How good is the Game of Thrones finale?
HBOAfter the penultimate episode left many fans disappointed, how good is the final part of the hit TV series? Hugh Montgomery delivers his verdict.
Warning: contains spoilers about the final episode of series 8.
One day, a prestige HBO drama will likely be made out of the momentous fall-out from last week’s penultimate Game of Thrones episode. After fans expressed growing discontent with the show, the decision to have Daenerys torch the whole of King’s Landing and its citizens with dragon fire finally blew the roof off the whole enterprise for many – only for others to fire back that these grumblers were wilful killjoys who should accept what was, in their eyes, a perfectly reasonable plot twist. Since last Sunday, the argument on social media has not let up.
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For what it’s worth, I think the events of last week were ruinous, in more ways than one – and it’s also worth emphasising that most of us who moaned about Daenerys’ wholesale transformation into the Mad Queen never thought of her as ‘good’ or expected her to be an upstanding ruler of the Seven Kingdoms – far from it. It’s just that pushing her into committing unprompted mass genocide seemed both a touch extreme and rather too obvious – a clunking privileging of plot over character. But I accept that there is a point at which one’s grievance also becomes excessive, even as a critic.
Which is why, in reviewing this week’s finale, I have vowed to try and be as even-handed as possible. To swallow my objections, take what has happened as read, and see if the ending can satisfy on the the creators have now set out. And, largely, it does – beginning with a remarkable, wordless opening sequence in which Tyrion wanders through the ashen remains of the citadel, surveying the wreckage, and the charred bodies. Saturated in grey, the scene eerily evokes a nuclear holocaust – and it is a terrible and powerful irony, of course, that after eight series of fear around the Night King bringing winter to Westeros, in the end, with ash falling like snow, it is human misdeed that should create that seasonal effect in the hitherto sunny King’s Landing.
It seemed likely that, for all the committed cynicism of the show’s worldview, in the final reckoning it would not allow the instigator of such a cataclysm to go unpunished – and so it proves. In a Nuremberg rally-like address to her armies, our self-righteous tyrant Dany suggests her whiffy ‘liberating’ mission is far from over, while kitted out in a fetching but distinctly fascistic black leather ensemble. Then she gets what’s coming to her.