There Is No Saving ‘Game Of Thrones’ Now - Forbes

The series finale of Game of Thrones is nearly upon us, and most of the fanbase is no longer watching with hopeful anticipation, but a general sense of looming dread.

Game of Thrones has faltered at times the last few years, especially once it moved past Martin’s books, but in season 8 specifically, things have started to go downhill fast. I’d consider episode two of this season one of my favorites of the series, but I will agree with both critics and fans that “The Long Night,” “The Last of the Starks” and last week’s “The Bells” have taken a turn toward the terrible, and now with just one episode left, it’s hard to see any way out of this tailspin. Spoilers follow.

The main culprit, as has been discussed at length already, is the fact that this ending has been rushed. What seems like a bad decision (Daenerys burning King’s Landing) might have been better if it was given more time to manifest, or if we had more time to dissect the consequences. Everything has felt hurried, whether it be romances (Jon and Dany’s), villain arcs (the Night King evaporating with no further explanations about him) or long-running lore from the books (remember the Azor Ahai prophecy?). Instead we have gotten impressively filmed battles and…a series of baffling character decisions. That’s pretty much it.

As we head into the finale, the problem is that so much has gone wrong and we’ve arrived here so quickly that it’s hard to imagine anything happening tomorrow night that’s going to bring things back from the brink. It feels like we’ve already jumped off the cliff and there’s nowhere to go but the jagged rocks at the bottom.

With literally just 80 minutes left to go in the series, and Daenerys now being the “final boss” big bad of the series as of last week, there are so few things that can actually happen now. Dany can win, because literally no region left alive has the power to stand up to her army and dragon in open battle, or Dany can be assassinated, probably by Arya, the assassin, or by Jon, who may still have the ability to get close to her. Or the show pulls something wild out of its rear end like Bran warging into Drogon to defeat her, though given the extent of his participation in the Battle of Winterfell, that seems unlikely.

Game of Thrones was always going to be a hard series to end. That’s why George RR Martin is probably going to take twenty years to end it in the books, with two more still left to publish. And yet almost no one likes the direction things have gone this season. It’s not that fans want a happy ending and the series finale to be Tyrion officiating Jon and Dany’s wedding at the Weirwood with Sam and Sansa as best man and maid of honor. It’s that they want an ending that feels earned, that feels properly thought out given the time it needs to breathe.

In theory, with Daenerys going full Mad Queen, we should have an entirely new season dealing with the fallout of that. Dany suddenly being the villain with her still-strong army and invincible dragon going up against the rag-tag army of the north is a very interesting turn that could easily go for another ten episodes as Jon and company scramble to figure out how to deal with their ally-turned-enemy. How do you kill a dragon when you’re all out of giant scorpions and ice spears? Which territories fall in line behind Dany and which ones stand against her?

But we don’t have a season, we have a single episode. And that’s simply not enough, given the limited amount of options on the table to resolve this conflict that just started last week.

I suppose the one benefit of all this is that given the last two weeks, expectations are low enough where we could be pleasantly surprised. But we have seen so many arcs destroyed because of bad decisions or time crunches that there’s little left of the core of the show. Were we always heading toward a tragic ending? Sure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you can make sad, frustrating, uncomfortable endings by making people be upset with the characters, not with the writers writing the characters, which is what we’re seeing here. It’s the difference between The Red Wedding and the burning of King’s Landing. Both tragedies, one immortalized by fans as an iconic moment of the series, the second dismissed as unjustified, unearned nonsense, “foreshadowing” aside.

We will see how this all ends tomorrow, but it seems too late for recovery now. Game of Thrones needed more time, though even if it had that, it probably needed a George RR Martin roadmap too.

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