Small Council: What did we think of “The Iron Throne”?

The Game of Thrones series finale has come. We have thoughts. Read our takes, tell us yours, and vote in our poll!

ARIBA: Wow, Game of Thrones is over, like really, truly over. I’m still not sure how I feel about it because it’s a surreal to comprehend that there is no more hiatus and no more new episodes to look forward to. It’s a bittersweet feeling given how the final season came to an end. I’ve been taking notice to the fan reactions about “The Iron Throne” and I find myself in agreement with some, while not exactly on the same page as others. There is a lot about the series finale that could have been better, hell, there are plenty of things about the entire season that could have been better, but did I absolutely hate it? Nah.

Starting with the Starks, I truly believe everyone sort of ended up where they were always destined to. I don’t think Jon got the best deal, and after learning about his parentage and how special he truly is, it sucked to see him exiled to the Night’s Watch. But I have a feeling that is where Jon’s heart always was. Perhaps not in the Night’s Watch, but definitely beyond the Wall. There’s something poetic about Jon’s journey starting and ending in the very same place, and while I’m not thrilled with his ending, I sort of get it.

I certainly loved the idea of Arya going west of Westeros because that’s very representative of the character she grew into. It’s just unfortunate that HBO has crushed any hopes of an Arya spinoff, which is a series I would love to see. Moving on to Sansa, the Queen of the independent North, who will now rule the people of Winterfell. Her ending up here also made a lot of sense to me because while she may or may not have excelled at ruling over the Seven Kingdoms, I think her calling is and always has been Winterfell. She’s not the rule-the-world type of person, and her loyalty has always been to her home, so it makes a lot of sense to me that she’d end up there.

But let’s talk about Bran the Broken, King of the Six Kingdoms. Now, this is an ending I certainly was not thrilled about. First off, all the memes that have been coming out making fun of how Bran did nothing but ended up with everything are so on point. Maybe everyone won’t agree with me, but why was Bran’s story given so much importance if in the final season he was barely going to be around? I wouldn’t be so irritated about Bran being King if there was more to his story in the final season. Instead, we saw him sitting around or randomly warging. If there was more buildup or clarification, then him becoming King would have been more believable. Maybe everything he did was to get him to that place, but there were too many chunks of the story missing.

As far as where all the other characters ended up, I was content for the most part except for Tyrion, who was most certainly the master manipulator behind everything. Just think about it. He told Varys about Jon’s parentage which in turn led to Varys being roasted, and then he all but convinced Jon to kill Dany and ended up Hand of the King once again. How can anyone deny this guy truly was the wisest and most clever one all along?

I absolutely loved Sam’s ending and was so excited when he made the comment about naming the book A Song of Ice and Fire. That simply made my day, and temporarily let me forget anything I was unhappy about. All in all, the series finale wasn’t everything I was expecting to be and I finished it feeling conflicted and torn, which wasn’t at all what I was hoping for. Nonetheless, it had its strong points and for that, I will commend them.

Game of Thrones, you may have had a rough final season, but you will be dearly missed!

DAN: I think the Bran-as-king thing is the most contentious part of the finale. I see it as the show’s message about what kind of ruler is best. Over the course of the series, we’ve seen a procession of rulers who were too frivolous (Robert, Renly), too weak (Tommen), too pure (Jon), too driven to achieve their goals no matter who it hurt (Stannis, Daenerys), or just straight-up unwell and violent (Joffrey, Cersei). By electing Bran king, the show — and George R.R. Martin, I think — are saying that the best ruler is one who’s as fair as possible, and not a slave to their passions. I took it as a statement.

Granted, I think they could finessed the actual scene more. Tyrion’s talk about the power of stories wasn’t very convincing, and I could have used more horse-trading and politicking for votes, but it made sense in the big picture.

Arya’s ending felt that way, too. I don’t know if she ever showed much interest in exploration for its own sake, but seeing her on the prow of that ship with a little smile on her face, eager to find out who she is now that she’s let go of her need for vengeance, felt right. And the more I think of Jon’s ending, the more I like it. I like the ambiguity of it: is he escorting the wildlings home or is he joining them? Is he adhering to his duty or casting it off? And I completely reject arguments that Jon “deserved” more. “Deserved” has nothing to do with it. In his mind, at least, he saved Westeros from a tyrant, a tyrant he may have had some role in pushing over the edge by revealing his secret. Once again, he sacrificed his future to take on the role society demanded of him, and it may have taken him back where he was always meant to be anyway.

