Every episode from the final season of Game of Thrones, ranked worst to best
By Dan Selcke
Image: Game of Thrones/HBO
“The Bells,” Season 8, Episode 5
The turning point of season 8 comes in “The Bells,” as Daenerys Targaryen sits atop her dragon, Cersei Lannister’s army defeated and the Red Keep looming before her, and decides to do the unthinkable: she takes off flying, glides low over the city, and burns it and its people to ash before finally blasting apart the walls off the Red Keep itself. Following her lead, her army — including Northerners who follow Jon Snow — flood the city and begin looting, raping and pillaging.
It’s definitely the most strikingly photographed section of the season, and the most harrowing. This is no battle between the living and an army of dead men. These are people — civilians — being killed by people, or burned to death from above.
Clearly, the show spent a lot of time on this sequence, and it is a spectacular technical achievement. It’s harder to parse how it fits into the story. Daenerys always had a sense of righteous vengeance; she was willing to slaughter the Masters of Astapor and crucify the Masters of Meereen, and was even prepared to burn that ancient city to ash if need be. But it’s quite a jump from that to indiscriminately killing men, women and children in the streets, and not one we were ready for. Watching the slaughter makes us feel complicit in something untoward, because the show is using such powerful imagery without earning it.
Other moments fly by in a daze, the best one featuring Arya and the Hound. Before he fights his brother in a Wrestlemania-style brawl, the Hound is able to reach to Arya and convince her not to throw her life away in pursuit of vengeance. Arya closes out the episode rising from the rubble covered in dust, finally free to be herself, whoever that is. We also feel one final pang of sympathy for Cersei as she and Jaime embrace as the Red Keep falls down around them, taking them out of the world as they came into it.
But it all comes down to that moment when Daenerys turns. If you bought it, you probably liked this episode. If you didn’t, it was another story. I didn’t buy it, and that breaks my heart.