-A recap and review of S08E06 of Game of Thrones, SPOILERS!!!!

The end of an era.

Game of Thrones has slowly risen to dominate popular culture and the internet over the last few years, and this episode was it, the final time we’ll be in Westeros with these characters who we’ve followed for ten years. I have a lot of thoughts about this finale, and my opinion about this episode is slightly related to other issues I’ve had during this season, but I will say that there was a ton of beauty in this episode that I think resolved some storylines effectively. I’d split this one about 50/50.

The first 40 minutes of this episode were brilliant, and finally gave some concrete resolution about how we should feel about the choices made with major characters. The final 40 minutes were a complete mess, and so, although the delineating line here is more obvious than in previous episodes, this also feels very much like a mixed bag. Eventually, I will do a piece or a podcast about the legacy of this show and discuss post-mortem how everything goes together, but this specific recap and review will only deal with what we saw on screen this week.

The part of this episode that I really bought and thought finally tied everything together efficiently is how they handled Daenerys in this episode. Essentially, before this episode, my principle complaint with how they did her turn was that they weren’t able to effectively write it to the point of making me believe the direction they had taken her. The bad things she had done previously never quite created the equivalency necessary to have me believe that she would be so callous with the lives of the common people. They tried to reference the previous decisions she had made, creating that false equivalency, and then used the Targaryen “madness” to fill in the gaps. Heading into this episode, I was really still resistant toward how they were going about telling this story-line, not just because she was my favorite character, but because it didn’t really have the necessary element of tragedy that would make it dramatically compelling. It just felt rushed, mishandled, and too sharp of a turn.

So, if we attempt to pull this back big picture after seeing this episode (and I’ll discuss this episode’s specifics in a second), I think we can craft a narrative that (mostly) makes sense, pays off well, but just has some specifics about it that don’t really add up entirely. We can chalk a lot of it up to timing, and I will, but I think that what they did this episode was the closest they could get to making her turn feel worthwhile, dramatic, and also tragic. I felt all three of those states were properly hit in this episode, and so although I think her burning the civilians in the way she did still doesn’t completely work dramatically, this episode does a lot to erase that bad taste, and the next few paragraphs will be about why I think we can start getting over the bad taste in our mouths that last episode left.

We open the episode with the trio of Jon, Davos, and Tyrion walking around the wreckage, and the city is just devastated. Men and women are clearly burned, buildings are destroyed, and a mix of ash and snow is raining down, coating the rubble. It has very much the imagery of what a nuclear winter would look like, and the three characters who are the most anti-war in the show, arguably, are drinking in the sights. Tyrion asks to go off alone, taking his own walk of shame through the wreckage and to confirm for himself that his brother and sister are indeed dead.

It sets up a pretty powerful scene for him, where he makes his way to the basement or bottom floor of the now mostly destroyed Red Keep and begins looking toward the escape route that he gave Jaime in the previous episode. He sees a golden hand sticking out from the rocks, and he cries as he uncovers his dead brother and sister who died in each other’s embrace. It’s a powerful scene for Tyrion because it made the stakes of his mistake in backing Daenerys entirely personal. He tried ceaselessly to find a way to avoid the kind of bloodshed which ended up happening, and that’s a huge indicator in some of his seemingly sillier decisions over the past few seasons. I guess we’re supposed to believe that his cautiousness-to-a-fault strategy over the past few seasons was a mix of some deep-seated remaining loyalty to the Lannister family (almost like he indirectly didn’t really want to dispose of Cersei) and a desire to keep Daenerys as far away from creating a potential river of blood as possible (perhaps a signal that he sensed this brutality inside her and went overboard to combat it). I find that a bit unsatisfactory, but at least they tried to justify some of his stupidity.

This scene didn’t quite hit me that much emotionally, although I liked its existence, for two main reasons. The first is that I found it naive of Tyrion to think that he could save Cersei’s life in a war between monarchs. In order for Dany to claim the Throne, she had to remove Cersei, and there wasn’t really a convincing way, sans utter destruction, for Cersei to flee willingly. Her death should’ve been part of the job that Tyrion signed up for when he sailed with Daenerys to Westeros. Second, I thought that Jaime and Cersei’s arc together was resolved nicely last episode, and so I’m not sure I needed them under a pile of rocks. Either way, it’s definitely more to reinforce Tyrion’s state of mind as he learns to try and live with his decisions than it is for audience to see the two characters officially be dead.

