“The Winds of Winter” is here at last. Sadly, I’m not talking about the sixth book in A Song of Ice and Fire—that tome remains in the “unfinished” category for now. But the sixth season finale of Game of Thrones was eventful enough to earn the right to share a title with one of the books. Of course when it came down to it, and perhaps without a trace of actual intent, critical discussions circled around Cersei Lannister. So much so, in fact, that, just as the character seizes power for herself in the episode, she also seizes the reviews for herself, provoking the most discussion out of an episode that featured revenge for the Red Wedding and apparent confirmation of R+L=J. Explosions have that effect, I guess.
Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post, discussing the difference between what feels good and what is right, has this to say about the cracking foundations of the Lannister family:
"Tommen is a decent, guileless person raised by a woman whose love was like poison.[…]his death is a tragedy; it saves no one, and serves only to turn Cersei’s triumph into wormwood. She always told her brother and lover Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) that it was the two of them against the rest of the world. But now that it is only the two of them: no husband to discover Cersei and Jaime’s affair, no children whose legitimacy must be defended and safeguarded. Their paradise is shot through with rot and gall. What happens when you’re alone with the person you love and discover that they are actually the snake in the garden, the voice tempting you to ruin all along?"
Alan Sepinwall edged away from directly calling Cersei a villain (which was an underlying theme of everything written about the character this week) and instead focused on the character’s emotional journey:
"She has had virtually everything taken from her — her mother, her father, all three children — just as the old woman once prophesied, but she will not stop fighting for control of her life and her story and for all that she feels she is still owed. She is the full and proper queen of Westeros now, not because of whom she married or whom she gave birth to, but because of actions she took, power she seized, lives she snuffed out because it suited her to do so. She doesn’t exactly look happy when she ascends the throne in her fabulous black dress — nor even as smug as she appears when welcoming Septa Unella to her new life of bondage and torture — but she looks… content."
Myles McNutt, the book-reader reviewer at the A.V. Club, contrasts Cersei’s “blow it all to hell” plan with the more subtle (but ultimately, in this case, futile) schemes of Margaery Tyrell:
"Cersei doesn’t have the foresight to play chess with the pieces she has, preferring to upend the board in a fit of rage. She may seem in control as she sips wine while watching the Sept explode in a ball of green fire, but what happens next shows just how little foresight she has. Not only does Tommen kill himself, but Lady Olenna turns her considerable resources to Daenerys. Cersei’s power comes from fear, as unstable as the Mad King, who also used fear to rule, and whose actions Cersei echoes by using wildfire to kill a mass of people for her own petty reasons."
Shortsightedness was a general complaint of Brandon Nowalk, the Unsullied A.V. Club reviewer, who found the show’s blatant disregard for consequences a bit concerning. That concern plays into Willa Paskin’s review of the finale, in which she breaks down the wish-fulfillment aspects of this season:
"Having spent seasons teaching us that violence is contagious and no one is immune, whether they die in body or soul, the rapidly approaching conclusion turned these principles into chuff. The season began by breaking the show’s first rule. Turns out some heroes are too important to die, and Jon Snow, killed at the end of Season 5, resurrected in Season 6, is one of them. Anyone can die, except him—and Dany and probably Arya. And then arrived the season finale, a rousing episode in which merciless vengeance starts to look pretty badass."
(I believe the TVTropes name for this phenomenon of undying-ness is “Plot Armor.”) Paskin’s arguments were echoed by Sonia Sarayia, writing for Variety this week. Her piece discusses how the working premise of A Song of Ice and Fire—deconstructing fantasy narrative tropes as they existed in the ’90s—is a great way to begin a story, but makes it much harder to build a coherent ending:
"What Benioff and Weiss have decided to do is to stop deconstructing. This sixth season of “Game Of Thrones” has been about picking up the loose ends and making some sense of the landscape they inherited. And the result has been a season that is both explosive and frequently hollow, as the story has attempted to satisfy “Thrones” fans with a type of storytelling that is definitively antithetical to what made “Game Of Thrones” so popular and so satisfying. The result is a mix of conventional action sequences, indie filmmaking and pure camp — an intriguing and at times fascinating combination, but one that is a far cry from the brooding, bloody drama about the human condition that “Game Of Thrones” once was."
This particular conversation is probably not over—we’ll be having it again next year, when Thrones begins its final march to the endgame. And we’ll probably have it when The Winds of Winter finally reaches our bookshelves. But the wish-fulfillment aspect of the season did not dull its excitement for many others. “The Winds of Winter” was hailed by a fair few people as one of the best episodes of the series. We’ll have to see how those “Best Episode” polls shake out once we’ve all had enough time to process this one.
Special shout-out to Washington Post’s David Malitz: “Sam went to the library.” He sure did, buddy. He sure did.