Defending the Ending

How the Final Two Episodes of Game of Thrones Worked as a Powerful Statement and a Fitting Conclusion to the Series

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

NOTE: If you haven’t seen the final two episodes of Game of Thrones and you want to avoid “spoilers,” don’t read any further because this post will be full of them. You have been warned …

Before we finally finished our 19-month journey through all eight seasons’ worth of episodes of Game of Thrones, my husband Charles and I had heard the scuttlebutt about the way the show ended. Ever since the final episodes aired a year ago, social media platforms -- especially Twitter -- had been full of posts attacking the last shows and saying the ending seemed forced, arbitrary and out of step with the overall mentality and Zeitgeist of the series.

Maybe I’d have felt that way too if Charles and I had followed through on our original plan to watch the last two shows on November 2, the eve of the 2020 Presidential election, since (even though the first six seasons were produced while Barack Obama was still President) the overall world of the shows seems to have uncannily anticipated the Zeitgeist of the Donald Trump administration. Like Trump, most of the Game of Thrones protagonists seemed almost psychopathic in their self-absorption, their insistence on “loyalty” even while they were stabbing each other in the back (figuratively and sometimes literally) to gain advantage in their never-ending quest for domination over the seven kingdoms of “Westeros” (i.e., medieval England).

Instead on November 2 we watched a 47-minute film from South German Television of a 1966 concert the Beatles had given in Munich, Germany, and we put the end of Game of Thrones on hold until November 9 -- six days after the election and four days after former vice-president Joe Biden was declared the winner by U.S. media. Watched in this context, the last two episodes of Game of Thrones -- “The Bells,” which depicts a genocidal battle that destroys the city of King’s Landing, location of the fabled Iron Throne (a chair made out of swords stuck into a metal base); and “The Iron Throne,” in which the survivors of this battle deal with its aftermath and chart a new course forward in Westerosian politics -- seemed a sign of hope that the Zeitgeist of both Game of Thrones and Donald Trump can be replaced by a new era of cooperation and public service.

“The Bells” is mostly a depiction of the final battle for King’s Landing between an army and an air force -- the latter courtesy of the last remaining one of the three dragons Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) hatched from leftover eggs and thereby revived a species thought dead for hundreds of years -- Daenerys has assembled from former slaves and the Dothraki tribe she married into towards the beginning of the series, and the defenders of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the incestuous couple who have been the real powers ruling Westeros (or at least as much of it as they could control from the Iron Throne) through most of the series.

Daenerys earlier made an alliance with Jon Snow (Kit Harington, easily the sexiest guy in the series as well as its most physically and morally attractive protagonist), who through most of the series was regarded as the bastard son of Ned Stark, rival family to the Lannisters for control of Westeros. He was sent off to the Night’s Watch to become part of this group of knights, sworn to celibacy, who were supposed to protect Westeros from the menaces lurking beyond the Great Wall separating Westeros from the wastelands of the North. (George R. R. Martin, author of the cycle of books collectively known as A Song of Ice and Fire on which the series was based, seems to have been inspired by Hadrian’s Wall, the barrier ancient Roman emperor Hadrian erected between England, which he was able to conquer; and Scotland, which he wasn’t. He also admitted he based the “Lannisters” and “Starks” on the real-life Lancaster and York families in 15th century England who fought the so-called “Wars of the Roses” for control of the English throne.)

For the most part, “The Bells” -- written by the series’ overall producers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who seems to have been their go-to guy for big action scenes -- is purely and simply a genocidal battle led by Daenerys and Jon against the city of King’s Landing. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), the little-person brother of Jaime and Cersei who previously killed their father, escaped and ultimately rose through the ranks of Daenerys’s court to become her “Hand” (i.e., her prime minister), tries to convince Daenerys to call off the attack if and when the city rings the bells in its great campanile tower and thereby indicates its willingness to surrender. Tyrion also helps his brother Jaime escape from Daenerys’s ranks and rejoin his sister Cersei inside the palace of the Iron Throne -- for which Daenerys captures him and threatens to have him executed.

Daenerys’s character arc is in some ways the most interesting of all Game of Thrones’ plot lines. I wonder if Martin, Benioff and Weiss (as is well known, Martin found himself blocked on the last two books that were supposed to finish the cycle so Benioff and Weiss had to concoct their own ending) were thinking along the lines of Sergei Eisenstein’s two-part film Ivan the Terrible here, since like Ivan, Daenerys begins as an appealing and even sympathetic character -- we give her big points for fleeing the enslaved races across the sea from Westeros and smashing the merchant classes that profited from slavery, both by making money from the slave trade and the labor of the slaves themseives. But we gradually lose our respect for her as she slowly but steadily turns into a bloodthirsty egomaniac, determined to exterminate every member of every race who opposed her and, at the end of her plotline, threatening to unleash a world war and annihilate whole races to “liberate” the rest of humanity.

Her final turning point comes when she hears the rulers of King’s Landing ring the bells and signal their willingness to surrender -- and ignores it, continuing the attack and utterly destroying the city. In these scenes Daenerys comes off less like a figure of medieval history or fiction (with a few exceptions -- notably Vlad the Impaler, the notorious Romanian warlord of the 15th century who executed 100,000 people and was the real-life prototype for the character of Dracula -- medieval warriors didn’t go in for genocide because they were more interested in keeping their former enemies alive and exploiting their labor power than killing them) than a 20th century dictator.

It was the 20th century that generated national leaders on both the Left and the Right (Lenin, Stalin and Mao on the Left, Mussolini and Hitler on the Right) who proclaimed the desire to “liberate” or “purify” humanity by annihilating large numbers of actually existing people (though when I read the Radu Florescu-Raymond McNally book In Search of Dracula it occurred to me that the only difference between Vlad’s 100,000 victims and Hitler’s six million was that Hitler had access to modern technology to create a more efficient killing machine).

And the war as depicted in “The Bells” is an odd mix between medieval hand-to-hand combat and a 20th century air war in which, like both sides in World War II, Daenerys and her forces (including her dragon) lead an incendiary attack that the Lannisters have no way to defend against. They had previously invented an anti-aircraft weapon variously called the “Ballista” or the “Scorpion” and essentially a giant crossbow. It had killed one of her dragons, but this time around Daenerys was able to burn out these weapons with her dragon’s fiery breath before any could shoot a projectile.

The ending of “The Bells” seems to set Daenerys up as the winner of the whole contest for the Iron Throne that was the overall concept of Game of Thrones. She’s annihilated her enemies (Jaime and Cersei Lannister were killed when the roof of the throne room in the palace collapsed on top of them as a result of Daenerys’s air attack). In its fusion of medieval and 20th century warfare, “The Bells” reminded me of Norman Spinrad’s book The Iron Dream, a 1972 novel he wrote to expose the essentially fascist politics he saw in sword-and-sorcery fiction in general and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in particular.

I first heard of The Iron Dream in 1971 from a recorded interview with Norman Spinrad, given after he’d written the book but before he got it published. I was struck by the audacity of the concept -- at once a sword-and-sorcery parody called The Lord of the Swastika and a counter-factual history in which Adolf Hitler fled Germany in 1919 after the end of the “Great War” (what World War I was usually called before there was a World War II), settled in the U.S., got work as an illustrator for science-fiction pulp magazines and then, once he’d learned enough English, began writing for them.

The main portion of The Iron Dream is the text of Hitler’s final novel, finished just before he died of syphilis in 1953, and though it takes place in the 20th century and doesn’t feature supernatural elements, the odd mix of modern-looking warfare and hand-to-hand battles Spinrad put into his counter-factual “Hitler”’s novel reappears in “The Bells.” (For more information on The Iron Dream, watch or listen to the podcast I did on it with my long-time friend David Agranoff and two other friends of his, David Woken and Anthony Trevino, on David Agranoff’s show, https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodcast/dick-adjacent-9-the-iron-dream.)

After the city of King’s Landing is destroyed by carnage in “The Bells,” with scenes of innocent King’s Landing residents fleeing from the airborne attack in ways that look like newsreels of World War II, Daenerys Targeryan appears at the start of the last episode, “The Iron Throne,” as the apparent victor in the wars of succession. She announces her intention to lead a war of conquest against the entire rest of the world -- reminiscent not only of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible but also the end of Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays -- part of his eight-play cycle which the BBC adapted into a 15-part miniseries in 1960 called An Age of Kings that was sort of the Game of Thrones of its time (and ‘broke” two actors who later became stars, Sean Connery and Judi Dench).

Shakespeare had written Henry V, Henry IV’s son and heir, as a noble character leading the English in a justified war to conquer France; Welles tweaked the ending to depict him as a proto-Hitler, using visual quotes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will to tap us on our shoulders and tell us, “He’s not a good guy after all. He’s an imperialist asshole trying to impose his will on other countries and not caring how many people he has to kill to do it.” Likewise Daenerys’s call to world war at the start of “The Iron Throne” establishes definitively that of the two sides of her character we’ve seen -- the one who’s freed slaves and broken the power of the merchant classes, and the loyalty-obsessed megalomaniac who kills people at the slightest provocation -- her evil side has won out and she needs to be stopped.

She is -- by Jon Snow, who in the later episodes was revealed as the true heir (or at least one potential true heir) to the Iron Throne, not a Stark bastard after all but a descendant of the royal line and a relative to Daenerys, either her half-brother or her nephew -- which doesn’t stop Daenerys from wanting him as either her prince consort or her boy-toy, (At this point I joked, “Is there something in the charter of Westeros that says it always has to be ruled by an incestuous couple?”) Instead, in an episode co-producers Benioff and Weiss directed themselves, they follow Alfred Hitchcock’s suggestion that directors should stage murders like love scenes and love scenes like murders, Snow embraces Daenerys and then stabs her to death with a dagger.

This plunges the remaining dramatis personae into a succession crisis as well as the question of what to do with Jon Snow. The leader of the “Unsullied,” castrated slave warriors totally loyal to Daenerys because she freed them, wants him executed on the spot. The other people left in what remains of Westeros’s political class want him freed because they regard Daenerys’ killing as justified because it prevented a genocidal world war. Daenerys’s dragon turns its head towards Jon and it looks for a moment like it’s going to execute him by breathing fire on him. Instead, the dragon turns its head to the Iron Throne itself and uses its fiery breath to melt the thing, thereby symbolically destroying the power all these people have been lusting after, and then flies away, apparently to perish from the loss of its master much the way the dragons in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels die once their human partners are killed.

“The Iron Throne” -- the episode -- ends with a council of the remaining contestants for power in Westeros to decide who is going to rule and how future rulers will be selected. Samwell Tarly (Jon Bradley) actually suggests that all the people in Westeros should have a chance to vote for their next king or queen -- which suggests that his years training to be a “maister” (essentially Westeros’s intellectual class) he had encountered books describing the ancient Greek democracy and the Roman republic, so assuming that Westeros is in the medieval part of human history the idea of people more or less self-governing isn’t as totally outlandish as the other characters say it is. Instead Samwell gets ridiculed and said that if you allow ordinary people to vote on their rulers, next you’ll be demanding that dogs and horses also get to vote -- an ironic anticipation of Donald Trump’s argument that one reason mail ballots were inherently corrupt is they’d be sent to dogs.

Eventually the consensus of the remaining people in Westeros’s 1 percent is to turn it into an elective monarchy like historic Poland’s -- or, for that matter, what Alexander Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be and we would have become if Hamilton had won the biggest battle he lost at the Constitutional Convention. He had wanted the President to be elected for life -- and he lost that one mainly because George Washington, whom everyone at the convention assumed would be the first President, wanted fixed terms so he could periodically decide whether he still wanted the job or not. (I joked that Samwell may not have got democracy, but he did get the Electoral College.)

And for the first ruler under Westeros’s new system they pick an out-of-left-field choice: Bronn (Isaac Hempstead Wright), a.k.a. Brandon Stark, who was a child in the first season when he scaled a castle tower and caught Jaime and Cersei Lannister in flagrante delicto. For this he was given a back-handed slap and knocked out of the tower’s open window, from which he fell onto the ground below but ended up crippled instead of killed. He got trundled around the forest by a woman caregiver and encountered the spirit of one of the ancient gods that was part of a tree, and learned from this to summon wolves and ally with a “three-eyed raven” that gave him clairvoyance. (Charles said Bronn’s character arc reminded him of Paul Atreides, the protagonist of Frank Herbert’s Dune.)

Most of the opposition to the ending of Game of Thrones seems to have come about from people who couldn’t believe that the survivors of the mayhem we’d been watching over the series’ eight-year run (actually nine years because it took a hiatus between 2017 and 2019) would suddenly sit around a peace table and at least metaphorically sing “Kumbaya.” Certainly there were some clunky moments in the final episode, especially dealing with the fate of the North and the last two survivors of the Stark family, Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maisie Williams).

In the end the North declares itself a separate kingdom -- or, rather, queendom, since Sansa Stark is given its throne -- so it’s now just the “Six Kingdoms of Westeros” instead of the Seven Kingdoms -- and Jon is exiled back to the Night’s Watch, where he was sent during the first season only to escape when he couldn’t keep the vow of celibacy it imposed. It reminded me of the last line in Anna Russell’s parody of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, in which she noted that after the world of gods, giants and heroes was destroyed first by fire and then by flood, the Rhinemaidens return and recover the ring that was made out of their Rheingold and “you’re right back where you started 20 hours ago!”

But what a lot of viewers seemed to have regarded as a negation of the central premise of Game of Thrones struck me as a hopeful, beautiful and moving conclusion to the cycle: after the horrors of war as so grimly presented in “The Bells,” the finale is an assertion of peace, love and basic human decency. Certainly we can wonder just how long the modus vivendi is going to last before the various Westerosians rise up and start killing each other off for power again, but I found the ending a glorious affirmation of common, shared humanity in much the way the finale of Wagner’s Ring suggests that the world of gods, giants and heroes had to die so a new humanity could be reborn out of love.

And just as the bulk of Game of Thrones seemed to reflect the Zeitgeist of the Trump administration -- the hunger for power at all costs, the disregard of any shred of human decency, the insane tests of “loyalty” inflicted by the rulers on their courts (particularly Daenerys, who in her willingness to dispatch anyone who so much as hint at another point of view definitely seemed Trumpian) and the cost in human lives of all these battles for power -- the ending seemed to anticipate the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election and what we hope will be the Zeitgeist of the Biden administration.

Oddly, in American reality the restoration of decency and basic competence to the government has happened through the election of a 70-something political veteran, while in Game of Thrones it comes through the elevation of a young and uncorrupted innocence. If Game of Thrones had turned out like recent American politics the final king would have been Stannis Baratheon, brother of the old king whose death kicked off the power struggle in the first place, but who lost a major battle and got killed midway through the run. But the sense of shadows lifting over the country and the beginning of a new age comes strongly through both the end of Game of Thrones and the real outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.

This is why, as I noted at the beginning of this post, I was glad Charles and I didn’t watch the last two episodes of Game of Thrones until after the election happened and its outcome became known. With the prospect of four more years of Donald Trump -- who, as I’ve noted before, would have fitted quite comfortably into the world of Game of Thrones except for his total lack of physical courage -- hovering over us I don’t think I would have seen this ending in quite the same way as I do now, with Trump on his way out and a person who, for all his flaws, is a decent human being who responds to tragedy and crisis in appropriate human ways on his way in.