A year after the disappointing season finale of Game of Thrones
“Themes are for eighth-grade book reports.” — David Benioff.
After one whole orbit around the sun, I still can’t shake the disappointing season finale of Game of Thrones. As a fan of the show since the third season (yes, I was two years late but whatever) I had high hopes that the series would have a well crafted ending. For a show that had the potential (and the budget) to go on for another two years, the showrunners decided to end the show with seven seasons.
Game of Thrones is adapted from George R.R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin has previously worked on the show as a consultant and wrote a few episodes. He stepped back from writing for the show to give his full attention to the two remaining books of the series. The writers didn’t have any source materials to base the season on, so they had to create storylines of their own. This is when it all went crashing down.
The showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were fans of the book series. They were not sure whether Martin would trust them with the book series. When Martin asked if they had any prior experience in writing for television, David and Dan admitted that they had none. The showrunners didn’t fully understand how to adapt a fantasy book series into television and why they were given permission to do so is beyond me. They didn’t have any appreciation for the series themes, characters’ backstories were not resolved and they took out a core theme of the book series: fantasy. Their defence was that they wanted the show to be targeted towards ‘mothers, NFL Players’. Basically, non-fantasy fans.
The Game of Thrones writer’s room was non-existent and that’s evident in the last three seasons when the showrunners ran out of source material. HBO had offered to hire writers but David and Dan were happy to work on the scripts themselves. According to them, they had one woman who wrote a few scenes and their assistant Brian Cogman wrote four episodes. This goes to show that when you don’t have a team of writers to discuss character arcs and themes, you will end up writing unnecessary scenes, like the Sansa Stark rape scene in season 5.
I could go on criticising the showrunners. Their lack of appreciation for fantasy and critiquing that “themes are for eighth-grade book reports”, that really tells you everything. Themes are the core elements of any television series. To take the core element out, which in this case would be fantasy, means that it’s reducing the television series down to nothing. Fans of book readers love the book because of the magical elements. The eerie and mysterious characters like The Faceless Man, The Night King, The Lord of Light, The Prince That Was Promised, Lady Stoneheart and Beric Dondarrion were all characters that didn’t exist in the series or have their character arcs resolved.
When the last episode was aired, the fans were disappointed. It was not the ending that any of us wanted. Daenerys’s storyline didn’t have to end with her murdering thousands of innocent civilians. It didn’t make any sense because time and time again we saw Daenerys as a character who was compassionate and caring towards innocent people. She never wanted to end up like her father, The Mad King. Her one true quest was to take back her home, Westeros which she had achieved for a moment and then ended up dying in the hands of Jon Snow.
Jon Snow’s character arc was disappointing too. His mission in the last few seasons was to kill The Night King, his one true enemy. As viewers, we all thought that Jon Snow would kill this creature but it was Arya who killed him. From the very first season, The Night King was described as this deadly zombie snow creature that had the ability to raise an army of the dead. He is powerful in his own right and had thousands of armies under his belt when he arrived in Winterfell. His death was underwhelming. It wasn’t satisfactory and I was left disappointed. It felt too immediate for a character to die so soon, after being teased from the very first season. It was only right for Jon Snow to kill him but I guess we were wrong for wanting that to happen.
To continue my disappointment in Jon Snow, why was he brought back from the dead? If his purpose was to kill Daenerys in the last season, it was greatly unsatisfactory. We were teased about The Prince That Was Promised, but that didn’t resolve either. For a time being, it was teased that Daenarys might be The Princess That Was Promised too, again, nothing came from it.
It was exciting to see Daenerys and Jon Snow together fighting battles side by side. The two Targaryens! Once his true lineage was exposed to Daenerys, she felt threatened. And when his army celebrated the defeat of The Night King she was excluded. They praised Jon Snow. Jon Snow never wanted to be the King. But his destiny, if the showrunners actually followed through, he would’ve ended up on the throne beside Daenerys.
Tyrion was one of my favourite characters in Game of Thrones. He was smart and strategic and is greatly loyal to his friends. At the end of the season finale, Tyrion upon seeing that Daenarys had killed every single civilian in King’s Landing, announces that he no longer wishes to be the Hand of the Queen because this is not what he thought would have happened. Daenerys throws him in jail and then her demise follows shortly.
When he learns about Jon Snow’s true heritage and rightful claim to the throne he tells Varys about this information. Varys, who had proven that he does not seek power for his own gain and believes in Daenarys as the one true ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. Varys considers this plan. He sees that Daenarys is unfit to rule The Seven Kingdoms and devises a plan to assassinate Daenerys. She learns of this plan and Tyrion reveals that Varys was behind this plan and has him executed.
After everything is settled in Westeros, Tyrion who is still a prisoner of the Unsullied, calls for the lords and ladies of Westeros to King’s Landing. He proposes that the Kingdom of Westeros needs to not to have a coronation by birthright and pursues a different path. Instead, proposes that Westeros be a democratic rule. He suggests that Bran to be the King because he has the supernatural knowledge and wisdom to lead Westeros. Bran accepts and then appoints Tyrion as his Hand of the King.
That scene was the stupidest scene ever written in television history. I don’t know what’s funnier, Tyrion who was a prisoner of the Unsullied, had more power to defend himself or the fact that he proposed that Bran be the King of Westeros. It felt out of character for Tyrion to suggest that plan. A character who has done nothing significant other than climbing a tower and transform into a raven.
All of these character arcs were disappointing. In an earlier season, Tyrion wouldn’t have made any of these decisions. He would’ve had a strategic plan and made decisions that had value and importance instead of betraying the one that he was loyal to the most.
There were so many character arcs that disappointed me up until the very end. There was no essence to any of the characters. When you don’t follow the rules of storytelling, character arcs and themes, there is no resolution to the story. You’d end up with unresolved storylines that make no sense. The one rule of storytelling is that when you write a character, the writer presents the problem, the character faces the obstacle and all the problems that come in between that, and at the very end is where the resolution is. In the case of the season finale of Game of Thrones, these character arcs haven’t reached a good resolution. Sure, the season finale’s ending shows you that they’ve reached the end of the character journey. But none of them reached their full potential.
I don’t know what the showrunners are up to these days. They dropped out from working on the new Star Wars movies and their plans on working on a new HBO show called ‘Confederate’ is not moving forward anymore. I hope that for the sake of writing they follow the rules of storytelling because when you follow those rules, you can work so many wonders.
