It’s Game over ... but grand finale was so short of fire even the dragon had a kip!
MORe than a million people have signed an online petition to see the final season of Game of Thrones remade ‘with competent writers’. By the Seven-Faced God, please, no. Being bored to despair once is quite enough.
The most bloodthirsty, surprising, controversial, ruthless, ambitious, perverse and sadistically witty show on television has been reduced to a pile of pretentious tripe this year. The finale – aired in the UK at 2am yesterday to coincide with the US screening – was 75 minutes of the dullest story ever told.
Showing it at 2am was like serving liquid Mogadon. Tens of thousands of viewers must have fallen asleep before it ended. I watched it in the afternoon and still needed matchsticks to prop my eyes open.
At one stage, scheming Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), the last of the Lannisters, went around a palace table straightening the chairs. he was quite literally rearranging the furniture as he waited for other characters to arrive. Amazonian warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) spent what seemed like five minutes writing up the obituary of her dead boyfriend. With a quill.
And these scenes were lively, compared to the paralysingly dull speeches at a council of war, about the importance of democracy and the problems inherent with a hereditary monarchy.
This whole pitiful spectacle couldn’t have been more stultifying if it had opened with the words, ‘This is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Democrats of Westeros’.
The problem was that Game of Thrones, once so irreverent and mercurial, started to believe its own press releases. After winning more emmys than any series in history, it imagined it was Great Art. Since its first episode in 2011, which stunned viewers with two electrifying shocks in the final scene, the show has killed off more than 100 characters, not to mention countless thousands of serfs and nameless soldiers – and never paused to regret a single one of them.
But that psychopathic streak was forgotten yesterday, as the handful of survivors moped around the city of King’s Landing to a soundtrack of sad cello music. Groan went the strings as Tyrion found the corpses of his evil brother and sister buried under rubble. Creak, saw, sigh echoed the melody as everyone stared at Queen Daenerys (emilia Clarke) and wondered why she’d started being so nasty.
The one memorable image of the episode saw the Queen arrive to make a victory speech, dragon soaring behind her, so she appeared to have demon’s wings.
Game of Thrones has been the fairytale of Daenerys, the powerless captive princess who was given a gift of three dragon’s eggs and hatched them by walking though the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. As her dragons grew, so did her realm, until she ruled the world. Along the way she took the rightful king Jon Snow (Kit harington) as her lover. The series has often been accused of misogyny, in particular for its depictions of rape, so the end of the fairytale was especially disappointing: alarmed that he could no longer control Daenerys, Jon kissed her, then ran her through with his sword.
This looked very much like a man killing his girlfriend for stepping out of line, because he couldn’t cope with having a woman more powerful than him.
The murder was made easier by the fact that Daenerys, though she had armies of elite soldiers desperate to prove their loyalty by dying for her, never bothered with bodyguards. even her last remaining dragon was having a kip under the ashes and rubble when the Queen was betrayed.
Luckily for Jon, the suicidally loyal soldiers all just shrugged and went home after the woman they worshipped had been kebabed. The dragon flapped off too. The rest of the cast spent an age, earnestly shaking hands and gazing into each other’s eyes as they bade farewell. That flaming cello wouldn’t shut up. Then they wandered away.
It was as if all the characters, dragon included, knew it was the end of the series. Or maybe they were just bored.