There have been many good shows ruined by a shoddy finale, but few (if any) compare to Game of Thrones.
The ire that surrounded Thrones’ final season and its perceived drop in quality has been compared, endlessly, to shows such as Dexter, Lost and The Sopranos, although none of them hold a candle to the particular brand of chaos and contempt that Thrones managed to conjure.
But now, exactly one year on from the HBO epic’s final ending, we must finally accept the truth. No show has ever pulled off a finale more disastrous than Game of Thrones, and no show has ever – ever – seen its cultural footprint erased quicker either.
It’s hard to even imagine that when 2019 began, appetite for the return of Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage). Sure, the seventh season had seen a slight drop in quality and bizarre story choices (why, exactly do seven men storm into the land of ice zombies again? Please?) but this was going to be a supercharged season of Game of Thrones. Six blockbuster episodes, in and out. No problem.
There are many reasons why this eighth and final season was a distinct, total failure and we’re sure many, many books will be written on the finer, succinct points for time immemorial. But, to put it bluntly, this is what happens when writers don’t write well in an effort to land this dragon as quickly and pain-free as possible.
Much of the blame for Thrones’ crash and burn has been put at the feet of creators and showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, and for once the internet has come to a sensible conclusion. Everything else about season eight – the performances, the design, the effects – were firing on all cylinders for their lap of glory. But the writing was DOA.
Characters marvelled for their intelligence – Tyrion, Varys – became remarkably stupid. The Big Bad of the series – the Night King – was dispatched with alarming ease in a world-ending battle where precisely one major character died. Cersei Lannister decided to take time out of her busy schedule to sip wine on a balcony and never return. Daernerys Targayren turned into Hitler.
Thrones had, by its last series, passed the material of its source novels and then some (the final two instalments of George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series are still yet to be published) and all the intricacy and nimble characterisation that brought the show into the international spotlight in its brilliant earlier seasons seemed to have evaporated by dragon fire on its home-run.
We could write 5,000 words on why this season was so bad – the rushed path to a clearly pre-determined ending, the suspension of the world’s realism in order to get people where they needed to be, the inability to write female characters without turning them into a tyrannical villain or a femme fatale – but we don’t want to upset you, or ourselves.
It now doesn’t matter why Game of Thrones’ final run of episodes was so bad, because the damage has been done. It has happened and it can’t be reversed. The legacy of Game of Thrones has been ruined, irrevocably, forever.
Look online, now, and you’ll find that the show’s cultural footprint has almost disappeared.
It’s estimated that almost 20 million viewers tuned into The Iron Throne when it aired in the US on 19 May 2019. That’s just above 16% of that country’s entire population. It was the most popular show of the decade, if not the most popular TV show to exist in modern times, and we won’t see anything to rival it again any time soon.
But, just look around on the internet today, search for Game of Thrones. Whereas, at any other given time, you will find people still tweeting about The Big Bang Theory or Friends, commentary of Thrones has ground to a halt after its disastrous ending. It was such a sudden and complete grind to a halt, we think it’s given every single viewer emotional whiplash.
No one is talking about Game of Thrones, because no one wants to talk about Game of Thrones. At any time in the past 12 months have you fancied a re-watch of the show? To once again experience the shocking death of Ned Stark, the battle of Blackwater Bay and Cersei’s destruction of the Sept of Baelor in all their glory? Have you talked yourself out of it because you know if you do that, you’ll have to once again watch season eight?
And, really, who can blame you? You invested so much in that show. You watched every episode live, without fail, since it debuted (or when people started to rave about it to you – it’s like fantasy, but for normal people!) You followed all the cast on Instagram. You bought all the books. You tweeted so, so many memes of Daenerys shouting ‘Dracarys!’ Only for the show to re-pay you for your loyalty and your obsession by turning into a parody of itself. It wasn’t just sad, it was a bit insulting. This is what you wasted two years of your life waiting for?
At the start of this article, we mentioned Dexter, Lost, and The Sopranos. Each of these shows, to varying degrees, had unsatisfying finales, people say. Whether it was the complex myth-making of Lost or The Sopranos’ refusal to give any ending, at all.
But Dexter and Lost were well past the peak of their cultural powers by the time they drew to a close and The Sopranos is, still, considered by many to be the finest achievement of any TV show, ever. Its ending wasn’t bad in the way that Thrones’ was, it only ended up enhancing the show’s mystique.
Game of Thrones was ruined by its own ending, and its a wound from which the show will never recover. Of course, there’s still hope for fans, either in the (eventual) publication of the final two books, or the debut of the promising, Targaryen-centric prequel.
Even if the franchise finds success in its future, every conversation will eventually wind back to ‘Game of Thrones? Yeah, great show, terrible ending.’
So, it’s finally time to admit it. Game of Thrones is dead, long live Game of Thrones. Or perhaps not.
Game of Thrones is available to stream via NOW TV.
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