The scene with Jon, Davos, and Grey Worm as the former two encounter the latter still killing surrendered soldiers is more interesting, because it sets up the kind of through-line that we see in this episode: Jon coming to terms with Daenerys’s utter brutality. Grey Worm honestly informs him that the order to kill the prisoners of war came directly from the Queen, and I thought their almost scuffle serves to show the brewing bad blood between them as the two people still loyal to Dany, essentially. It will end up paying off as the episode goes on.

Now that we got the intro of the characters on the ground floor, Jon moves away from the scuffle with Grey Worm to go try and speak to Daenerys, and Tyrion heads to her side as she plans to give a post-victory speech to her remaining Dothraki and Unsullied soldiers. Arya moves behind the scenes, watching from afar. For me, the next grouping of scenes are pure Game of Thrones, and some of the best moments in show history. The first 35-40 minutes, as I said, were done really beautifully.

Daenerys’s speech is given at the top of a staircase as her soldiers wait in the patio below. The building that the stairs lead up to is entirely destroyed but a huge Targaryen flag rests on one of the remaining walls that is still partially intact. Drogon lands at the top of the stairs and as Daenerys approaches, the dragon’s wings spread out from behind her in this really chilling visual metaphor which indicates both that she is now one with the dragon, emphasizing her diminished humanity, but also giving almost a dark, demonic-like look. This one visual queue did more for me than the last two episodes’ writing combined, and shows what good visual story-telling can do. Her speech, notably given in Valyrian and not the common tongue, emphasizes that they will continue to sack cities and destroy everything in the name of liberation all over the world, and includes Winterfell in that designation. This Daenerys is completely drunk on power, and has fully gone over to being a true conqueror.

This, to me, was the way to properly emphasize her turn to being a more villainous character. Everything that was said previously about her nature makes sense, and she heads to Westeros with the conquering spirit, occasionally reigned in by the advice of Tyrion and Varys. I think that there’s some confusing messaging about the way that we got here, though. They play with her being “mad” as the Mad Queen. They play with her suffering so much loss that she snaps. They play with her deciding that she has no love here, so she rules by fear. These things all swirl inconsequentially in the background throughout this season as the writers could not decide how to paint a convincing portrait of this character. This episode struck the right balance and completely wrote her with the kind of nuance that seems true to her nature, true to the other characters, and most of all made sense. The bells causing her to snap still seems unconvincing because her vision for the world in overthrowing all of the people who don’t submit to her seemingly doesn’t involve burning the innocents alive. There’s almost a confusing jumble of motivations that exist prior to this episode and then they finally reigned in on (in my opinion) the right one: no one should rule if they feel destined to it, and no one should rule if they view themselves as highly as she views herself.

Daenerys the conqueror, drunk on power, believes in her destiny as the ruler of all people, breaking the wheel only to the extent that it silences anyone who opposes her vision for the world. But then, behind closed doors, she’s charming and can inspire loyalty from people. This dangerous charisma, lofty ambition, and complete narcissism in believing that she is somehow a chosen, god-like figure is totally achievable with what they gave us. We didn’t need her crying as she burned the people. We didn’t need it being partially attributed to grief and/or trauma, and we most certainly didn’t need all the talk about coin-flips and Targaryen madness. This could’ve been written in such a way that we see her descent into cruelty because she’s delusional and narcissistic. The show-runners were, I guess, afraid to make this more of a political conversation about leadership, and instead tried to attribute some of it to Jorah’s death or Missandei’s death or Jon’s rejection. This episode pulls away from that. It wasn’t any of those things, really. It was that her nature was inherently tyrannical and she became more and more wrongly convinced that she was a savior or almost metaphysical. In losing people close to her, she became more isolated, and in becoming more isolated, she lost the check on her personality that seemed ready to head into absolute tyranny.

So, as we look away from this season, the big bungling is that they didn’t emphasize her nature as a person and her personality, and couldn’t write the turn in a compelling way which tragically depicts her becoming more and more delusional. Again, she fought for the North three episodes ago and held a dragonglass knife as she fought off zombies at the ground floor, terrified of dying. A few scenes of her justifying using her troops to defend the army of the dead but also explaining her delusional state of mind about her own power would’ve been better. We’re supposed to take some of that away from the conversation with Sansa or some of them with Jon, but again, there’s an issue with varying motivations. I think the writers threw everything at the wall to see what stuck, but a groundwork which properly laid her ideology as the problem would be the most convincing and also the most devastating. Tyrion’s later line asking Jon about “wouldn’t you kill everyone who stood between you and [the self perceived] paradise?” Bingo. That’s the kind of dangerous nature of Daenerys that makes her turn to tyrant really work in this episode. Having her just “snap” because of previous events and calling her “the Mad Queen” is not only a disservice to her eight seasons of character development, but it’s also offensive to women in power everywhere. Instead, painting this picture of grey, that she does have a good heart in there somewhere but is delusional about how to achieve her goals and is obsessed with her own power and ego is a more nuanced and more respectful conversation about the nature of power.

The groundwork of her delusion should’ve really taken root after she burns the Khals and unites the warring tribes in Season Six. I’m not saying that the loss of people close to her didn’t influence all of this, but the tone around some of her deeds and decisions should’ve been less lauded and contained the necessary sinister aspect. I think that the bells moment where she decides to burn the city was done for shock value, and instead, there’s a compelling tragedy about pursuit of power that is way more interesting than giving shock value. That to me is the main problem of Seasons Seven and Eight. Pacing can be forgiven because of the lack of time, but shocking us for shock value and subverting expectations just to be subversive isn’t good writing. I can, however, finally forgive it because of what they gave us in this episode. I can rationalize the changes now that we’ve pulled back, and although I can criticize the handling of her eventual villainous turn, the end result is effectuated really nicely.

Tyrion, once she has finished with her speech, approaches her and challenges her for slaughtering a city. He throws off his hand of the queen pin and is quickly arrested. It’s the first of two moments that she’s legitimately shocked that people don’t like that she burned the city to the ground. For example: if she’s that delusional, why have her cry right before doing it? That’s the type of inconsistency I’m talking about. As she walks away, she just stares down Jon Snow with a “if you try anything I’ll execute you” look and she is entirely surrounded by her soldiers. Arya magically appears next to Jon and says that she “knows a killer when [she] sees one.” What? I suppose that Jon can’t tell that the person who just murdered a million people is a killer….It does, however, emphasize something that we’ll soon find out is incorrect. The idea that Jon Snow is being viewed as an immediate threat due to him actually being Aegon Targaryen is discussed by characters around Jon to warn him that she may try to butcher him also because of his potentially superior claim. We’ll see in the throne-room scene that the opposite is true, Daenerys has begun viewing their familial tie as a further hint that there’s a larger destiny at play for the two of them.

Tyrion, now a prisoner, sits alone in a cell when Jon Snow comes to visit him, presumably later that same day. He outwardly laments his decision to give Varys up and jokes about how Varys’s ashes can give his ashes a fresh batch of “I told you so.” As Tyrion discusses having Varys burned, strangling Shae, and shooting his father Tywin with a crossbow, I was reminded of the scene way back in season one where he “confesses his crimes” to Lysa Arryn in the Eyrie. He’s come a long way since then and actually has a list of crimes to talk about at this point. This scene was my second favorite in the episode behind the throne room scene next, because I think it adequately summarizes the mistakes made by Jon and Tyrion on their goose chase to help Daenerys win the throne. Jon even says, “I can’t justify what happened.”

The picture Tyrion paints of Daenerys fits with the theme of this episode, even though as I said above, I would argue that the version of Daenerys in this episode is one finally synthesized out from all of the varying motivations and plot contrivances to get us to this point. Either way, as a stand-alone exercise, the lines about how she will liberate people from the higher-ups until she rules over everyone tend to fit with what she said earlier to her soldiers.

I appreciated the way that they gave Jon a unique perspective in this scene. He says he can’t justify what happened but it appears he spends most of this episode trying to, or at least have someone prove to him that he’s seeing it incorrectly. He first points the finger at Tyrion for the soon-to-be-attempted world overhaul by saying “you’ve been at her side counseling her.” He then reacts pretty angrily to the idea that Daenerys’s natural state is “fire and blood,” by questioning the idea that “our house words are stamped on our bodies when we’re born” and says that he’d be fire and blood too. He also says that Tyrion’s viewpoint is not entirely informed because it’s easy to judge when he stands a mile behind the battlefield until it’s over, justifying that some of her cruelty may be because her friend died and her dragon was shot down. Interestingly, we want to believe that, but Tyrion knows better, that it’s Daenerys’s wrong idealism and narcissistic view of her destiny that got them to this point. She says that if you piled up the bodies killed by evil people like Tywin Lannister that they wouldn’t be half of what Daenerys did in one day.

