, a well-written show, would have showed us the moral and psychological metamorphosis of his character's arc, but that would have been hard to write and the GoT writers are not good writers. Besides, they only had so many minutes left to wrap everything up in their self-imposed six-episode final season, so who's got time for character development and drama when what people will be talking about the next day is who stabbed whom? (But they did have time later to show Tyrion rearranging chairs around a table for several minutes.)
But wait! It gets stupider! After Dany dies, her dragon shows up, pitches a fire fit over the death of its mistress but doesn't kill Jon (perhaps it sensed the Targaryen blood in his veins), and then lifts up Dany's body and flies off with her corpse. The perfect murder! No victim, no witnesses, no evidence except a pool of blood and a melted Iron Throne. Jon could say the dragon did it and leave it at that. He could say they rode off together to fight the next war somewhere else, and make up any excuse about the pool of blood (there's always a puddle of blood around somewhere in GoT). He could simply slip out of there unseen and claim he has no idea where she and her dragon went either, or who's blood is on the floor.
But, no, none of that. Instead the show fades to black and when it comes back, Jon is in prison for Dany's murder and the heads of the remaining families in Westeros are assembled to decide his fate.
Now, this is so stupid on so many levels. First of all, notwithstanding that it would be just like Jon to admit to the murder (if you've watched the show, you know what we mean), if he had, he would almost assuredly have been killed on the spot, not taken prisoner. And if he was a prisoner, his captor, the vengeful Gray Worm, would almost assuredly have had him executed at the first possible opportunity. Jon and Gray Worm had been challenging each other and giving each other the stink eye all throughout the episode, and Gray Worm was earlier happily executing the few surviving soldiers from last week's battle just because they had fought against his Queen, so there's no reason to suspect that he wouldn't have taken justice into his own hands right then and there for the Queen's actual murder.
Which brings us to the other stupid thing. If there's any lesson we learned after eight seasons of GoT it's that power corrupts, so why didn't Gray Worm, who had just been appointed the leader of the entire military, not immediately seize power in the absence of his Queen, declare the medieval equivalent of martial law, and proclaim himself the new ruler of the Seven Kingdoms? Who would have/could have stopped him? No one.
But, no, instead, he apparently called a council of the remaining heads of the Seven Kingdom he had just conquered, including Jon Snow's friends and family, and asks them for advice on what to do with his prisoner. But we say "apparently" because the show doesn't tell us how or why the council got together (lazy script-writing and too little time), just suddenly, "poof," there they all are, even the entire remaining Stark family.
Now, the fact that the entire remaining Stark family was there was so dumb on so many levels, such as a) it was, at least for the first several seasons, a long and arduous journey from Winterfell to King's Landing (even though in later seasons characters like Jamie Lannister made the trip seemingly overnight), so why would they bring the wheelchair-bound cripple Bran with them on the long overland journey?, and b) there was a maxim in earlier episodes that at least one Stark had to always remain in Winterfell, even during battle, but there was the entire clan, even Bran who would have been the obvious choice to leave behind.
What's more, c) a MAJOR THEME in the show (damn, we're so worked up now they've got us shouting) is that little good comes to Starks when they head south - Ned Stark gets beheaded, Robb Stark gets murdered at the Red Wedding, Sansa Stark suffers a horrific series of degradations at the hands of a number of psychopaths and sadists - and the last thing the now wise and wiley Sansa would have agreed to would be to head down to King's Landing for a confab with an army of the Unsullied and a horde of half-crazed Dothraki.
Which brings up WHERE WERE THE DOTHRAKI? In earlier seasons, they were a wild, feral band of marauding rapists and plunderers who only respected raw power and were loyal to Dany only because she had burned all their chiefs alive and then walked out of the fire unscathed (well, that and her three ENORMOUS DRAGONS). But with Dany gone, why were they just sitting around waiting to see what happens? Why weren't they off raping and pillaging what was left of Westeros like the bad-ass Dothraki of Seasons 1 and 2 would have? There might be good reasons, but the show doesn't tell us, because of poor writing and the self-imposed limit on the number of episodes.
But anyway, whatever, back to the council meeting. Grey Worm presents to the assembled heads of state not the prisoner they're there to see - Jon Snow - but his other prisoner, Tyrion Lannister, and is all macho and authoritarian about who he presents to the council and when. When Tyrion tries to plead his case, Gray Worm basically tells him to STFU, but instead Tyrion launches into perhaps the longest monologue of the episode, and, uninterrrupted, convinces everyone to elect the cripple Bran (of all people) as the new King, and everyone, including the vengeful Gray Worm, who has all the power and is holding all the cards, eventually goes along with it. Gray Worm basically goes from "The captors will present whichever prisoner it pleases us to present" and "STFU," to "Okay, I guess you guys voted all fair and square for me to let my arch enemy free, so I'll go with that" in the course of less than five minutes. Why? BECAUSE LAZY STORY-TELLING, LOW-QUALITY SCRIPT-WRITING, AND NOT ENOUGH TIME, THAT'S WHY!
We would go on and on, but we think you get the picture. The reason this makes us so mad is because the first five or six seasons were SO GOOD, and the last two seasons, and particularly the last two episodes, were SO BAD, that it just ruined a thing that we had loved.
The picture at the top of this post is not GoT but a still from the video game The Witcher 3. Say what you want about the mindless violence and cartoonish characters in video games, but both Witcher and another medieval-themed game, Skyrim, do a better job of story-telling (especially Witcher, although Skyrim is more adept in its use of dragons) than GoT, and there's little possibility of some Hollywood hacks on a deadline phoning in the end of the games and ruining if all for everybody.
Spoiler Alert: Season 8 of Game of Thrones sucks!
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