Season 8, Episode 6: The Iron Throne

After three centuries, “The Iron Throne” is gone, melted down by the dragonfire that was used to craft it in the first place. Forged by Aegon the Conqueror, the first Targaryen ruler, the seat was made from the swords of the surrendered lords forced to bow to the invading dragon king. Aegon Targaryen wanted the seat to be uncomfortable, cutting all those who sat upon it in order to remind them of the weight of their responsibility.

Now, the consequences of his ancestor’s brutal decision to slaughter the innocent on the last road to the throne has led to its ultimate destruction. It’s Aegon’s namesake (raised under the name Jon Snow) whose difficult choice makes a grieving dragon annihilate the thing that destroyed his beloved master. Daenerys is likely the last of the Targaryen dynasty to rule over Westeros.

With the destruction of the brutal symbol of absolute power in the land– one whose very existence seemed to corrupt all who sought it– the people left over are given an opportunity to craft a new seat of power from the ashes. But in the end, have they done enough to fulfill Daenerys’s original grand vision of breaking the wheel?

As ashes fall like snow on King’s Landing, we open on Tyrion, Jon, and Davos taking stock of the aftermath of Daenerys’s slaughter. Tyrion, horrified by the part he played in this crime, heads alone into the Red Keep. He traces the steps he told Jaime to follow in escaping with Cersei, only to find his brother’s golden hand sticking out of the rubble. As he pulls away the stones, he uncovers his siblings lying dead in each others’ arms and sobs. After all this time and all they’ve put each other through, Tyrion still has enough love to mourn his siblings and their violent end.

Jon and Davos interrupt Grey Worm as he’s about to execute Lannister soldiers on their knees. They try to stop him, but Grey Worm claims to be acting under Daenerys’s orders: “Kill all who follow Cersei Lannister.” The exchange is heated, and the Unsullied draw their weapons on Jon and his northern men, but Davos convinces Jon the only thing they can do is talk to Daenerys. They leave the Unsullied to execute the prisoners of war.

After seemingly riding out on a white horse at the end of the last episode, Arya appears still in the heart of the city, there to witness the celebratory speech of the victorious dragon queen. Jon is there as well, mounting the steps through a sea of Unsullied and Dothraki forces, the outsider within this invading army. As he reaches the top and Daenerys comes into view, we get a great shot of Drogon taking flight behind Daenerys, giving the impression of her becoming one with the dragon.

Daenerys starts a victory speech in Dothraki, praising the warriors for defeating the iron-clad armies in their stone houses. “You gave me the Seven Kingdoms,” she tells them. Then, she speaks in Valyrian, anointing Grey Worm the Queen’s Master of War for his loyalty and bravery. She calls the Unsullied liberators for freeing the people of King’s Landing from a tyrant. But then, in a authoritarian turn, she tells them that the war is not over until they have “liberated” all the people of the world.

“From Winterfell to Dorne,” she says as the camera pans to Jon. “From Lannisport to Qarth,” as it pans to Tyrion. “Women, men and children have suffered too long beneath the wheel. Will you break the wheel with me?” This concept is of course in reference to her famous pitch to Tyrion back in Season 6, back when she actually seemed to be advocating a more democratic ideal: removing power from the feudal lords and giving it to the common man. Now, it appears that she wants to tear down anyone who might challenge or dilute her absolute power. In the vein of other autocrats in history, she uses language as if she is doing this all for the people, but it is clear that this is now about her own quest to rule the entire world; after all, she’s not even speaking the language of the people she just supposedly liberated, nor even talking to “the people” at all.

As the troops cheer her on, she breathes deeply with the emotion of the moment, seemingly without much conflict in her heart for the innocent people she just burned to get here. That is, apparently, the last straw for Tyrion, who joins her side one last time. She tells him that since he freed Jaime, he is guilty of treason. “I freed my brother. And you slaughtered a city,” Tyrion says. He resigns his post as Hand of the Queen by throwing his brooch down the stairs for all to see. Since we are no longer in Daenerys’s head, it’s hard to know what she is thinking when he confronts her with the brutal truth– if she’s reckoning with her own violence at all. She arrests Tyrion and stares defiantly at Jon before marching off with her loyal Unsullied troops.