The concept of choice begins to play a real role in how this all shapes out. Tyrion says that Jon’s ability to choose whether he would’ve caused the same kind of destruction on the back of a dragon is key and that he has the ability to choose whether Daenerys remains the ruler because Tyrion knows he can get in close enough to assassinate her before it’s too late. It’s in this moment that Jon’s parentage feels like such a let down on how it was handled on the show. Bran and Sam made it such a big deal to tell him, but even though Daenerys grew fearful of a rising claimant that actually has Westerosi support, Daenerys doesn’t even mention it to Jon in these last two episodes. Her choices are made less out of fear and more out of some disdainful, bleak, and deluded idea of fairness. Jon was able to get close to her because they were romantically linked before the parentage thing was revealed, and truthfully, because it doesn’t play into the end game in terms of power structure, I’m not sure that the idea that Jon’s parentage being the big reveal and secret of the show ended up mattering.

Ask yourself: if no one ever figured it out, what would be different? Jon would’ve still been King in the North, he would’ve still rode South to try and win an allegiance with Daenerys, they would’ve still been romantically linked, he would’ve still flown a dragon, and she probably would’ve still become a conqueror. Much of this episode is designed to demonstrate to us that Daenerys’s vision of breaking the wheel was always going to be cruel and violent, and so, if they were already romantically linked and he was a commander of her forces, he would’ve still probably been able to get into the throne room to be alone with her. Is it just to give him the idea that his parentage reinforces the idea that he can make the Queenslaying choice? If so, can only royalty stand up for the good of the realm? Again, the rushed pacing really bungled all of this. We never really got any kind of payoff to the “you rule by love, so I only have fear” rationale, because this version of Daenerys seems more intent on upheaval and ideology in creating some bizarre paradise than just being cruel. It’s not like she told her soldiers, “these people all hurt us, let’s show them what it means to win the throne.” As Tyrion says, she believes its her destiny to create paradise.

My guess is that it’s probably to give him additional ammunition in making such a drastic, country-changing choice, but I really enjoyed them bringing back the idea that “love is the death of duty.” They basically admit, especially in Tyrion’s case, that his decisions were partially influenced by him loving Daenerys and having the wool pulled over his eyes to a certain extent. It’s in this moment that you realize that not only do these men love her romantically, but she’s almost like an icon to them. Giving her that almost supernatural respect only exacerbates her ego and cements her cruel vision, but it creates a blinding cycle where she can then use that confidence to charm other people into following her. Tyrion became a bit of a stand-in for the audience members who did back her, or named their kids after her (yikes), and so we can finally chalk up that end of Season Seven stare from Tyrion on the ship being out of jealousy. This seems like a pretty logical confirmation in this moment, and it explains why someone as smart as Tyrion stayed on the sinking ship for so long. It wasn’t vanity, as he says, it was the opposite. He was completely overborne by her iconicism. In the end, the straw that gets Jon to at least confront her and consider an assassination is Tyrion rightly bringing up that her sisters will never bend the knee, thus, they would become the types of people stripped from their castles and burned alive.

And so, Jon begins the trek from the cells to the throne room in the Red Keep, walking notably through the snow and destruction. When he reaches the tunnel that leads to the throne room, Drogon emerges from under a pile of snow and ash, shaking it off and smelling Jon like a guard-dog allowing him past. The shot of him emerging out from the pile was incredible, and the far away shot of him sniffing and checking on the visitor was really cool. There are aspects of this season I didn’t like, but damn on the visuals. They used the space, the setting, and the lack of characters and activity outside to really hammer home how depressing this all is. That totally worked for me.

Then, we get the scene we’ve all anticipated since Daenerys walked into the House of the Undying back in Season Two. The throne-room is destroyed, the walls caved in, but the iconic steel chair remains. A chilling, somber choir plays behind her, as she, wide-eyed as can be like a mix of a child in wonder and someone fresh out of a psychotic episode, finally reaches out to touch the throne just as a more full orchestral chord plays underneath her. Just as she touches the throne, we see Jon’s shadow appear in the doorway, the same doorway Ned walked through to confront Cersei or when he found Jaime had slayed King Aerys. Daenerys warms to Jon, telling him a story about how she couldn’t imagine a throne built from a thousand swords as girl who could only count to twenty, “I imagined a mountain of swords too high to climb. So many fallen enemies, you could only see the soles of Aegon’s feet.” And it’s funny that now we know Daenerys’s true goal and true nature, lines like these seem less fiercely charismatic and more demented.

