Game of Thrones is a Game of Misery

The hype that was promised! The two Clegane brothers stand off. Finally after fifteen years of fan speculation and memes, we are here. The Cleganebowl. And could we have a more exciting backdrop? A city burning to ash under the fury of a mad dragon queen. The very Red Keep itself crumbling beneath their feet. But none of that matters compared to the raw anger within the hearts of these two knights, living and undead. This is a battle beyond life, death, justice, or sanity. Pure masculine hatred is all right here for your viewing pleasure.

And it is fucking miserable. All of it, just unpleasant and awful. What a waste.

There is no point to giving Game of Thrones any credit that the last episode could possibly redeem what has happened in Season 8. The latest episode, The Bells, broke whatever hope I had. There is no final episode that could possibly make me happy any longer. In some ways, that train left the station many seasons ago. Some shows jump the shark, Game of Thrones rapes it. Remember Sansa and Ramsay? That was real bad, and I still haven't forgiven you, show. But I've been along for the ride, through all the ups and downs. I still wanted to see how it ended. At this point, we're watching the ending now and it doesn't matter what happens anymore. I don't care. This is miserable, miserable by design.

We could spend thousands of words here going through every little detail of every little mistake that has piled up into this car crash of a season. You can take your pick really. The choice to cut these last two seasons down to thirteen episodes has been a complete disaster. This latest season has been a near total failure thanks almost entirely to the writing. Character arcs are total botches, plot points have been forgotten, major villains have been let downs, battle scenes have been so badly shot you can't even see them, and I could keep going forever. Everybody was excited to see how Game of Thrones was going to end. Well, everybody except for showrunners, Benioff and Weiss, whose decisions this last season feel like the halfhearted work of two guys who put in their two week notice already. The themes are lost, the characters are wasted, and none of it means anything anymore. All that's left are surprises, horrible horrible surprises.

It is so easy as a fan to blame creators for what has gone wrong, and I don't want to be that guy. Somebody else can make the RedLetterMedia review where they just throw the creators under the coals like a true savage fanboy.

But you have to give some perspective here. Benioff and Weiss took a nerdy fantasy book series with a massive, perhaps unfilmable scale, and built out of it one of the largest cultural events of our time. (It's only rival being the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) They even gamely took on a job with goals that changed every few seasons thanks to George R. R. Martin's failure to finish his books. They went from adapting the books to stalling for GRRM to finally just writing their own fanfiction. And despite a few noticeable mistakes (Sand Snakes) they've managed to keep a coherent narrative full of incredible acting, impressive action, and gorgeous filmmaking. Even in Season 8, most of the shows strengths are still on display. Despite the writing features some of the best directing and acting that is all the more impressive considering how little the stars have to work to with. Lena Headey spends this entire season smirking by a window and still is one of the best actors on television. Benioff and Weiss deserve some credit for putting that woman in that role to be so dynamite at it. What I want to say is, the showrunners are not losers here. Memes aside, they are capable producers who might actually makes great Star Wars movies. So bravo to Benioff and Weiss for getting us here. This was an impossible job and maybe nobody could have done it better.

The problem though is that while Benioff and Weiss can find the right source material, the right actors, the right directors, and the right tones. I don't know what Game of Thrones actually means to them in the end. With this series now wrapping up, this should be the moment for the big series-ending statement. All the dragons and the zombies and the alcoholic Lannisters were steps along the way to... what, exactly? The body paragraphs are great, now write your conclusion. What do I take away from this?

And all I get as an answer is a big puff of "ummmmm..." In their post-episode interviews Benioff and Weiss seem depressed and ready to go home. It shows in the work. Maybe the question doesn't need to be answered, maybe Game of Thrones can simply be itself, a collection of people who struggle in dark times and the cycle of violence will continue beyond them. But the showrunners weren't content with that either. So they pulled together what maybe could have looked like an answer if you squint hard enough. Most writers are probably cheaters who know a lot less about their work than they would ever admit, but a good writer can hustle his audience and pretend otherwise. Sadly, the work in Game of Thrones this season is so sloppy and unconvincing that everything falls apart.

Dany burning down King's Landing is not an illogical choice if you just read the vague outline of her character. She's a dragon queen who is a foreigner in her own land who has struggled with a furious desire for justice and desperate need to be loved for seasons now. After all she's done to defeat tyrants and literally the save the world, what she gets from the people she wants to save is distrust and betrayal. This conflict between gentle savior and fire goddess has always been there. It reads great when you write it out. Then when you watch it play out, its butchery. A character you've come to root for goes from maybe a 12 to the full Hitler 100 on the Genocide Scale in the span of seconds for no apparent reason. People need to act like people, or else the audience loses trust in you.

It isn't like HBO hasn't done this exact kind of storytelling before. Tony Soprano spent a decade struggling with his own guilt and the joys of being a mobster. He was a charismatic guy so charming that he could scam the audience and himself into  and believing that he was a good person under it all. The last season of The Sopranos has him seemingly reach an epiphany of how to be a better man and appreciate life before returning to his hateful, gluttonous, resentful ways. Not all arcs need to be clear linear steps of logic. Characters - again - are people. People aren't that simple. Daenerys is a complex figure who always been (to borrow the show's ham-handed metaphor) a coin flip between good and evil. But Tony Soprano or any of the great flawed heroes of the Golden Age of Television had full lives that we could see and feel as real. You don't have to like how the character ended, but you believed in how they got there. Daenerys seemingly went two days from being jealous at a dinner to killing a traitorous advisor to then full fucking Godzilla. It's nonsense.

