Control: Game of Thrones Finale

I, Dalton Lewis, didn’t predict the ending of Game of Thrones. I can say that about the episode. Storytelling takes a lot out of the writer and the audience, and the emotions of the characters weigh more than plausibility in many cases. Game of Thrones tried to insist that no character was guaranteed a happy ending and that the bad guys didn’t always lose. Characters died regularly, good ones and bad ones, and people often were hurt or treated unfairly. No one was given an easy path in life, and that became the show’s greatest strength: the notion that life was brutal, difficult, heartwrenching, and often tragic — quite the opposite of a traditional, three act, good guys win storytelling arc.

Writing fantasy used to have hard rules about how the story should go. The characters who were good were destined to be kings, and they should have a central villain to stop at the end of the story. Martin subverts all of those things by killing important characters and showing a difficult world in which anything can happen. The good guys aren’t perfect, the bad guys are sympathetic or at least understandable, and fights are brutal and often unfair.

I don’t know how to describe the ending without some spoilers. So be warned — spoilers below.

I thought that the choice for king was decided by Tyrion sort of telling everyone that Bran should be king — a ridiculous letdown. Why do the other characters go along with that? I don’t understand. Why don’t they fight over it? Why is everyone suddenly willing to go along with this — except his fucking sister, who wants to be independent? I think that an interesting and surprising winner is what Martin was going for — and that’s fine. That’s a good idea. Surprise and irony is excellent. The irony here — that the wonderful Danaerys Targaryen would turn evil like her dad — was a wonderful surprise, a genuinely interesting and different idea. It was clever and well-designed. The problem is that we love that character and don’t love that happening to her. At some point the surprise and the twist overcame the need for lovable characters about whom we care and want to root for.

What happens when the story surprises instead of satisfies? At some point we wanted a good person to stop a bad person, and the reality is often two sympathetic people fighting. I understand that. I’m glad that the Game of Thrones finale had some twists. I just don’t think that they were earned well enough. I also don’t think that Bran should be king over Tyrion or Sansa or Jon Snow. I agree that it’s an ironic surprise — the weakling defeated everyone else in the Game of Thrones without ever really playing. Fine and well. I just think that wit was more important than a conventionally satisfying ending, and the fans can’t have that — they want Jon Snow, Dany, and Tyrion each on a dragon killing Cersei Lannister in the climactic scene, saving the realm and giving the commoners all the Lannister gold. They don’t want an intelligent, sophisticated ending with unlikable characters fighting over a crown none of them deserve.

I’m sorry for the lateness of this review — I’m working on getting them to you, the reader, faster. I just needed some time to think about this. I don’t think that the finale is bad — I think that it’s unsatisfying because it fits the story. The good guys aren’t always good and the bad guys aren’t always bad, and the conventions are broken in interesting and enlightening ways. I’m glad that George R. R. Martin didn’t write a conventional high fantasy story. In that he wrote something different and ironic he succeeded. That’s the point, right? Create a work of art? He did it.

Thanks, and take care, friends.