Jon doesn’t bite, immediately turning to questioning her over her order to execute the prisoners of war, which she says was necessary. He yells at her about her burning little children, telling her that she hasn’t really seen the destruction she’s caused, and she responds similar to what Jon said earlier, that Cersei left her no choice, that she tried to use the innocence against her. This line is just so not true from so many perspectives that Jon just moves on to ask about Tyrion. He tries to convince her that she needs to forgive, make all of the people understand that they made a mistake opposing her, and then he almost starts begging, both for his natural goodness in being a protector of the people but also begging her to convince him that she’s not beyond saving. It’s a really nuanced bit of acting from Kit Harington, who I’ve criticized before, but he shows a real broken spirit and wavering resolve in this scene. I think we all pretty much knew that he’d kill her in this scene, but his acting really makes you question it as he goes on. Dany’s line in response is that they “can’t hide behind small mercies.”

The next monologue given by Daenerys seals her fate, saying that their world will be one of mercy (twisting the meaning of that word, I’d say) and says that it’ll be a good world, that it’s not easy to imagine what’s never been before. The way this is framed adequately addresses her commitment to what she perceives as goodness from prior seasons, but how it’s been warped by her self-perception and her view of destiny. It’s a really great idea when she says “I know what’s good,” and that everyone else, “doesn’t get to choose.” She’s not only convinced herself that she’s destined to make the world better but also that her judgment is the only judgment that matters. Props to Emilia Clarke for having to pull off a combination of deranged and tender together, and so she actually drums up a little innocence when she says that Jon knows what’s good as well, that’s he’s always known, and their reason to be together is to do all of this together as a combined force, “since you were a little boy with a bastard’s name and I was a little girl who couldn’t county to twenty.” I thought this was all great writing and really well acted, and so he pretends to accept it, and stabs her through the heart suddenly. They make eye contact as she dies, and just like Ygritte, dies in his arms.

Then, as Drogon comes up, Jon’s seeming seasons-long death wish is about to be fulfilled when instead of lashing out at Jon, Drogon burns the Iron Throne down after screeching in pain in seeing his mother dead. I was touched by him trying to nudge her back to life, and I’m also not angry about his decision to burn the throne. Animals are strangely perceptive sometimes, and he’s supposed to be smarter than any animal. I’m sure he understands that the throne was his mom’s undoing, one way or another. This was tragic, well-acted, well-executed, and potentially one of the best scenes of Game of Thrones. I’ve said a million times now that it was rushed and the motivations don’t all quite fit, but hopefully in the books, George can really capture this turn into being a tyrant convinced of her own goodness instead of blaming it on some vague idea of ‘madness.’

And so, for me, this could really end the series. The following other half of the episode really didn’t do much for me, so I’ll run quickly through what I liked and didn’t like.

 

As for the following scene where Grey Worm parlays with the lords of Westeros, his eventual decision to vacate with the Dothraki is the right one, and the city and two prisoners are his bargaining chips. He wants justice for Daenerys, but he’s also in a pretty precarious situation; he’s a foreign army commander no longer following a leader, and he’s surrounded on all sides by everyone else. So, Tyrion, despite being chained up and a prisoner in the moment, somehow gets everyone to vote for Bran to be King, who says: “why do you think I came all this way?” Spare me.

Then, his first act as King is to give his sister a free North, making him Lord of the Six Kingdoms, instead of Seven. If I’m a lord from any other kingdom, I’m calling bullshit on this. The idea that the Northmen will never kneel again is not a justification. Everyone has been destroyed by war. We now have Gendry, a bastard, ruling the Stormlands because all of the Baratheon line is dead. The Martells and the Sand Snakes are all dead, leaving a new, unnamed Prince of Dorne in their place. The Tyrells were all eliminated so Bronn, of all people, is given The Reach as payment for his years of service to Jaime and Tyrion. The Westerlands probably belong to Tyrion, as he’s still alive, and I’m sure there’s some distant Lannister cousin there as an acting Lord, but the main lineage is destroyed. The Riverlands have been hit with the brunt of every way and every battle, and I suppose belong to Edmure Tully, while the Eyrie is still in the hands of sickly teenage Robin Arryn. The Iron Islands, behind Yara, were promised freedom by Daenerys in exchange for the ships in Season Six, but I guess that’s off the table…But yeah, the North has suffered the most. They deserve independence more than anyone else. Good thing the Starks get to be King in the Six Kingdoms and Queen in the North. (*sarcasm*)

