‘Game Of Thrones’ Finale Review: All Hail Bran The Boring, The New King Of Westeros (For Some Reason)

We ended at the beginning.

King Bran the Broken has arisen (as the betting markets somehow managed to call before the final season of Game of Thrones took off), and the seeds of a new Westerosi republic have been sewn. Jon “Aegon Targaryan” Snow reclaims his true birthright, Sansa Stark secures independence and a crown, Arya goes off to seek adventure, and Tyrion Lannister will now seek to repair the damage that he and his former queen Daenerys wrought on the Seven (Six) Kingdoms. Maybe the real game of thrones was the friends we made along the way.

“The Iron Throne,” the series finale of the world’s most popular television show, managed to emblematize this season’s greatest strengths and its most galling weaknesses in a neatly bifurcated package. The episode’s first 40 minutes tapped into the silent, piercing, hauntingly atmospheric act of looking that the best moments of the final six episodes embodied. The concluding 35 minutes tried to cram as much plot in as possible without allowing for the fully emotional weight of the story to hit us. The first half was an intoxicating tone poem on par with the best aesthetic work of the series’ 73 chapters; the second half was a conventional TV finale that wrapped everything up in a tidy bow.

Since it gave me much more pleasure, I would like to initially consider those first 40 minutes. The opening segment of Tyrion, Jon, and Davos slowly making their way through the carnage of King’s Landing is accompanied by no score. All we hear are crunching footsteps on ash, the wind gently swirling those carcinogenic flakes through the air. We don’t get to escape bearing witness to the aftermath of Daenerys’ war crime. Writers-directors-showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss use two alternating tracking shots depicting Tyrion’s point of view, the charred and flayed bodies always just on the margins, fanning out and going on forever. A naked, burned man wanders aimlessly, surely to die at any moment. That tight, suffocating perspective constricts our view and also makes very clear just how far beyond our view the ramifications of this genocide is. The snowstorm of ash never abates. King’s Landing is now hell on earth.

This silence pertains to dialogue, as well. I would pay a tidy sum for somebody to sit down and calculate the number of words per minute spoken in Season 8, relative to the other seven. I would imagine that the number would come in quite low. Season 8 has worked so well for me aesthetically and emotionally in large part because of the lack of dialogue. Many people carried their frustrations from Season 7 over to this one because plot and story got compressed to the point of incomprehension. I would counter that much of that story is carried in the silent faces of the actors, and the ways in which the camera draws those emotions out. Season 7 was rough because people were speaking the gibberish of the plot, which made Loot Train, Zombie Heist, and all the rest of it so much more unbearable. Season 8 dispensed with the chatter and let the story exist almost elementally.

An instructive example from the finale was Tyrion’s search for and discover of Jaime’s and Cersei’s bodies. He says nothing, but he doesn’t need to. His tears–the first he’s shed since killing Shae–tell you everything about how he felt about his siblings. Indeed, Tyrion sheds tears for Cersei, too. His tears come forth in force when he removes the brick uncovering her face.

Think I’m crazy? Go back and re-watch their scenes together in Seasons 2 and 3, and conclude it with their one shared scene in each of Seasons 7 and 8. He clearly loves his sister, because he loves his family, no matter how much he and she wanted each other dead. It’s extraordinarily powerful when he cries for her and Jaime, and it is communicated through delicate, textured camerawork, as well as a gut punch of a performance by Peter Dinklage. Ramin Djawadi’s score finally emerges, and seals the power of the moment with the strained lilt of “The Rains of Castamere.” When I reflect back on the filmmaking of this season, it will be moments like this that will resonate, not the battles.

Another small thing, perhaps unnoticeable on first blush, is the long take in Tyrion’s cell when he confesses his love of Daenerys to Jon. The shot lasts 80 seconds, and only uses one small pan to the left when Tyrion walks to another part of the room. Otherwise, we simply get two people talking to each other, slowly realizing all the mistakes they have made for love, and what to do to fix them. It’s not flashy. But we feel the desperate size of these two men’s conflicts because we’re not allowed to look away from them. It is as if the camera is burrowing a hole in Tyrion’s and Jon’s hearts.