I think the episode should have been split in two. The first half, everything up through Daenerys’ death, was very different in tone than everything that followed. Separating out those halves and adding some supporting material would have helped them both breath, but that’s been a consistent complaint throughout the season.

The first half was stronger. I still don’t buy Daenerys’ heel turn, but the follow-up was undeniably stirring, from the horrific photography of a ruined King’s Landing to Dany’s rousing dictator speech to her soft, dreamy conversation with Jon, where she seemed to once again be the Dany we knew. Kudos to Emilia Clarke throughout.

I liked that Tyrion and Jon put some bones on Dany’s transformation into fire-raining death goddess, although it was too little, too late. And I loved Drogon melting the throne. Yes, it was on the nose, but everything about that first half screamed operatic tragedy. It was plenty powerful and mysterious.

“The Iron Throne” was a conflicted, compromised, thrilling, fascinating episode of television. I’ve had worse evenings.

CORY THONE: I’m not going to blow smoke about this season. It was bad. There were some highlights for sure, but overall the rushed pace led to forced narratives and a lack of subtlety that made the final season (and season 7, too) feel out of place with previous seasons.

That being said, the finale wasn’t all-around terrible. Like with much of season 8, the bullet points are fine, it’s the stuff in-between that was bad. Jon going North instead of ruling is fine. He’ll end up being the King of the Far North, anyway. He always falls backwards into titles. Arya sailing west is something we talked about her possibly doing on the Take the Black podcast. Sansa being Queen of the North and Lady of Winterfell was always going to happen. Bran being King is…..yeah.

Of course, Jon’s banishment from the realm is worthless since his sister could pardon him now that the North isn’t part of the realm anymore. Which, by the way, it kind of seems like the Iron Islands would also want independence since they had a deal with Dany for it anyway. How many times did the Stark sisters say that they couldn’t trust Dany because she wasn’t one of them and the pack survives and must stick together? Anyway bye I’m leaving forever.

Varys’ letters, the white horse in the last episode, House Reed….the list of things that we COULD have or even SHOULD have gotten resolution for is long and full of terrors. But at some point the complaining becomes too much. When it’s all said and done, the ending is the ending. No sense in taking over the small council with my whinging.

It was a great ride overall, even with the less-than-perfect ending.

RAZOR: Yeah, I’m not super happy about the finale. Sure, it had some very cool moments, some heartbreaking moments, and even some cringe-worthy humourous moments. (Did we really need the jackass and honeycomb joke again, Tyrion? DID WE?)

To me, it felt like three episodes crammed into one: the first part ending with Jon killing Dany, the second part with named King of the Six Kingdoms, and the third part with the Disney-esque resolutions for the Starks. What was bittersweet about everyone getting what they want?

I think the bittersweet part was probably in part one, when Jon had to kill the love of his life…well the second love of his life (RIP Ygritte: Gone but never forgotten). The rest of the time we just had to accept that the respawning Unsullied and Dothraki were keeping Jon hostage because they controlled the city.

I just feel like too much happened off-screen for me to enjoy what normally makes Game of Thrones so enjoyable. And the moments that did happen on screen were like Benioff and Weiss hammering home points to make us accept the narrative that Daenerys was always bad and Jon would have no choice but to kill her to save the world.

All-in-all, the episode was kind of a letdown for me, and maybe that’s because the season as a whole was kind of a drag on my soul. Usually, I’m the most excited person for anything Game of Thrones, but this season felt too rushed to really enjoy. I really wish we had extra episodes to flesh out the big moments. Instead, we got Bran the Broken as King of the Six Kingdoms because stories are powerful? Eh, I don’t buy it.

SARAH: Nothing that happened in the finale was remotely surprising, and I don’t know if I’m happy or sad about that. On the one hand, it’s tremendous fun to see one’s theories pan out, but on the other, it would have been more fun to see them pan out with a bit more time and finesse. Dany’s heel turn and subsequent death, Jon’s exile and Bran’s ascension to king of the six kingdoms all made perfect sense to me, but at the same time, I feel like D&D were leaning too heavily on their hopes that the audience would blindly accept the endgame without being shown exactly how we got there.