They also laugh off democracy by comparing the common people to horses and dogs. We can see why Daenerys was so intent on breaking the wheel. So, Bran the Broken, with no aspiration for change and no real human desires is now King, and the Kingdoms largely remain in place under the same families: Baratheon, Arryn, Tully, Greyjoy, Lannister, and Stark, with the exception of Bronn in the Reach. Bran’s big power is that he can look into the past, and so every decision he and Tyrion (who is a terrible, terrible politician with a long losing streak) make is entirely influenced by the past and not the future. The small counsel, made up of an untrained Sam as Grand Maester, an uneducated Bronn as Master of Coin (who blackmailed his way into his seat), and then Davos and Brienne (fine picks), debates the funding of brothels as the series closes out, and Bran says two lines at counsel and then retreats to go watch Weirwood Porn, showing no interest in governance.

This was all so nihilistic and the dialogue was so sloppy that it felt like an ending you’d write to a paper that’s 95% finished and is due in a few hours but you started pre-gaming for a party while you try to work. The sentence structure slowly slips and the end is a hodge-podge of convenient plot-endings that are more and more maddening the more you think of them. We spent eight seasons in a show where nothing ended up mattering. That’s fine, but don’t paint this last 40 minutes as bizarrely happy. It isn’t. Tyrion and Bran ruling the Kingdoms while Sansa gets a family discount for Northern Independence is nonsense. They really want us to believe that a monarch “elected” by an oligarchical group of rich people is happy progress. Instead of doing it by lineage, we’ll do it by corruption and special interests at the very top, and the same wheel that rolls over everyone keeps rolling. Outside of a touching scene of Brienne filling in Jaime’s entry in the Kingsguard book, I just was ready to check out by this point. The sloppy mix of tearing down Daenerys in two episodes and then giving us this desolate ending hidden behind brighter colors and happy lines really pissed me off.

And then, Grey Worm and the Dothraki agree to leave and go abroad, which is fine, but Grey Worm trades his prized hostage for….Jon to go the Night’s Watch? First, there is no Night’s Watch and there is nothing to “watch” out for. He’s befriended the wildlings and the Walkers are gone. This surprised me, I assumed we’d get a ‘the walkers are still alive and there are more dragon eggs somewhere’ ending, but if there really isn’t a northern threat, Jon being sent to the Night’s Watch is a pretty round-about way for him to end up at the Wall with Tormund and Ghost. He would probably make that choice voluntarily. I also think that Jon putting his hair back into a shaggy form rather than his Seasons Six to Eight man-bun is meant to convey that he’s done fighting and that he’s done emphasizing the Targaryen part of himself. It seemed that once he hooked in with Dany that he went away from his Stark heritage a little bit, prompting zingers from Arya and Sansa, but also disdain from the fandom when he didn’t say goodbye to Ghost. Him going back North with the changed hairdo and embracing Ghost is supposed to complete his character arc I suppose. I don’t mind Jon ending at the Wall because he’s part of the true North, but I just didn’t find it that dramatically satisfying when it was written so oddly. I also thought the “ask me in 10 years” line was in bad taste from Tyrion to Jon. It felt almost meta, like the showrunners were telling us to reflect on the legacy of the show in ten years.

The show’s legacy, to me, is still among the best properties of all time. The first six seasons are so great that the drop from being amazing to being inconsistent but still decent over the last two seasons doesn’t ruin or tarnish the legacy of the show too much, in my humble opinion. For this season in particular, I really really liked the first two episodes, and had a lot of positives with third and fourth despite some pacing issues and odd decision-making. The last two are troublesome, but if I liked four out of the six episodes of a season, it’s still a positive score for me.

Overall Episode Grades:

Episode 1: Winterfell  

Episode 2: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms 

Episode 3: The Long Night 

Episode 4: The Last of the Starks 

Episode 5: The Bells 

Episode 6: The Iron Throne  (5/5 for the first half, 2/5 for the second half)

 

Season 8 Overall Grade: