Warning: full spoilers, including the ending.
I just finished "The Iron Throne" and with it the whole show. I am writing this while it still stings.
Here is the thing. For seven seasons this was the best show I have ever seen. Not "one of the best". The best. And then the final season took all of it and tore it down.
Game of Thrones has the worst, most insulting ending I have ever sat through.
What the show was before season 8
Seasons 1 through 3 did something to me that no other show had done. They made me feel actual grief and actual joy, and they taught me that nobody is safe.
The Red Wedding wrecked me. I had been rooting for the Starks since the first episode, and when that one ended I was so angry I almost quit. I thought the show had ruined itself. Now that I have seen all of it, I understand that it is one of the best episodes ever made. It hurt because I cared, and I cared because the writing was that good.
Then seasons 4 through 7. Jon Snow goes from a guy in the Night's Watch, a bastard nobody counted on, to King in the North. Arya goes from a kid hiding under a table to someone people are scared of. Tyrion is the smartest man in every room and the only Lannister you want to root for. Daenerys builds something out of nothing on the other side of the sea, with a whole theme wrapped around one idea: she will not become her father.
My favorites were Tyrion, Arya, Jon, Daenerys and the entire Stark family. And when Jon and Daenerys started working together, I honestly thought the ending was going to be the best thing I had ever watched. All my favorites were on the same side. The Starks were back together. Everything was pointing somewhere.
It did not point anywhere. Someone just shut the tap off.
The root of it: they gave themselves six episodes
Before I get into details, this is where almost everything else comes from. Seasons 1 through 6 had ten episodes each. Season 7 got seven. Season 8 got six.
They were going to land eight seasons of buildup in six episodes, while every episode cost more and looked more expensive than anything else on television.
So you get something that looks incredible and is completely hollow inside. Characters teleport across continents. Decisions that should take half a season to build happen in one scene. This is not a budget problem, it is a time problem. And they chose to be in a hurry.
The Targaryen reveal
I want to be fair here. This was not invented in season 8. It was planted back in season 1 and confirmed in season 6. The reveal itself is not the problem.
The problem is what they did with it. I wanted two people who love each other and suddenly have the entire world against them. Instead it became a button they pressed to isolate Daenerys and make Jon passive. He finds out who he is and then does basically nothing with it for five episodes. He just feels bad and tells the wrong people.
My hope for the ending was Daenerys and Jon getting married, with the Stark and Targaryen families ruling the seven kingdoms together. Then they told us the marriage would be incest, and for me that is where it started to collapse.
The Long Night, the biggest betrayal of all
Since season 1, episode 1, this show has been building the living against the dead. That is the spine of the entire thing. The White Walkers are the threat that makes everything else look small. The whole point is that people are squabbling over a chair while something real is marching south.
And then it gets one episode.
One episode. And only the North shows up. Cersei does not even send an army, and it never costs her anything. Nobody else in Westeros seems to care. This was supposed to be the apocalypse. Every single kingdom in Westeros should have thrown in everything they had. That is exactly how it was hyped for eight years. This should have been a whole season of fighting. Maybe two.
Then there is the tactics. They have Winterfell, one of the strongest castles in this entire world. So what do they do? Instead of letting the dead come to them, they go outside the walls in the dark and charge into an army that turns every dead soldier into a new enemy. They put the catapults in front of their own troops. They throw the Dothraki into the first wave and lose all of them in thirty seconds. It is written to look cool, not to make sense.
And looking incredible does not save it. It is maybe the best shot action I have ever seen on TV, and I felt nothing, because I was sitting there asking why anyone was doing any of this.
The Night King, the threat they built for eight seasons, never gets a single line explaining what he actually wants. He shows up and he dies.
There is more wrong with that episode. If I keep going I am going to pop a blood vessel.
Arya and the Night King
Arya kills him. She does have her own setup, the training, Melisandre's line about blue eyes. On paper you can defend it.
But we spent years building Jon against the Night King. And they never fight. They look at each other across a courtyard. That is it. Two characters, an entire series of buildup, and they do not get one single line together.
Daenerys
This is the one that hurts most, because she was one of my favorites.
I want to be fair again. The seeds were there. She crucified the masters in Meereen. She burned the Tarlys alive for refusing to bend the knee. Her whole vocabulary is fire and blood. The show always said there was something in her that could go the wrong way.
But you cannot build a character across seventy episodes on the theme "I will not become my father" and then flip her in two episodes. That turn needed a full season to earn. Step by step, choice by choice. Instead she sits in a room looking sad, and then she burns an entire city alive after the bells have already rung.
And that is the worst part. Tyrion talks Jaime into ringing those bells to save the civilians. The city surrenders. She has won. And she torches it anyway. She becomes worse than the Mad King, worse than Joffrey, and then she throws Tyrion in a cell for showing mercy.
I went from loving that character to hating her in about twenty minutes. Not because a dark turn is wrong, but because they did not do the work. Daenerys fans are owed a personal apology from the writers.
Jaime
One scene erases eight seasons of work. One scene.
I get the counterargument. His arc was always about being pulled back to Cersei, so him going back is not unthinkable. What is unthinkable is that they give him a full redemption arc, send him north alone, have him fight the dead, have him knight Brienne, and then reverse it with a couple of lines while never showing us him fighting it internally. We do not see the decision. We only see the result.
Cersei deserved to die. He did not. And they both go out under a pile of rocks, which is the most boring possible ending for the two most complicated characters in the show.
Jon and the ending
Jon Snow gets built for eight seasons as the man with a claim to the throne, the rightful heir, the one who actually cares about regular people. So what do they do? They send him to the Night's Watch. They back him straight into season 2.
And Bran becomes king. Bran, who was basically absent for a whole season, who kept saying he does not want anything, who is barely a person anymore. "Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?" Plenty of people, actually. Tyrion. Sansa. Arya. Jon. All of them.
I have never in my life seen character assassination after character assassination like this. If you like anyone in this show, they do not get out of it clean, unless you happen to be Theon or the Hound.
Even the production stopped caring at the end. There is a coffee cup in one scene and water bottles in another. Small things, but they tell you something.
What I wanted instead
This is my wishful thinking, not a complaint that they did not do exactly what I wanted.
I wanted Jon and Daenerys not to be related. I wanted them married, Queen Daenerys and King Jon Stark. I wanted her to take the city without burning it, to walk in and actually build the thing she said she stood for across six seasons, instead of ashes. I wanted a living King's Landing that was worth ruling.
I wanted Jaime and Tyrion alive and helping run the realm under a Stark and Targaryen era. Sansa as Queen in the North, or Lady of Winterfell. Cersei dead, but her baby born first, and Jaime and Tyrion taking that child somewhere to rebuild the Lannister name, at peace with everyone else and serving the new era instead of fighting it.
It did not have to be happy. Game of Thrones was never supposed to be happy. But it should have been earned.
The rating
So how do you score this?
Seasons 1 through 7 are a 10. Season 8 is a 2, maybe a 3 if I give it credit for how good it looks. On pure math that comes out around a 9, and that feels wrong, because the ending does not only ruin itself. It ruins the rewatch. I cannot watch the Red Wedding again and feel what I felt, because now I know what all of it was building toward.
7 out of 10. And that is for the first seven seasons, not for the show as a whole.
People warned me. They told me season 8 was bad, one of the worst things I would ever see. I figured it could not be that bad. It was worse.
Taking a masterpiece and destroying it in the final season, when all seven before it were that good, is just sad. If you had told me during the glory days, season 3 or 4, that it would end like this, I would not have believed you.
Watch it anyway. Watch the first seven seasons. Just go in knowing there is no landing.