Things start to deteriorate at Daenerys’s death. We barely get to fully comprehend her final descent into fascism before Jon has plunged a knife into her heart and Drogon has melted the Iron Throne (#symbolism). Her story concludes in a way that reminds me of how she was woven into the series in the first place. Daenerys’s journey through Essos often felt tacked on–an afterthought compared to the rich drama going on across the Narrow Sea. Here, she is cast aside again, almost carelessly. We don’t get to sit with those contradictions and complexities that have defined Daenerys. She’s barely even a villain.

The one thing that saves the scene is the gentle tenderness of Emilia Clarke’s performance. Daenerys is the hero of her own story, and therefore she can speak softly and sweetly about the future. She can even convince herself that she and Jon can love each other again. She is the strongest person on earth, so she is allowed to love again, in her own mind. Clarke plays it with such sincerity that you could be forgiven for believing that Daenerys is right. We even get one final glimpse of Daenerys’s betrayed fury as she fades away.

But Daenerys wasn’t the hero of this story. She wasn’t even the villain. She was just the final piece to remove from the board. The council at the dragonpit is, frankly, corny beyond belief. The thing that drives that feeling is the talkiness of Season 7. Everybody declares something that sums up their history, and what they want in the next phase of the country’s history. It’s an expository way to ensure that our protagonists all get a happy ending. (Even the joke at Edmure Tully’s expense is flat, another element found in so many other bland dramas.)

What’s more, it is here that makes me think that Benioff and Weiss really didn’t care about the populations of Westeros that lived outside of lords’ bedchambers. Sam proposes a democracy as a new form of government, and he’s practically laughed off the stage. The quasi-republic that does emerge is a step in the right direction, but even so, we are left with the nobility pulling all the strings. It feels rather cheap, especially since the last two episodes steered our attention toward the common people.

After the birth of this new republic-oligarchy hybrid political system, those lords and ladies still need a leader, and they choose…Bran??!? Tyrion’s explanation makes some sense about why he would be the most effective ruler, but we don’t know Bran. We never really have. He has been the most boring of all the series’ important characters, and has been so basically since he escaped Winterfell in Season 2. We even lost him for an entire season because there wasn’t enough of a story to keep him going. Bran is the same impetuous bozo who caused Hodor’s mental incapacitation and death. He is dramatically inert. He ceased to function as a POV character in Seasons 7 and 8; he barely functioned as a character at all. Look at his new small council. Wouldn’t you rather just have those five people running the country outright rather than in the shadows? We are not allowed as viewers to be invested in the meaning of Bran as king, because Benioff and Weiss didn’t invest the time to make us understand it.

On and on it goes. Yara and the “new prince of Dorne” are sitting right there, but somehow don’t bother pressing their claims for independence after Sansa does so for the north, meaning that her request is just a matter of neatly wrapping up her arc. Brienne becomes lord commander of the Kingsguard and earns a seat on the small council. Davos becomes Master of Ships. Sam earns the title of grandmaester. Bronn is named Warden of the South and Master of Coin. And Tyrion, now that he has nobody to love, can focus on duty and be a better hand to Bran than he ever was to Daenerys.

We can keep going. Master Ebrose, not Sam, wrote A Song of Ice and Fire and managed to omit Tyrion from its pages (LOL). Brienne completed Jaime’s entry in the book of the Kingsguard, thus restoring his honor. Podrick is knighted! Doesn’t this all just strike you as a bit treacly? Even the slow reverse tracking shot backing out of the council chamber as they all discuss the business of the realm is a hoary cinematic device that has no place in a show like this.

Sansa, like Cersei and Daenerys, ultimately got short shrift when crowned Queen in the North. This was inevitable, richly deserved, and utterly tossed off. Sansa is the one character whose growth from the pilot to the finale was unabashedly triumphant. But she only gets about 15 minutes of screen time across the final two episodes. She is someone who, like Cersei and Daenerys, would have naturally been given a larger concluding platform had Benioff and Weiss just committed to two or three more episodes. A thematic undercurrent of the show was what happens to traumatized women when they get close to power. Each of those three women expressed it differently, and it made them three of the most captivating characters on the show. In the end, they could barely get onscreen to show us why we were captivated by them in the first place.

You can say the same thing about Yara, too. Benioff and Weiss never did a great job of establishing the Iron Islands and its people within the context of Westeros, but given the journey that Theon and Yara ultimately took, I would have loved to see Yara grieving her brother’s death, to at least make her more than just a chess piece at the dragonpit. Yara is now one of the most powerful people in Westeros, and easily the second-most powerful woman behind Sansa. A few grumbling lines to Sansa and the others isn’t enough to demonstrate the richness of her humanity.

Let’s return to the end, and the beginning. Much of that final montage, with its match-cut crosscutting, was remarkably elegant. The three Stark children were the series’ heart and soul, and here, they all ride off into the sunset. The gate closes behind Jon and the wildlings, much as the gate opened in the first shot of the pilot. He leads the wildlings north, much as the White Walkers marched through the landscape. The chants of “Queen in the North” echo those sung to Robb and Jon. Arya’s gaze into the sun on the bow of her ship recalls her journey to Braavos at the end of season four. Essentially, the Starks are finally listening to their hearts, and breaking free of the cycles of damage that defined much of their childhoods.

These structural echoes and inversions give hope to a show that openly flirted with nihilism from its very first moments. Yet, we only are given the opportunity for such hope in the final 35 minutes of a 73-episode series that never truly suggested a way out.

The primary philosophical ruminations of Game of Thrones have centered on the destructiveness of power. A few cheesy words at a lords’ council try very hard to erase that, and say that if we work together, we can beat back our base impulses and actually build a better world. It can’t be that simple. The likes of the Iron Islands and Dorne could rebel again. The country could plunge into war once Bran dies and multiple people demand the throne. A tougher and more interesting position for the show to have taken in that half hour of loose-ends-tying would be to undercut its characters optimism. Instead, Benioff and Weiss lean in to it. Hope is not easy to come by in this universe. The show acts as if it is.

If only Benioff and Weiss had allowed themselves more time. The first six seasons of Game of Thrones averaged about eight-and-a-half hours of onscreen story time (opening and closing credits removed). Season 7 clocked in just shy of seven hours. Season 8 measures approximately six hours and 45 minutes. Resources were obviously budgeted and shaped differently in the final 13 episodes, but those figures should make clear that it would not have been much of a strain on Benioff and Weiss’s time or energy to add two hours to each of the seventh and eighth seasons. The big moments–the relationship between Jon and Daenerys, Zombie Heist, Daenerys’s final turn toward darkness, and the aftermath of the sack of King’s Landing–could have been fleshed out or taken in radically different directions. We could have gotten much more material for Sansa, Cersei, and Yara. Instead, we’re left with the final 35 minutes of a run-of-the-mill TV drama.

Season 8 has come in for a lot of undeserved criticism, in my view. The beauty of the filmmaking and the performances that filmmaking captured wove a deep and rich narrative and emotional tapestry for five-and-a-half episodes, and were mostly wonderful. Dialogue was not required, and the logical speed bumps were more than made up for by atmosphere, texture, and beauty. The finish line helped solidify that criticism, sadly, and drew “The Iron Throne” closer to the finale of The Wire than, say, The Americans.

Game of Thrones, like most good, successful popular art made on its scale, was too unwieldy a text from which to derive a single, stable, interpretive framework. There were too many characters, too many narratives, and too many styles to allow for unifying narrative, dramatic, and thematic principles. Each viewer entered into the show via a different avenue, and enjoyed playing in a number of different sandboxes. The show both condemned and accidentally condoned rape. It both abhorred and glorified violence and revenge. It raised up and enriched its central female characters, only to punt the ball on them at the very end. It feinted toward standing up for the people, but couldn’t help but rely on the essential uniqueness of elites. It exposed the corrosiveness of power, but chiefly concerned itself with merely putting power in the hands of characters we liked. It did all of these things at once, and invited its audience to grab hold of whatever they wanted to see in it.

Benioff and Weiss achieved something that nobody else had previously done in television. In several years’ time, we may look back on those 73 episodes and forgive some of the problems of the final 13, or we may simply choose to ignore them altogether, as we often did with elements of the first 60. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion tells the lords’ council. The story of Game of Thrones has reached its end, but the story about that story is only beginning.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports