Game of Thones: What kind of ending will Game of Thrones give us?
By Cory Thone
The Ambiguous Ending
Will we get the Sopranos ending? You remember The Sopranos ending, right?
The Sopranos ending is now synonymous with ambiguity. Is Tony Soprano dead or alive? Did the guy in the jacket kill him? Did he maybe have a heart attack from the stress? The editing and pacing of that final scene (the whole final episode, really) is designed so you expect something bad to happen. Like why do we spend so much time with Meadow trying to parallel park? The constant opening of the door and the quick speed of the conversation, which are amplified by the music in the background, is all foreboding.
But nothing comes of it. Or if it does, we never see it. This drove fans crazy at the time, but about half of them have come around to the idea that the ambiguity of the finale adds to the lore of Tony Soprano. What would be worse for Tony? To live in constant fear looking at the door every two seconds, or just taking one to the head, which is what a lot of people think happened?
I think I speak for most Throners (I’M NOT LETTING THIS GO) when I say that a Sopranos-style ambiguous ending for Game of Thrones would piss a lot of people the hell off, me included. It has worked for The Sopranos (kind of) in the sense that no one had ever done anything like it before, but The Sopranos had always been a show about bad people; if we had affection for them, it was misplaced. The moral ambiguity of the universe lent itself to an ambiguous ending.
Yes, there are complicated characters on Thrones, but the show itself has been pretty straightforward with bad guys, good guys, and a few in-betweens like Jaime and Bronn. Game of Thrones isn’t the place for ambiguity, or at least not that kind. They should probably avoid it in the finale.
However, other shows have delivered a blend of finality and ambiguity that have worked really well. Might they serve as examples?