I could imagine a whole episode, maybe even several episodes that should have come between last week and The Bells where we see Dany's descent. She realizes her advisors are against her. We see that even after returning home after an eight season journey, she's more alone than ever. Jon is a fucking dipshit as always. The masses who loved her in Slaver's Bay are long gone and instead the Westerosi masses won't listen to her. She gets frustrated as her siege of King's Landing takes too long. Until finally, boxed in and without any answers, Dany has to take the Iron Throne by any means necessary. This should be incredible work, showing us how sometimes getting everything you wanted can be worse than failure. But all this needed time, it needed long pauses, it needed characters interacting and a sense of isolation and paranoia. Game of Thrones needed that sense of gradual change that great episodic television can give. Six hurried mini-movies just don't cut it with this kind of storytelling.

Worse, I don't think Benioff and Weiss even wanted to tell the story I outlined there. I think this was a strategy, that the sudden flip to brutal nonsense was always the plan. If you fundamentally misunderstand what Game of Thrones is about, you could mistake it for "shock". Ned Stark dying at the end of Season 1 was a surprise. Robb Stark losing the war all at once was a surprise. The most memorable moments that people will remember from this show for forever will go down as "twists". Make sure to have your spoiler warning up, because otherwise the twist will be ruined. Benioff and Weiss have become wrestling bookers making up swerves to throw the audience off for the sake of swerving.

If you think of Game of Thrones as purely a mechanical artifice designed to create surprises and thus generate blog posts, then Dany burning down King's Landing is a complete success. Nobody saw Jaime suddenly going back to Cersei either, and boy was that a terrible surprise. My expectations were subverted when Euron Greyjoy of all fucking people got to mortally wound Jaime, a character I don't think he ever even met. Just keep turning the crank on the Mystery Box, folks, you'll jump out of your chair when the twist pops out.

But that's why this season (and to a great extent the previous season) feels so hollow. Because you can so clearly see the mechanisms at work here. It doesn't matter how you get there as long as we all get to where we need this to go. They've been writing for many episode to make this twist happen. So we end up with this weird circular plotline of advisors begging Dany not to burn down King's Landing when seemingly that was never her intention in the first place. She burns down King's Landing because Varys betrayed her because Varys thought she might burn down King's Landing. All this predestination really needed a Cassandra warning the characters of this dark future that only could have existed in a writer's head.

It is also why the show suddenly needs to write essay through the moves of other characters on why Dany can't be trusted. And even the arguments in-universe do not make very much sense. Varys and Tyrion are terrified she won't listen to them when she's followed their plan the entire way these past two seasons. We end up with this sexist implication that Dany is impulsive and crazed, but Jon Snow, a pouting dude who vacillates between lovesick puppy and moody prick, would be the stronger choice. Jon is a guy who got his entire army surrounded a few seasons ago trying to save his little brother and had to be rescued by Littlefinger. Jon's most defying character trait is "knowing nothing". (Plus his resume of leadership features such highlights as giving up his crown to the first blonde who banged him on a boat and getting assassinated once already.) If you look at everything Game of Thrones has taught us about leadership these past eight seasons, Jon is not the man. I can see how Varys could like Jon better since he's an indecisive unambitious fool who is easy to control. But that again is assuming real dimension to these characters when they don't have that anymore. Varys is not a person, he is a piece on a chessboard that is sacrificed so we can get to the real point.

And what is that real point? Nothing, there was none. The big twist was a magic trick and that's all you get. Dany burnt down a city in a gruesome display of pure psychopathy. The showrunners even gave you a whole montage of people stabbing other people. It wasn't fun but it wasn't supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be awful and you were meant to feel bad. Because that's really the goal now. Once you strip out the great dialog and intrigue and magical mysteries, Game of Thrones becomes an engine designed to create misery in you. Everything you love will be taken, your heroes will all fail you, and nobody gets a happy ending. Right choices, wrong choices, good morals, bad morals, doesn't matter, every character goes into the grinder to make salt to pour down the audience's eyes to make them cry. Even the pure action fanservice you wanted for so many seasons can be made perfunctory and pointless. You get your Cleganebowl, but if you wanted to have fun watching it, this was the wrong show.

The tragedies can even pile up on each other so that next episode Jon will murder Dany, somebody might murder Jon, there's still ninety minutes of agony to go through. We can have our own little Hamlet of people stabbing each other to fill time before the end credits play. Have the entire planet explode too just to make sure nobody makes it out okay. That doesn't make sense, but we got rid of sense awhile ago. Benioff and Weiss, how much can you fuck them up now?

That's what we all wanted, right?

No, it isn't. Season 8 didn't have to be like this. Every so often you still get those vague little touches of what made Game of Thrones so good. People like to talk about the Red Wedding as iconic of the series, but most episodes weren't Red Weddings. Most episodes were people standing in a room talking to each other. The really great moments don't have any gore at all. They're people just being people. There were queens being catty to each other, Joffrey being a little awful bitch, Tywin demanding too much of his children, Jon falling in love, Arya seeing how dark the world truly is, Tyrion manipulating his way to power, and Theon discovering his name and his strength again. We don't have time for that anymore.

But when Game of Thrones, even in this twisted broken form, gives itself more time to let its characters be characters and not automatons built to make plot happen, it can still be an incredible show. Benioff and Weiss think the heart of the matter is whether Jon or Dany can sit on a throne. The throne is irrelevant, the gore is irrelevant, the twists are irrelevant. The real beating heart of Game of Thrones was back in episode 2 of this season, A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms. When a group of secondary characters could all sit around a fireplace, shoot the shit, and be themselves one last time. I know that episode would have left all the zombies and dragon storylines wide up, but I really wish that was the finale.

I don't want to think back on Game of Thrones and remember cities on fire and characters betraying themselves in an orgy of misery. I want to think back on Game of Thrones and remember Jaime knighting Brienne. That's a character overcoming certain doom and becoming a greater man for it. The Song of Ice and Fire should be found there, not in horror.