Note: This piece contains spoilers for “Game of Thrones” season 8, episode 6.
One thing you certainly cannot accuse “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss of is failing to map out their plot. They contorted character arcs developed over nearly a decade to connect point A to Z. So what if the middling 24 points required illogical leaps of faith from viewers?
Consider that the Dothraki seemingly died en masse during the Battle of Winterfell, but then came back in full just in time for them to serve as bloodthirsty foils opposite the carnage and despair of armies at King’s Landing being laid to waste. Jon Snow gets sent back to the Wall, but the White Walkers are already vanquished and he’s famously made peace with the Wildlings. But for all these inconsistencies, “Game of Thrones” made sure to tie up all of its loose ends. Bran, who has been very helpful and not at all robotic and creepy, is the King of the Six Kingdoms, Sansa splinters off the North as Queen, Arya takes a victory lap as the Columbus of whatever lies west of Westeros, Jon is again resigned to frozen celibacy at the Wall, and Tyrion, Brienne, and Bronn all serve in the small council.
That feeling of dissatisfaction you’re feeling isn’t about the plot. It’s barely even about the haphazard character manipulation required to advance the plot. It’s about a quarter-century’s worth of unfired Chekhov’s guns.
“Game of Thrones” followed through on the most hotly anticipated theory from the original George R.R. Martin book series, confirming that Jon was in fact the legitimate son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. The “R+L=J” theory originated online in 1997, just a year after the publication of the first book. So the show confirmed a theory that book readers had been contemplating for 20 some odd years.
Naturally, expectations going into the final season were high. But there was just too much to explain, and a truncated season racing through what surely must amount to a thousand pages of plot hardly helped.
Fans anticipated that Arya would kill either Cersei Lannister or Daenerys, fulfilling the final touchstone of Melisandre’s prophecy that she’ll “shut forever” brown eyes, blue eyes, and green eyes. She took vengeance on the brown, beady-eyed Walder Frey and notably killed the blue-eyed Night King in the third episode of the final season.
But then “Game of Thrones” simply abandoned the last point, instead offering Daenerys the ignominious death of being stabbed by her boyfriend-turned-nephew in the middle of an ash-strewn kiss. Abandoning the prophecy could have been worth it if the show decided to milk Jon’s choice for greater character development, demonstrating that Jon became the successor to the Kingslayer, but unlike Jaime, he sacrificed his personal love for a mad queen in the name of decency. But instead Daenerys’ murder just happens, providing little more than a plot point to open the Iron Throne for the most useless, eyeroll-inducing character in the show. (Yes, all puns intended.)
Bran is one of the most theorized and analyzed characters of the entire book series. Named after the legendary founder of House Stark, Bran has two unique abilities: “warging,” or remotely controlling other animals and humans, and observing the past, as he discovered the truth of Jon’s parentage. We’re told that he gains omniscience after becoming the Three-Eyed Raven, and given his destruction of Hodor with “hold the door,” it’s clear Bran could have manipulated the entirety of the Game of Thrones trajectory.
Right?
If you were hoping that Game of Thrones would even attempt to address whether Bran was responsible for the Night King, “burn them all,” or why he didn’t prevent Daenerys burning tens of thousands of civilians to the ground, you’re out of luck. You’ll never know if Bran was the Prince Who Was Promised, why Melisandre brought Jon back from the dead for him just to return to the Wall to serve as a glorified snow monk, or even why Arya spent years learning how to appropriate dead people’s faces to use it just one time.
“Game of Thrones” just had too many loose ends, not just in the plot, but in the world it built. The only way you’ll ever find out if there’s more to the story is if Martin actually published another work. Given that he’s been working on “The Winds of Winter” for about a decade now, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
[Also read: More trash: ‘Game of Thrones’ finale accidentally shows modern water bottles]