Arya sneaks up on Jon once again, surprising him (after all, he doesn’t even know she’s in King’s Landing; she rode south with the Hound on her own). She calls Daenerys “your [Jon’s] queen” and Jon corrects her once again, calling Daenerys “everyone’s queen.” Arya knows that Sansa will never accept this, and after seeing all of the carnage she was forced to witness last episode, why should her sister accept Daenerys as queen? Arya is first to put a bug in Jon’s ear about the threat Daenerys poses, not only to Sansa but also to Jon himself. She does not believe that the dragon queen will let Jon live, especially since he is the true heir to the throne.

Jon, clearly in conflict with himself, visits Tyrion to see what he has to say. He’s hesitant to give up his honor, which bounds him to Daenerys even if she does things he would not do himself, but Tyrion has fully given up on their queen. He says that “fire and blood” was always her nature, but Jon won’t stand for it. “You think our house words are stamped on our bodies when we’re born and that’s who we are?” he argues, believing more than most that experience means just as much if not more than your blood.

As Tyrion tries to convince him to take drastic action to protect the realm, Jon seems tired and unsure. “What does it matter what I do?” Jon wonders, ever the reluctant hero. “It matters more than anything,” Tyrion begs him. Jon was resurrected from the dead, the gods determining that he was meant for greater things than he wants or even realizes, and in his heart he must know it. Tyrion lays out Daenerys’s history for Jon, pointing out that with each successive victory she has grown powerful and sure of the right of her rule. She believes she is meant to bring freedom to the world and uses that to justify the violent means she takes to get to that end. “You are the shield that guards the realms of men,” he says, quoting the screed of the Night’s Watch, telling Jon that Daenerys is the greatest threat to the realm.

Most of all, Tyrion knows that Jon loves Daenerys, which makes him confuse his duty for her with his duty to the realm. “Love is the death of duty,” Jon quotes Maester Aemon, much to Tyrion’s surprise. In that conversation long ago, Jon told the maester that if his father Ned had to choose between those he loved and his duty, he would choose his duty. Maester Aemon replied, “We all do our duty when there’s no cost to it– honor comes easy then. Yet, sooner or later, in every man’s life there comes a day when it is not easy. A day when he must choose.” For Jon, that day has come at last.

In the throne room, Daenerys finally sees the fabled Iron Throne. This seat was built by her ancestor Aegon the Conqueror, the first Targaryen king. She regards it for the first time in real life, though she has seen it before in a vision at the House of the Undying back in Season 2. Back then, the throne room was also seen in ruins, though with snow falling instead of ashes. Several of the shots are recreations of that vision, except this time she actually touches the throne (whereas before, the sound of her kidnapped dragons called her away just as she was about to touch it). She looks satisfied and relieved to have reached it at last. But she never gets a chance to sit atop it.

When Jon enters, she happily recalls her childhood fantasies of that very throne, the object manifesting the power she has been striving for her whole life. She’s smiling, until Jon confronts her about the order to execute Lannister prisoners. “It was necessary,” she says. Jon yells, “Children, little children, burned!” She justifies her actions, seemingly without remorse. She continues to say that her world will be a good one, without once grappling with the innocents she murdered in order to make it in her image. Then, she tells Jon that he has always known what was good and right, calling on him to do his duty and stand at her side as they break the wheel together. But Jon hears this differently– he hears her call him to his duty to the realm and knows what he must do. He calls her his queen, kisses her, and stabs her in the heart.

Drogon, sensing something, flies up to find Daenerys dead in Jon’s arms. He nudges her like a dog trying to rouse his master and grieves when he realizes she’s not waking. In his grief, he blasts the throne room with fire, melting the Iron Throne. It’s as if he knows that his mother’s desperate quest for the seat was what killed her, not Jon. And somehow, Jon escapes his punishment when Drogon picks Daenerys up in his talons and flies her back east to what ended up being her only true home, orphaned on Essos.

We fast forward a few weeks to see a bedraggled Tyrion roused from his cell by Grey Worm. He’s brought before a council of the remaining great lords of Westeros (plus a few others), though we have no idea how this group came together or what their purpose is– I suppose it’s to decide what to do with both Tyrion and Jon, who are prisoners of the Unsullied. Sansa demands to see Jon and when Yara advocates for his execution, Arya threatens to kill her. Though Sansa and Arya both know that Jon is not really their brother by blood, they continue to call him their brother and fight for his life as if he were. This interaction is probably more realistic than what follows, showing the divisions that should remain between all of these long-warring houses, and illuminating the trouble with the plan they will eventually come up with.

Davos offers Grey Worm the Reach, a supposedly uninhabited land, for him and his troops, but Grey Worm refuses in the name of justice. He wants Jon and Tyrion killed for betraying his queen and frankly it’s amazing that they are both still living at all (how did Grey Worm or any of Daenerys’s other soldiers not kill Jon on the spot for what he did?). But Tyrion rightly points out that it’s not really up to Grey Worm at all; he is not the ruler of Westeros and is now rendered nothing more than the foreign soldier of a quickly-deposed queen.

Tyrion suggests that the powerful nobles choose a new king, and Edmure Tully is the first to make an argument for himself. This is Catelyn’s brother, the man whose wedding will live in infamy as the Red Wedding. He’s been imprisoned by the Freys and otherwise off-screen for the majority of the series, so there’s a note of humor when Sansa tells her uncle to sit down. Then, in another moment, Samwell Tarly suggests a democracy, which sends all of the lords and ladies into a brief fit of laughter. It’s probably right that they wouldn’t commit to such a radical reform in just one day.

What follows doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s the ending we have, so I’ll do my best to recap it anyway. Tyrion suggests that they, the most powerful lords of Westeros, elect a new king themselves and proposes that it should be someone with a “good story.” Somehow, out of all the bunch sitting there, Tyrion determines that Bran Stark has the best story. Surviving a horrible attack then rising to one of the most powerful and mystical positions in the land, “Bran the Broken” has come so far from his origins. “He is our memory, the keeper of all our stories… Who better to lead us into the future?”

“Bran has no interest in ruling and he can’t father children,” Sansa, the only pragmatist left, replies. Bran didn’t even want to be Lord of Winterfell (“I don’t want anymore,” he told Tyrion after the Battle of Winterfell), but now he accepts the entire kingdom. And Tyrion, who once was so concerned about Daenerys’s plan for succession (back when her infertility– or maybe even lack thereof– seemed like a relevant storyline), for some reason seems to think that Bran’s inability to produce an heir will only be good for the realm. He thinks that the great houses will just come together and elect a new king every time one passes, setting up something like a representative monarchy. (Surely he must know that the great houses’ ambitions will come into conflict with such an ambiguous plan for succession. How can he possibly expect a peaceful transfer of power from this bunch, most of whom just fought a war for their own independence and supremacy over Westeros just a couple seasons ago?)

“I know you don’t care about power. But I ask you now, if we choose you, will you wear the crown?” Tyrion asks Bran. Confusingly, Bran agrees to it, saying, “Why do you think I came all this way?” Bran’s message this season has been that “everything you did brought you where you are now”– so does that mean everything he did up to this point was because he knew he would become king? Did he know he would have to “let” hundreds of thousands of people die before he could rule Westeros?

Only Sansa objects or shows any reservations at all to this crazy plot. She says she loves Bran, but that the North will not kneel again after all they have suffered defending the realm from the White Walkers. She declares independence for her people and thereby makes herself Queen of the North. The others do not object, nor do they raise their own pleas for independence. Not even Yara Greyjoy and the new prince of Dorne– the first people the camera cuts to after Sansa’s request– ask for the thing both of their houses specifically have been striving for for forever. Yara asked Daenerys for independence last season and was promised it, but now she agrees to kneel to Bran Stark– a man of the family whom she believes are responsible for betraying and murdering her queen? It just doesn’t make sense. But Arya smiles proudly at Sansa and Bran, and that’s genuinely heartwarming to see.

The newly appointed King Bran the Broken immediately makes Tyrion his Hand of the King. After all of his failures, Bran determines that Tyrion should spend the rest of his life fixing them.

As Hand of the King, Tyrion visits a distraught Jon Snow in his cells. They’ve decided to send him to the Wall as punishment for killing Daenerys (“There’s still a Night’s Watch?” Jon says for all of us– after all, without the threat of the White Walkers and if peace has truly been made with the wildlings, then what is their function? Just a bunch of criminals hanging about doing nothing, in service to Westeros while on the land of a totally independent kingdom?). Tyrion says that this is the only thing that Grey Worm and the Unsullied will accept. But shortly after, Grey Worm leaves for Essos with all of his Unsullied. So why would they even feel the need to sentence him to life in the Night’s Watch? Moreover, Jon is the rightful heir to the throne– since when does killing a tyrannical usurper (an unloved and unknown queen among the Westerosi) negate your claim to the monarchy?

Jon, still tormented for killing his lover, asks Tyrion, “Was it right, what I did? It doesn’t feel right.” He chose duty over love, but at great cost. Without the certainty that it was even the correct thing to do, Jon made a decision that will forever weigh on his conscience. Even Tyrion says he cannot know if this was better. “Ask me in ten years.”

