Is there anything I can say about “The Bells” that hasn’t already been said by every critic out there? Let’s just put it out there up top and then move on: Dany going Mad Queen is fine, but the path to get there was a mess. Not two episodes ago, she was saving the world from the army of the dead. Now she’s nuking King’s Landing?
I know Dany took some extreme measures during her rise to power on Essos, but there are still a lot of dots missing between that and her slaughtering civilians. When you remove context, who in the show isn’t a madman/woman? Jon hanged an 11-year-old boy and decapitated a man begging for mercy and pleading for his life. Sansa fed her husband to dogs. Arya turned men into meat pies and fed them to their father before slicing his throat and smiling as he bled out. Cersei is Cersei.
There are apparently very few characters in Westeros who AREN’T being set up to turn mad! Of course, I just listed all of that without context. So when you post that stupid Pikachu face tweet that lists things that Dany did that showed she was mad, like burning Lannister troops in battle or killing slave owners who castrate boys and force them into slavery, consider that it could apply to pretty much anyone.
King’s Landing wasn’t the only thing destroyed in this episode or season. Jamie and Bran have suffered a lot as characters. Jamie went from saving the citizens of King’s Landing to not caring about the people of Westeros pretty quickly, particularly since he came North to fight for the living just a few episodes back. Bran has been more than useless. The only thing he’s contributed was giving Arya the fancy dagger that stabbed the Night King, but that was already in Winterfell, so really he was just a delivery service. Varys asks Jon if he’s wants to commit treason out in the open. Tyrion turns him in for treason and them promptly commits treason (although the scene with Jamie in the tent was the highlight of the episode for me).
And why was Jon resurrected, again? What is his greater purpose overall? To kill Dany next episode, I guess? Arya killed the Night King, and it sure looks like the show sent Shadowfax her way so she could ride somewhere within the city to kill Dany, too.
These past two seasons have been rushed. I pointed that out after the season 8 premiere I’m not here to “I Told You So”, either. I’m just saying it again. All of the problems with the narrative in the past two seasons could have been fixed with an additional few episodes. I also could have done without the forced plot devices, such as Euron’s existence or ballista’s with 100% accuracy when not aimed at Dany.
The bullet points for Dany’s descent into madness are certainly there. Dragon 1, Dragon 2, Jorah, Missandei, Sansa and the Northerners, Jon not being down with incest…the show has hit these in a perfunctory way, but it’s not enough. And Items 1-6 happened in the last couple hours of storytelling. The audience doesn’t have a chance to soak in the information before we’re onto something else. And while we’re still trying to process it, Dany starts frothing at the mouth and murdering babies.
Game of Thrones isn’t made up of bullet points, just as history isn’t made up of battles. It seems the creators forgot why Game of Thrones became a worldwide phenomenon. It wasn’t because of the Battle of Blackwater Bay. It was because of scenes like this that really built to something. There’s no time left for scenes like that anymore, apparently, and I don’t expect them in the series finale, either.