In terms of how the finale was set up, I really think that this season (and season 7) didn’t have any problems that more episodes couldn’t have fixed. We could have devoted more time to the Jon-and-Dany romance so that I could have believed for even a second that Jon ever loved her, which would have given Dany’s death scene the poignancy they were so valiantly shooting for. They could have shown us more of what Bran was up to, day-to-day, to make that final chapter in his on-screen story feel less jarring. They could have shown us Yara’s reaction to Theon’s death, or given us a juicy scene between her and Sansa in which, bonded by their ties to Theon, they finally managed to broker a true peace between the Iron Islands and the North, once and for all. I liked this season and found it entertaining, but I’m not going to pretend that D&D executed the last 13 episodes to the best of their ability. We all signed up for this show because the character work was phenomenal. Nobody would have minded seeing more of that.

Some things I really enjoyed about the finale, in bullet point form:

• I will never be able to satisfactorily express how happy I was to see that stupid iron monstrosity get replaced with a humble wooden wheelchair, and a long procession of unworthy monarchs replaced with a king who is as incorruptible as he is wise, and who by way of knowing all history will never be doomed to repeat humanity’s mistakes. The long and bloodied history of our own world teaches us say over and over, “Never again,” but over and over, we start wars, leave the EU, vote corrupt and dangerous people into power, and generally screw ourselves over. It’s heartening to think that this fictional world I love, at least, is protected from such horror, if only for a little while.
• Tyrion’s discovery of Jaime and Cersei’s bodies was a powerful moment that struck a personal chord with me, and there is not a theorist on Earth who can convince me that the tears he shed were only for the sake of his brother. The genius of the Lannister family dynamic has always shone most brightly when it showed us how tightly the ties of blood can bind us, even and most especially when we don’t want them to. The painful, confusing mess of loving a person you hate may be a foreign concept to some, but to many others it is all too familiar. Tyrion and Cersei’s push-and-pull relationship has always been a stellar example of such toxic complexity. For all their threats and snipes and backbiting over so many seasons, they’ve never truly been able to hurt each other when push came to shove. That Cersei died attempting an escape that Tyrion set up for her only adds weight to the pain he will inevitably carry with him for the rest of his life, and furthers my conviction that Tyrion and Cersei, in fact, had one of the most tragic relationships the show offered us.
• In Episode 4, Jon expressed a wish to go north with the wildlings. In Episode 6, he wound up heading north with the wildlings. I’ve seen a lot of people decry Bran as an evil mastermind and lamenting Jon’s exile on Twitter, but I honestly think he got the best deal he could have hoped for. We know he’s never wanted power, but we also know that he is powerless to refuse the call of duty. Had he taken the throne and spent the rest of his life ruling Westeros, he would have been bloody miserable. It honestly seems to me that Bran pulled one over on Grey Worm and set Jon free to live his life in peace.
• All hail the Queen in the North. I could not devise a more perfect ending for Sansa Stark. Well deserved, you brilliantly clever darling. Well. Bloody. Deserved.
• Gendry Baratheon is a legit snack. A legit snack. I love him. He can storm my end any time and this better not get edited out. That is all.

Lastly, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody who knows me, I’m going to finish on Arya. I patently do not like that Arya ended up alone, and with zero intention to ever see her family again, when being alone has largely done her more harm than good over the years. I think that sending her west by herself was an act of cowardice on the part of two male showrunners who seem to believe that a woman can’t be a “strong, badass” character without simultaneously rejecting love and companionship. I don’t think it melded with the rest of her season arc, which was hopeful and heartening, and grew organically from her relationships with other people. I also think they let her carry the entire season on her shoulders only to treat her like an afterthought in the final episode. That really soured the finale for me for a couple of days.

But hey, this is why fanfiction exists. Arya is alive, she made a conscious choice to step away from vengeance — the one thing I wanted more than anything for her — and she’s only 18 years old. The open-endedness of the finale gives me leave to imagine all manner of adventures and changes for her to experience. This is a character who has meant a great deal to me for many years, and one who will continue to mean the world to me in the years to come. I have championed her, dreamed for her and wept for her with the ferocity I might have spared for a member of my own family, ludicrous as that may seem, and for the privilege of getting to know every beautifully nuanced shade of this willful, scrappy, relentlessly ferocious young woman, I will forever be immensely grateful.

Now give Maisie Williams her Emmy.

What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments and vote in our poll below!

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