When Jon is collected from his cell by two men of the Night’s Watch, he is brought through the streets of King’s Landing one final time. At the docks, he passes by several Dothraki, as well as Grey Worm’s ship full of Unsullied. They are setting sail for Naath, Missandei’s hometown, which was where they dreamed of going together after the war was over. The island’s people are strictly pacifist, so Grey Worm promised Missandei that he and the Unsullied would protect them. Without Daenerys, he can now fulfill that promise in honor of his lost love.

Before Jon boards his boat, he finds Sansa, Arya, and Bran waiting for him at the dock. Sansa apologizes for breaking her promise and telling Tyrion about his parentage. With tears in her eyes, she asks him for forgiveness. But letting the secret out had dire consequences, arguably leading Daenerys to the place of such paranoia and desperation that she made the turn to tyranny. Jon is unable to say he forgives Sansa, but sincerely congratulates her on gaining true independence for the North at last– something her brothers Robb and Jon tried but failed to accomplish. “Ned Stark’s daughter will speak for them. She’s the best they could ask for,” he tells her, giving her a heartfelt embrace.

Jon invites Arya the visit him at Castle Black, but she tells him that she plans to sail west. “What is west of Westeros?” she says, which is the same thing she told the actress Lady Crane while she was training with the Faceless Men (“But what’s west of Westeros?” she asked. “I don’t know,” Lady Crane replied. “Nobody does, it’s where all the maps stop,” Arya said. “The edge of the world, maybe,” said Lady Crane. “I’d like to see that,” said Arya.) She chooses a life of adventure; she chooses life. Jon asks if she has her Needle, the same sword he gave her all those years ago, and they cry as they say goodbye.

We cut to Brienne, presumably the new Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, filling in Jaime Lannister’s page in the Book of Brothers (a.k.a. The White Book, or the large book that records the accomplishments of every knight who ever served in the Kingsguard). Back in Season 4, Joffrey flipped through the book and landed on Jaime’s page. “Someone forgot to write down all of your great deeds,” he said mockingly. “There’s still time,” Jaime replied. “Is there? For a forty-year-old knight with one hand?”

Later that same season, Brienne herself read his entry from the book while Jaime looked on. “There’s still room left on mine,” he told her as he handed her his Valyrian steel sword, Oathkeeper, and gifted her a suit of armor. As the Lord Commander, she gives her old friend and lover the honor of recording his deeds to history. Jaime’s entry begins with his killing of the Mad King, earning him the derisive title of “Kingslayer” he fought hard to overcome. The new Lord Commander ensures that he is remembered for all that he did as he tried to regain his honor, and especially for his final deed: “Died protecting his Queen.”

As Tyrion sets up for the Small Council of King Bran the Broken, he straightens the chairs (perhaps in a nod to this scene from Season 3, when Tywin Lannister was Hand of the King), but they are immediately undone by the new council members. We already know about Brienne as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, but the other new additions include Bronn as the Master of Coin (and new Lord of Highgarden), Samwell Tarly as the Maester, and Davos as the Master of Ships.

Sam presents Tyrion with a book written by Archmaester Ebrose (whom we met at the Citadel last season) titled, “A Song of Ice and Fire” (the same as the series of books the show is based on). It chronicles the time after Robert’s Rebellion, which covers the history of the show itself. Tyrion asks if he is portrayed in a positive or negative light in the history, but Sam admits that he’s not mentioned at all. (Really? Not at all? That seems so unbelievable to me. Tyrion has been– for better and for worse– one of the most consequential players in the game.)

King Bran is wheeled in and instructs Tyrion to come up with a Master of Whisperers (seems like something Bran could do with his powers!), War, and Law. Sam mentions that Drogon was spotted in the east, and Bran suggests that he might be able to find him (probably by warging into ravens or some other creature to search for him, like he did the Night King during the Battle of Winterfell). “Do carry on with the rest,” he tells Tyrion, indicating that his rule will largely be one where he lets his advisers run the affairs of the kingdom. He is collected by “Ser Podrick,” who was not only knighted but also sworn into the Kingsguard– a major improvement for the man who started as a squire to a lowly drunken knight who was sentenced to be hanged alongside him until he was pardoned by Tywin Lannister.

The council goes about their business, figuring out how to feed the people, rebuild an armada, improve drinking water, and (if Bronn gets his wish) construct new brothels. Ser Davos, who began the story as an illiterate sailor, corrects Bronn’s grammar like his old King Stannis before him. Tyrion starts to tell the joke, “I once brought a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel,” but the scene cuts before we get the punchline. This was the third time this happened to us. The first time he tried to tell it, Lysa Arryn cut him off at his trial at the Vale in Season 1. The second time, he was trying to tell jokes with Missandei and Grey Worm in Season 6. I guess we’ll never know the joke, but it’s nice to hear Tyrion telling jokes again.

Finally, we finish the story with three interwoven sequences showing each of the remaining Stark children– Arya, Sansa, and Jon– as they independently prepare for their new roles. Arya and Jon equip their swords, while Sansa is dressed in a ceremonial gown with red weirwood leaves on the Cersei-like sleeves. Jon packs for a journey north of the Wall, Arya reads maps of the Sunset Sea, and Sansa prepares for her coronation.

Arya sails a ship bedecked with Stark sigils on an adventure to discover uncharted territories to the west. The music and setting echo the last shot of Season 4, when Arya set sail for Essos in order to find Jaqen H’gar and escape the War of the Five Kings. This decision reminded me of Frodo in the end of Lord of the Rings, when he sails Valinor (a land far to the west of Middle Earth where elves and a few select others go to find eternal bliss) because he has suffered so much physical and emotional trauma during his quest to save the realms of men. Arya too bears scars, metaphorical and literal (there’s a new scar on her forehead from the attack on King’s Landing). She suffered such a great shock after losing her father, never fully recovering from that first trauma while adding more violence and brutality to her list of experiences. All of her training led her to the moment when she alone killed the Night King and saved all of humanity, only then to suffer more trauma trying to save people from dragonfire in King’s Landing. Arya is sailing west to not only seek adventure, but also to find peace at last.

Sansa always wanted to be queen. She thought she would be married off to Prince Joffrey and rule beside him in King’s Landing. That wish almost came true, until it all came crashing down after her father’s arrest. She had to suffer so much at the hands of others, but she survived each turn. Over time, she learned how to play the game of thrones more adeptly than her forebears– how to manipulate and maneuver– learning even from her worst enemies. She learned how to exert political power, combining this skill with the Stark qualities of family, duty, and honor in becoming an intelligent and just ruler of her people. She demanded independence for the North, thereby achieving her lifelong goal of becoming queen– only this time, one of her own making. “The Queen in the North!” the Northmen shout as a crown of two direwolves coming together is placed atop her head.

Jon ends up back at the place where he started his journey, returning to Castle Black and the lands that played such a formidable role in his development. From there, he joins Tormund and his direwolf Ghost to lead the wildlings back to resettle the wild north. He always wanted to be a ranger for the Night’s Watch, but Lord Commander Mormont held him back to groom him to lead. At last, Jon gets his wish, and ranges north of the Wall, though it is left up to the viewer to decide if he ever returns. “A direwolf has no place in the south,” he told Tormund back in episode 4, and though he was talking about Ghost, he could have just as easily been talking about himself. He grew up thinking he was a bastard and never quite fitting into his Stark family, only to find out that he was trueborn of a Targaryen and Stark and next in line for the throne. He never really felt like he fully belonged to any of his families. But he found a home and a family north of the Wall that was his own, back when he fell in love with Ygritte and the wildling people. “He’ll be happier up there,” Jon said when he gifted Ghost to Tormund. “So would you,” Tormund rightly replied. “You’ve got the North in you. The real North.”

Jon and Daenerys were both the tragic heroes of this story of Ice and Fire. Daenerys lost herself in the pursuit of power to implement her moral vision. Jon chose duty over love– “duty is the death of love”– sacrificing his queen and his lover for what he believed was the greater good. Part of his tragedy is that he can never really know if it was the right decision; Westeros has ended up almost where it started when the series began, with the notable exceptions of Northern independence, an appointed ruler, and the removal of the threat of the Night King. But still, lords and advisers and kings rule on as they have before. It’s not clear how long peace will last in Westeros, but at least Jon Snow finds his in the wild lands of the North that he has come to call home. Our final shot where we end is of the same forest where we began this journey all those many years ago.

Other thoughts on “The Iron Throne”:

• I cannot believe it is over! I am a mixture of emotions– very sad and unfortunately (after this season and all the discourse around it) a little relieved. As I’ve said previously, I don’t like to insert my own opinions into the recap, but it was fairly hard to avoid during this episode. I wrote in more of my opinions of the last 40 minutes (from the council scene onward) than I usually do, so if you skipped that part and are curious, see above for my take on it. But basically, I think many of the premises that the show hangs its hat on are a mess. There is so much that does not make sense. That said, as was the case throughout this season, there are so many beautifully shot and acted sequences that I was able to still take a lot from it and largely enjoy my watch even despite its storytelling flaws. Every other aspect of the production aside from the writing was incredible, from the costume design to the acting to the cinematography to the score, etc. It’s just a shame that all that brilliant work ended up being tarnished a bit by the storytelling. I believe that if Season 7 and 8 had 10 episodes each, like they were meant to, then this would have made a world of difference on the final product.
• Last week, I wrote at length about my issues with Daenerys’s turn to the dark side, so I won’t repeat them here. I still think that the ending of her story is the same destination as it will be in the books, but that the journey will be different. It was hard for me to lose Daenerys as a point of view character over these last couple of episodes. We’ve been with her since the beginning, in her head even as she’s making difficult and even troublesome decisions. The writers decided to wall her off to us just as she was making the most fateful decisions of her life. I would have really loved to know more of her internal struggle and I feel like it would have really helped do justice to the character who deserved more, even as she turned into a tyrant. I really think that she suffered the most from the arbitrarily condensed final seasons and the shoddy craftsmanship from a seemingly autocratic writer’s room. She meant so much to so many people, including the actress herself, so it’s a real tragedy that her character arc was not given the time and care it deserved.
• When Bran agrees to become the king, he says, “Why do you think I came all this way?” Are we meant to believe that he knew he was supposed to be the ruler all along? His ability to see the future has not been confirmed, and what future he has seen has only ever been delivered in out-of-context snippets. I tend to think this was just another example of sloppy writing from the showrunners and not that Bran knew he was supposed to be king of Westeros and let hundreds of thousands of people die so that he could get there. But when you introduce time travel without establishing clear rules to bound it, it’s hard to really say what we’re supposed to take away here.
• Unfortunately, we did not really learn much about Bran this season (or many of the previous seasons, for that matter), so having him rise to the highest position in the game is both shocking and confusing. No one in Westeros really knows about him, aside from the people that just installed him as king, and really what indication does Tyrion have that he would make a good ruler at all? The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Tyrion knows Bran’s powers could be useful, but that ultimately he would abdicate the day-to-day management of the realm to his advisers.
• I would have vastly preferred that Jon was installed as king (there was really no good reason for him not to be, even after killing Daenerys– see the recap above for more thoughts on this). Then, I would’ve expected him to immediately abdicate the throne and choose to head north of the Wall on his own– not as a punishment.
• It’s interesting that this story ended on the Jon, Arya, and Sansa montage, because to me it has always been a tale of the Starks. They are the first family we come to know in the series, and the last ones we say goodbye to. I’m happy that they lived and found some hope in the world after all they lost along the way. Since Arya and Sansa were both my favorite characters, I am probably more pleased with the end game than most, especially considering how sloppy this final season got. But I still can’t help but think that shouldn’t have all ended up apart. “The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives,” Sansa once quoted her father to Arya. I would have liked to see more of them living out this motto.
• What were the major themes of the show? How much changed? Is it a nihilistic show in the end? What did the show have to say about peoples’ abilities to change? I feel like there are still so many questions that we will grapple with in the fallout of this beloved series ending, especially since it ended in such a rush. I think if anything, the struggles the show exhibited over the last 2-3 seasons have only made people more excited about the books George R.R. Martin intends to release. Though I was personally let down by some of the writing in these last two seasons, I think that the rest of the production was outstanding and truly a feat unlike any we’ve seen on television.
• This show accomplished something major and became a decade-defining global phenomenon. I will miss the feeling of anticipation from week to week, gathering with friends, and debriefing each episode with all of you. It feels like not only the end of one of my favorite-ever series, but also the end of an era of appointment television. This show, like the books before it, has meant so much to me, so I’m pretty devastated to let it go.
• I’m also sad to say goodbye to you and these recaps. Despite how many words I’ve managed to put to page for each of these episodes over the years, I’m having a hard time expressing just how much you all mean to me as readers. It means so much to me that people like you are reading this blog, some even returning week to week. Time is precious, and that you chose to spend it reading my thoughts on this show is such a gift to me. Thank you so very much for reading and sharing these posts over the years. It has brought me so much happiness. Valar morghulis.