Nicolaj Coster-Waldau defended the work of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss over the writing of the final episode of Game of Thrones the other day in a HuffPost interview noticed by Vanity Fair. “Everybody worked their asses off,” he said, to produce the best finale they could.
I am sure they did work hard; I have no doubt of it. I do have doubts, however, about whether the ending was as hard-hitting and as epic as the rest of the series was.
If the HBO documentary, The Last Watch, is to be believed, in the first cast read-through of season eight, Kit Harrington was reading cold; unlike his castmates, he hadn’t read any of the scripts he had been sent for the season. When he came to the last scene of the last episode, wherein Jon Snow kills Dany–a necessary, evil act–he was shocked, and pained. Had the final shooting script been written that way, many disappointed fans would have gotten the shattering, Westeros-cracking, series ending they were hoping for, an ending that would have measured up to the impact of the death scene of Eddard Stark in season one and the death of his son, Robb Stark, at Walder Frey’s Red Wedding.
But we didn’t get that ending. Instead, we got Dany’s death, which was beautifully done, followed by fifteen minutes of some of the silliest plot resolution ever seen on a great show: Brandon Stark, who had made it perfectly clear that he had moved beyond the material desire of a terrestrial kingship, is suddenly appointed king; Tyrion, who had just finished betraying his Queen, retains his position of Hand; the assassin, Arya Stark, decides she wants to be Christopher Columbus for the rest of her life; and Jon Snow, whom we are repeatedly told over the final seven episodes of the series is actually Aegon Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne, goes back into the Northern forest with the Wildlings, without ever once asserting his claim.
The only resolution of character that made full sense was that of Sansa Stark, who gets to be what she always wanted to be, a Queen, albeit Queen in the North, and not of Westeros. Her crowning was a satisfying moment, and yet, I wish we had been shown it earlier, so that Danerys Targaryen’s death would be the last image the series offered us.
There is a distinction, of course, between a television series as viewers see it each week and the shooting script of each episode. Scenes are not shot in the order viewers see them. They are shot in the order of ease of production. But what I am suggesting–to actually end the series with Danerys’ death–would have made for a truly remarkable finale.
That ending would have required a different set up for the resolution of other character plot lines, but difficult as the challenge would have been, it would have saved viewers the task of digesting all those resolutions in one big lump at the end of the show. I would even suggest that, in doing it the way it was done–with Arya sailing off and Jon riding away off into the trees–Benioff and Weiss did what George RR Martin did not want done, and that is to provide a happy ending for the entire tale. To be honest, nobody needed a glimpse into the future of these characters. They would have lived in our imaginations anyway, as The Lone Ranger (whose death is nowhere recorded) lives in mine.
What was missed in the Game of Thrones finale was an opportunity to create an ending that fully justified the viewers’ (and the actors’) efforts to reach it. Contrary to popular opinion, two of the episodes of season eight, “The Long Night,” about the attack of White Walkers on Winterfell, and “The Bells,” about Danerys’ siege of Kings’ Landing, were among the very best the series has ever done. But a series, just like a novel or a movie, has to drive to a payoff that is worth the effort to watch. Raiders of the Lost Ark had such a payoff; so did the finale of the television series, Angel, and, most recently, Deadwood: The Movie, which brought that vision of the Old West and those characters to an end that was simply perfect.
So, I put it to you: does the ending of your tale justify our efforts to get there? I’m not asking if all your characters are going to live happily ever after. I’m asking, have you written a piece of fiction that is worth our time from its beginning to its end?
Books Here And There 