Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 6 Recap: The Most Polarizing Finale...Ever?

The real finale was the dragons we found along the way.
film still of battle scene

If you missed GQ's recap of the season's penultimate episode, click here before reading below.

The first thing the Game of Thrones series finale gives you is darkness. After the credits, before the episode begins, there’s a pause where the viewer is invited to sit and contemplate the blackness as the sounds of chaos fill the soundtrack.

It’s the aftermath of Daenerys’s deadly attack on King’s Landing, and when the image fades in, it’s Tyrion Lannister, walking the ash-filled streets and contemplating his own role in the fiery massacre.

Mostly, he does it silently. The first act of the Game of Thrones series finale is filled with powerful images, trusting the weight of the visuals and the music to carry the sense of shock and grief. The cracked bell that should have marked the end of the war. The ruined floor map of Westeros that stands as a mocking reminder of Cersei’s failure to hold the country together. Tyrion, still wearing the iron hand of his queen, discovering the golden hand of his dead brother in a pile of rubble. Jon, nearly coming to blows with Grey Worm, on the same streets where a fight between Ned Stark and Jaime Lannister set the stage for the political struggle that defined the series. A Targaryen banner hanging limply on a half-collapsed wall, simultaneously triumphant and horrifying and pathetic.

These are powerful moments. They are also wordless or near-wordless moments. At this point in the series, it’s pretty clear where everybody stands, and what Daenerys’s success or failure will mean for the future of Westeros. Game of Thrones has spent the entirety of its final season making sure we understand those stakes. You could probably do this whole episode in mime without anyone getting too confused.

But after that strong opening, the Game of Thrones finale falls back on the show’s old habit of laborious, wheel-spinning conversation. The finale first started to lose me when Jon visited the captive Tyrion, sparking a conversation so long and repetitive that it felt like it was going to continue until the credits rolled. As Tyrion told Jon, for the fourth time, that Daenerys’s once-good intentions had been thoroughly corrupted—and Jon told Tyrion, for the fourth time, that Daenerys was still his queen anyway—I started to wonder why a show as complicated as Game of Thrones doesn’t even trust its audience to follow the argument in a single scene.

I suspect the answer is a variation on the same thing that has made Game of Thrones’s final season so polarizing: This show, which used to be so dense and complicated, has whittled itself down to a series of easily digestible parts. The remaining characters tend to have a single belief or personality trait they hammer over and over. The strategy that characterized the show’s earlier military battles has been replaced by logic-defying spectacle, where ships and ballistas are impossible to destroy until they’re not. And the formerly sprawling political alliances have turned into a few distinct rounds of Us vs. Them, in which it’s extremely clear which side our sympathies are supposed to be landing on.

Of course, the final season has given us one big exception. Last week’s episode alienated some viewers in a totally different way by turning Daenerys Targaryen into the show’s final villain. Whether this felt like an out-of-nowhere twist or something the show had been setting up for years was largely up to the viewer—I’m somewhere in the middle, but I’ve read convincing arguments on both sides—but however you felt about it, it was safe to assume that dispatching Daenerys would be Game of Thrones’s endgame.


But before we get into how Game of Thrones actually did it, I want to pause and think about how—for a brief moment—this storyline looks exactly like the Game of Thrones of old. It’s easy to imagine a different, longer version of this story—one that treats Daenerys’s rise to power not as an ending, but as the midpoint of the story, with the surviving characters striking reluctant alliances or plotting secret coups against an increasingly tyrannical Targaryen queen. (At the very least, I can’t wait to read the events of the final two episodes in George R.R. Martin’s novels, which use character point-of-view chapters to cover the same incidents from a variety of perspectives, and which will almost certainly stretch this out longer.)

But HBO’s Game of Thrones is out of time, which means that Daenerys needed to be dispatched as efficiently as possible, before the show can even hint at what the country might look like with Daenerys on the Iron Throne. And so Game of Thrones—having flirted with the possibility of another complicated civil war in Westeros—just makes Daenerys erratic and stupid so she can be killed as cleanly and efficiently as the story requires.

To be fair, her fatal mistake comes in the form of her big weakness: Her nephew-lover Jon Snow. But what a mistake it is. With the Iron Throne literally in her grasp, Daenerys ignores the fact that her nephew (1) still has a better claim to the throne than she does; (2) emphatically rejected any further romantic overtures; (3) was clearly horrified by that dragon attack; (4) just had a suspiciously long and private conversation with Tyrion in prison; and (5) was the person she most suspected of betraying her just a single episode ago.

Any one of those things would be a good reason to meet Jon in a public place, or at least keep a couple of Unsullied soldiers nearby. Instead, Daenerys chooses the worst possible moment to drop her (incredibly justified) paranoid streak, drawing Jon so close that he can literally stick a knife in her. He does, and she dies, and Drogon mourns by destroying the Iron Throne with a burst of dragonfire, because he understands symbolism.

This is all rushed, and maybe a little undercooked, but there’s also plenty to admire about it. The staging of the Iron Throne in the ruined, ash-filled hall of the Red Keep is incredibly striking. Emilia Clarke, who has always been one of Game of Thrones’s best actors, finds the tragedy and the pathos in Daenerys’s last moments; Kit Harington, who has not always been one of Game of Thrones’s best actors, makes Jon’s betrayal as reluctant and heart-wrenching as it needs to be.


But all of that was all inevitable as soon as Daenerys broke bad. The real question that interested me—and the question that turns out to have the most disappointing answer—is what comes after Daenerys is killed.

There’s a famous George R.R. Martin anecdote about how part of the inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire was his skepticism over the ending of Lord of the Rings, when Tolkien hand-waves over the complicated question of how orcs would be treated in the aftermath of the war. But Game of Thrones ends up running into a similar problem. Daenerys is not the Night King. When she died, she left a massive army of loyal, rowdy followers behind. How did they respond to her assassination? By…taking Jon prisoner and then leaving Westeros without seeking revenge or even really holding anyone accountable, so don’t worry about it. What happened to Drogon? He flew away…somewhere. He probably won’t cruise around lighting people on fire, so don’t worry about it.

It’s no fun being a stickler. I’m certainly not immune to the joys of a fan-pleasing ending, and I certainly never expected Game of Thrones to answer every question on its way out the door. But I’m interested in some of these very pragmatic questions because Game of Thrones used to be so interested in them. In the end, there’s something frustrating about seeing a show that was once so obsessed with consequences decide to sweep most of them under the rug.

But this hasn’t been that show for a few seasons now. Much as with the Night King, the terrible reign of the Mad Queen Targaryen turns out to be mercifully brief, with basically no consequences. And in place of a tyrant or a violent uprising from Daenerys loyalists, we get a small council of fan favorites whom everyone, for whatever reason, peacefully agrees to accept.

This is where pretty much everybody left alive gets a happy ending. Bran Stark, who shares none of the flaws of Westeros’s previous rulers, is named king at Tyrion’s suggestion—an unlikely but acceptable choice (even if it should have been Sansa). Tyrion was a disastrous Queen’s Hand, but Bran knows literally everything and picked him for the job, so I’m sure he’ll do just fine. Brienne is an ideal choice for Lord Commander of the Kingsguard (even if the show makes her too focused on Jaime’s deeds at the expense of her own arc). Bronn and Davos are there too, because we like them. And Samwell Tarly, the story’s George R.R. Martin surrogate, finally goes full George R.R. Martin and shows up with a book called A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s incredibly corny and lame, and it still made me smile a little because, come on, I’m only human.

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And then there are the three remaining Stark children, who ultimately emerged as the protagonists of the show. Sansa stumps for independence and ends up as the Queen in the North. Arya sails off to parts unknown (and into her own spinoff?). And Jon, who once seemed the likeliest candidate for the Iron Throne, avoids execution by going back up to the Wall.

This is all handled with a fair amount of sentiment, and much of it is clunky. (I get that Game of Thrones wants to reference its own history, but come on, Sansa deserves higher parting praise from Jon than the lofty title of "Ned Stark’s daughter.") But it also gives Game of Thrones a chance to say goodbye to these characters with the warmth and fanfare that was denied to so many characters on the bloodier, more ruthless TV series this used to be. For the creative team that spent so long on this story—and, I suspect, for many fans—that’ll be more than enough.

But if the finale offers emotional closure, it also raises questions. How would Bran and his council of misfits heal a wounded people and rebuild a shattered country? How would Sansa fare as the Queen in the North? What will Arya find in the lands west of Westeros? With the White Walkers eliminated and the wildlings on his side, what else will Jon discover beyond the Wall?

There is almost always too much emphasis placed on how a TV show ends. But Game of Thrones was always at its best when its world felt impossibly big, with an endless array of characters and stories to explore in the show’s rich history and wide-open future.

Honestly: I didn’t particularly like this ending, which felt like a too-neat bow wrapped around a series that was at its most enthralling when it was strange and ambitious and messy. But Game of Thrones is at least wise enough to close with the implication that all of this is just one chapter in a much greater story, stretching endlessly in both directions, and that’s truer to the spirit of this story than any "ending" could have been.