If the cries of disappointment from the millions of Game of Thrones fans all echoed at once, even the Old Gods would be able to hear it. The ending was terrible on a scale I could never have imagined possible before the season began. Disappointment doesn’t really begin to describe it. It felt like a bad break up. In a way, I suppose it was.
For me, the best example of abysmal writing comes in the form of one Jamie Lannister. Let me give you the run down. In the very first episode of GoT, Jamie is the most despised character. As we all know, having a character attempt to murder a child is a classic way of turning the audience against them. But over the last seven years, we’ve come to root for Jamie. We learn why he made the choices he made, and that he made them because he doesn’t live in a world that shares our same sense of justice and morality. At the end of last season, Jamie finally left Cersei. Hooray. He keeps his promise to the north and risks his life to fight the dead. He’s becoming the man we always knew he could be. He even apologizes to Bran for pushing him out the window all those years ago! Then, in the matter of a single episode, Jamie gets with Brienne, leaves Brienne, and claims that he is a hateful man and ventures to return to Cersei. In his venture to find her, Euron Greyjoy happens to just wash up on shore at that exact moment he’s passing by. They duel to the death. Jamie finds Cersei. They die.
Wtf kind of ending is that?
There were other upsetting things as well, like our favorite character murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people, but that’s neither here nor there. The ending was bad. It was rushed. You don’t need me to tell you that. What we need in this dark time full of terrors is some classic Samwell Tarly optimism and what I’ve concluded is that the show, as a whole, was still an incredible ride. It gave us years of some of incredible storytelling. And to me, this show absolutely had the some of the best moments out of any series I’ve ever seen:
The Red Wedding
The Night King raising the dead at Hardhome
Daenerys coming out of the fire with three dragons
The shock of Ned’s execution
Joffery’s assassination
Every line Peter Dinklage uttered as Tyrion
Tomen walking out a window
Danny freeing the Unsullied
Arya killing the Night King
I think when I look back at Game of Thrones, I’ll remember sitting in complete silence with a half a doezen friends who were all as equally spellbound by the story as I was. I’ll remember how obsessed we all were and the conversations and speculation that surrounded it. I’ll remember the characters for who they were, like old friends who now live in distant places.
Am I disappointed? No. That’s not a strong enough term to describe my feelings for this last season. Mortified may be better. But will I miss this fantastical world for a couple months every year? Absofuckingloutely.
So, cheers to the moments we had and to all the people who worked on the show for years (yes, even D&D). What’s dead may never die.