What Is Dead May Never Die

Game of Thrones

Season 8

starring Lena Headey, Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, John Bradley, Gwendoline Christie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Liam Cunningham, Rory McCann, Pilou Asbæk, Joe Dempsie, Kristofer Hivju, Nathalie Emmanuel, Hannah Murray, Jacob Anderson, Conleth Hill, Alfie Allen, Iain Glen, Carice van Houten, Richard Dormer, Vladimir Furdik, Ben Crompton, Bella Ramsey and Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson

created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss

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If you haven't watched this already and prefer to not know what happens, I invite you kindly now, in the gentlest possible terms, to, with all humility, fuck all the way off. NO SECRETS WILL BE SPARED. I haven't gotten this far playing coy and I'm not about to start for the likes of you, fussy-britches.

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I know, there's been a lot of pop culture review here as of late, and a couple of them have already been about Game of Thrones. Maybe for you it's starting to get repetitive. For me it means I didn't have to type out that long-ass "starring" list again from scratch.

The earlier review of "The Long Night," episode 3 of this 6 episode abbreviated season, was the first writing I've done about GoT directly I think. It's been mentioned a zillion times as a reference or punchline on the blog, which I would expect given it has been my favorite television show of all time, which at this point is saying something. TV and I go way back to when new episodes of Barney Miller were still airing. So the surprising thing isn't that I'm writing about it a lot now, it's that his hasn't been an all-Thrones all-the-time blog at any point during its existence. Of course it's had to compete with me generating very serious and important content about... uh, other TV shows...

The reason I feel compelled to dig into it here is a couple of things: first of all, it's over. I'm the guy who in graduate school had nothing to say during the weekly seminar discussions as we worked through some impenetrable text by probably a French person talking about historical methodology and Lyonnais silk weavers or whatever the fuck because I wasn't done with the book. How was I supposed to understand a thing if I didn't have all the information yet? I'm the tiresome asshole who DOESN'T WANT TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MOVIE WE'RE WATCHING because I've seen exactly as much as you have. Of course I don't understand it either, we haven't gotten through the goddamned thing yet. Sometimes you have to know a thing in its entirety before you can decide if it was bullshit or not, like Christopher Nolan's Memento, for example, which turned out to be very good. And other times you reserve judgment only to have your creeping doubts confirmed in the worst way, which I like to call the Star Wars Prequels Dilemma. Yes, we see what you were trying to do, George, but then you made the mistake of trying to actually accomplish it...

Whether or not Game of Thrones ended up being what it promised I've covered to some extent as I've said, so I'm not going to belabor this too much. And neither am I going to take on the series as a whole, because the only result there would be me kicking myself afterward for all the things I forgot to consider and left out. That depth of self-immolation I've learned to avoid as I've gotten older. I'm not sure if it's wisdom or just the equivalent of the rat learning not to hit the laboratory lever that delivers the electric shock, but either way I've decided it's progress. That brings me to the second reason why I've decided to take this up at all: everyone else sucks. The online vitriol against it has been... well, it's been online vitriol, so it's as predictable as a tornado in a trailer park.

Do I think it ended well? I think it ended fine. Do I think it was a bit rushed? Sure, but look, episode 3 alone took two months to film and cost all of the moneys. I get why a limited number of basically full length feature films makes sense. I wanted more, but I was always going to want more. A show that's been this deliberately paced for eight seasons was always going to be a bit vertigo-inducing as all the disparate bits got drawn toward the tighter and tighter spiral of the whirlpool's vanishing point at its center.

I will say that for a show that's forced tears out of my head as much as this one has, a function of both its quality and my aging into sentimental middle age over its run, I took in the finale with very little reaction. The dies had all been cast, to the point where a knife in the heart of a central character shoved there by arguably the other central character felt more like a point (ha) of inevitability than the shock of betrayal or even drama. As the last streams of blood trailed out of the mouth and nose of Daenerys Stormborn, I realized that what I was watching was epilogue. The story had ended for me already. Not my interest or even my investment, but my ability to relax into the scattered unknowing of it, the unnerving doubt that was the raison d'être of the entire project famously crystallized with the execution of Ned Stark on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor way back in season 1.

At first I thought it had spent its chaotic energy in season 8 episode 5, when the bells rang, and Daenerys atop her embarrassingly named dragon Drogon decided, in violation of several of her stated and demonstrated motivations as a character, went full Airborne Stalin and did a bunch of purging of innocents with fire and blood. Jon stabbing her through the heart later, well, all you could kinda do was nod.

But the more I think about it, the more I think the sharpness of my attachment to the narrative eddys of the show was probably dulled in episode 10 of season 6, "The Winds of Winter" when the same Great Sept of Baelor that gave us the trademark GoT uncertainty about any character's fate also took it away when Cersei Lannister blew the whole thing up along with a good six to eight running subplots, all in one big showy flash of green wildfire. Well beyond the scope of the source material books already, I think it was there that the characters making their run to the end all donned uncharacteristic plot armor that would shield them through most, if not all, of the final season. From then on, it stopped being a show about humans and the tragic mess of their possibilities and about a meta-narrative positioning characters physically and emotionally to serve a predetermined resolution. If there's an ache or a letdown in seasons 7 and 8, for me at least it's that, the death of the immediacy provided by the immediacy of (possible) death. But the six full seasons to that point I'd still put up against any other 60 episodes of television, confidently.

This is not to say I thought seasons 7 and 8 were by any stretch "bad" or "unwatchable" or "an abortion" anything else the petition-signing dipshit outrage brigade want to say about them. Yeah, Bran becoming king was kind of stupid, but I realized after the fact that no answer was going to appease me. The rest of it made sense of a sort, to me at least, so whichever schmuck got stuck sitting in this long-ass game of whatever is the opposite of musical chairs would be was, as I said, epilogue. The story had been told by then and this was all just a bunch of people I recognize struggling to help each other remember something that hadn't happened yet.

People of course know the books remain unresolved and they want to know: but what will the real ending be? For me, the only honest answer is: who gives a shit? Not that it won't be interesting or of use to book readers, it's just that it will be a thing divorced from this thing, this show, my show. The show ending is the show ending. It will deviate from the book canon in some crucial ways, I have no doubt, but the show ended with the finality suggested in the word "finale." It's over now, never to be revised. And I shall never see its like again.

At least until Sunday when I watch the whole season again with a friend who doesn't have HBO but doesn't want to watch it alone. If I change my mind and decide it's all bullshit after all, well, I'll have another 1,500 words for you about that next Thursday.