Our watch has ended

Let’s say you want to break up with somebody. It’s a lot easier when they start acting like a douchebag, or behave in completely uncharacteristic ways. Right? The same with Game of Thrones, which made it so easy to break up with by the time the finale hit final credits that they might have a hard sell on the projected three Westeros prequel series currently in the works.

I mean, when half a million deranged fans sign a petition demanding that the whole season be shot all over again to meet their expectations, then you know it’s time to… take a break.

There are many filters and lenses through which to view that finale, btw. 1) Show creators decided to brazen it out, working from a mere synopsis, and tried to breathe life into a skeletal outline of the characters’ motivations; or 2) it’s supposed to play into early foreshadowing of character traits (Daenerys, most importantly), except these were largely overshadowed by other, more democratic traits shown throughout the rest of the series; or 3), perhaps it is meant to be consistent with the largely cynical view that the books held about politics and fantasy tropes in general, so what were we expecting from HBO anyway?

All of these are useful ways of excusing the, er, mixed reactions to the final season of a show that, in most other aspects, was the Cadillac Eldorado of prestige television (even with its mandatory inclusion of female and male flesh peddling. Again: HBO, y’all.)

We could be chided for feeling conned when the show, in fact, has always played off of our sense of cheated expectations — whether it’s the shock twists of red weddings, Jaime losing a hand, Jon becoming suddenly dead — then, just as suddenly, not dead again.

But there are twists, and there are twists. One line by Tyrion rings true in the finale: “No one is very happy, which means it’s a good compromise.” And boy, you could just see 100 million people watching that finale and going, “Yup.” Compromises meant that there was no spectacular body count in the finale — but after all, hadn’t we seen enough killing by then? Compromises meant that the show creators had to cut corners in sending Most Likely To Rule The Seven Kingdoms Daenerys straight down to Crazytown on the back of a dragon in the last two episodes — no buildup, no real inciting incident to drive her there. So: kind of unsatisfying. 

Compromise, basically, sucks for a show that was meant to rip our hearts out and convince us that there was no other way for things to go. So, shortcuts are bad.

Some further disappointments and puzzlements:

• Jon killing Dany, then Drogon stealing off with her limp body. So who was the doofus who informed Greyworm that Jon was the actual Brutus behind the stabbing? Duh, Jon himself.

(By the way, that Drogon scene was kind of hilarious. Talk about bad dracarys aim. Maybe Drogon needs Executive Optical. Or is he secretly a lit major who understands the metaphorical value of melting down that throne? In any case, good image; hard to scan logically.)

• The final scenes seem to delight in just how futile the promise of human leadership really is. There’s Samwell Tarly’s suggestion of a ruler picked by the people, casting votes and such — you know, what we call democracy — for which he’s roundly laughed into humbled silence. (It may as well have been a direct dig at crazed GoT viewers thinking that they have a vote.) The cynicism in this scene, as with a following one at the Great Council, is played for laughs, but it leaves a metallic taste: where are the women or minorities on this hifalutin Council? (Though it is wheelchair accessible for Bran.)

• Bran’s ascendance was one of the show’s worst bait-and-switch moves in its eight-season run. The guy’s pretty much a millennial space case who looks like he’d rather be playing video games — sorry, “warging” to locate Drogon — than run things. So that petty administrative duty thus falls upon Tyrion, who mysteriously is still drawing breath despite dozens of near-death moments, bad advice as the Queen’s Hand, and loads of betrayals. But he’s still there, yucking it up over building new brothels in the Brave New Westeros. (Because: HBO, y’all.) A side note: Peter Dinklage, through little fault of his own, has gone from portraying a character whose witticisms we longed to hear each week to emitting the desperate pleadings of a pint-sized Scheherazade, spinning out more yarns to save his skin. The role is no longer worthy of Dinklage’s skills.

• Arya at least stayed within her character’s arc, heading off to “whatever’s west of Westeros,” a lonely endeavor, to be sure, but she was never gonna sit around and bake cookies for Gendry anyway.

• Sansa’s final scene kind of brings her full circle to her earliest silly-girl preoccupations: getting primped and dressed in elaborate detail for her role as Queen of the North, once again focused largely on what to wear and how to look good — the fineries of ruling, rather than its finer details, in other words. Good luck, North. Your queen is kikay.

• We never really believed the whole “break the wheel” fantasy even from the first time Dany uttered it, but by the end the show went to great pains to shred such a notion, pervert it, twist it, the way only absolute power can shred, twist and pervert things absolutely. Again, cynical. But was it too much to ask that a fantasy epic, for once, allow us to dwell in an imagined world in which things actually got better?

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Follow/dispute the author on Instagram @scottgarceau.