“I know a killer when I see one,” Arya says.
Jon looks even glummer than usual-and even more so when Arya reminds him that Dany is dangerous. He removes his little Star Trek hand-of-the-queen insignia and tosses it aside, glaring purposefully at Jon as he is marched off to his doom.
Then she starts talking like Cersei, telling Tyrion he committed treason by freeing Jaime. Friend, you were supposed to break the wheel-not melt it and the entire cart. Where will it end? “Will you break the wheel with me?” she yells, making a handful of sane onlookers uneasy. (I’m nostalgic for her Season 1 Dothraki dialogue, which was more “moon of my life.”) “We will not lay down our spears until we liberate all the people of the world!” she hollers, and starts naming neighborhoods we haven’t thought about in many episodes: Dorne, Qarth, the Jade Sea, Lannisport, Hyannis Port. (Still scythey after all these years.) “Blood of my blood!” Khaleesi says. Outside, Arya and Jon wander among the Dothraki, who are lustily waving their adorable arakhs. (I wonder what will become of the hand.)Įmilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, talks about the final episode of “Game of Thrones.” Put those bricks on my heart, Tyrion, because I am furious. He uncovers a square that perfectly frames Jaime and Cersei’s faces in death, they lie side by side, attractive heads unscathed. Tyrion’s not happy about it, either, and he begins some of the saddest reverse masonry we’ve ever seen. Tyrion makes his way into the Red Keep, across my beloved floor map-goodbye, floor map!-and heads downstairs to look for Lannister cremains.Īgony! A pile of bricks, and a golden hand poking out of the rubble. Jon and Davos disagree: No, Grey Worm, we should not kill everybody. Grey Worm, recently turned unsympathetic, is about to kill a bunch of soldiers on their knees, per the queen. He runs into Jon Snow and Davos, then stumbles on in search of the charred or pulverized remains of his siblings. ‘My God-I love writers!’ ” In the end of “Game of Thrones,” the writers claimed victory, but the viewers weren’t always so sure.Īs the episode begins, Tyrion is walking through the smoldering remains of King’s Landing, looking like we all feel: grim, contemplative, uncertain. I found myself thinking about one of the all-time great Charles Barsotti New Yorker cartoons, in which a middle-aged man is sitting at a desk, pen and paper before him, the caption revealing what he’s writing: “ ‘A writer?’ she gasped, her perky breasts heaving. By the end, a leader is chosen because he has the best “story” a book with the title of the series’ source material, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” is proudly unveiled and we watch a tender love scene between pen and paper.
But it also hit us over the head with its theme. Who was that guy?) The episode, which had to solve a problem like Daenerys and resolve the question of the Iron Throne, did so, and more, with moments of real beauty. (Just ask Gendry, Arya’s bag of faces, Brienne of Tarth’s love life, or, heaven forfend, the Night King.
No enemy can defeat it.” At the conclusion of an icy, fiery, truncated season, full of abruptly concluded plots, this narrative-as-king motif was, as some might say, a weird flex. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion says at one point.
In the series finale of “Game of Thrones,” the killing was minimal, the writing of books maximal, and the primacy of “story” questionable.