‘Game’ without frontiers
That was wonderful. That was terrible. That was television.
A TV show’s viewership can behave a little like a young dragon — capable of fervent loyalty but also a destructive fickleness. So not surprisingly, last week’s finale of “Game of Thrones” was met with all manner of foul cries, some more legitimate than others. And a dedicated few expressed admiration for the vision David Benioff and D.B. Weiss created in telling such a grand story through TV, the scope of which was unprecedented.
Science fiction and fantasy have fared fine on TV in the past, but their permutation of culture often occurs slowly, as with “Star Trek” — ubiquitous now after enduring dreadful ratings during its original run from 1966-69. Its first trek through the galaxy ran 73 episodes, a quantity comparable to “Thrones” even though “Trek” ran those hours over three seasons, and “Thrones” did so over eight. The differences between the shows underscore how much change has occurred in the presentation of television over a half century. More than ever, TV operates like an elongated film rather than a serial narrative. The former is a more complicated creature to tame.
So comparing “Thrones” to TV past is difficult because TV is different now than it was then. It’s also different now than it was when “Thrones” began in 2011. The show, based on George R.R. Martin’s deliberately unfilmable novels, was a gamble. Many felt it paid off. Until it didn’t.
But consider a moment the great shows of TV’s current golden era. “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad” — all could be made on a series of familiar locations with actors playing identifiable characters in remarkable circumstances. “Thrones” was a different beast from the outset. The show was conceived with greater scope in its elaborate costumes and sets, its cinematic computer-generated cities, battles and creatures.
To use its own terminology, “Game of Thrones” broke the wheel. It reached ambitiously and often grasped what it intended to grasp, until it didn’t, which might be why its farewell was so dissatisfying.
To my mind, the story we identify as “Game of Thrones” should be judged against two criteria: the story itself and the story as told through the medium of television.
The show’s Tyrion Lannister voiced this theme in a way, near the end of the finale.
“What unites people?” he asked. “Armies? Gold? Flags? … Stories. There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.”
Such a defense of storytelling is frustrating because story was ill served by storytelling with “Game of Thrones.”
This particular story is difficult to fully assess because the book series by Martin is incomplete, leaving the ambitious but flawed TV version as the definitive take for right now. So let’s look at “Game of Thrones” — both for its story and for its storytelling.
A story in Stark contrast
First, the story. I’d argue that the show in one regard was true to much of the tone of the books in that it deliberately avoided tidiness in its conclusion. The show, like the books, was always more focused upon the Stark family than any other of the well-developed families it introduced. Years of pre-history tell us more about the Stark family, but for our purposes, we begin with parents Ned and Cat and their children, Robb, Sansa, Bran, Arya and Rickon, along with one bastard in Jon Snow and one ward in Theon Greyjoy.
By story’s end, Sansa is in a position of power in the family’s lands with troops loyal to her. Arya is on an undefined journey befitting her spirit. Bran — or the person people keep calling Bran — is made king. Jon is exiled, essentially. The rest are dead. Westeros does not coddle.
The grievance that Bran ends as ruler is a legitimate one, at least as far as the show goes, a flaw in storytelling rather than story. Plenty of fans theorized it could end this way. I went back and re-read “A Game of Thrones,” Martin’s first novel in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, and was reminded the series starts with a prologue before cutting to the first of the character point-of-view chapters that tell the story. And the first character with a point of view is Bran Stark. Martin revels in telling all sorts of different stories: those that seem to end too soon or unjustly; those that remain open-ended; those that possess a sense of finality. But even the stories that come across as resolved leave some mark on the narrative. No element of the story operates independently. The narrative field gets tilled regularly, and one character’s reality is buried as a new important reality surges upward.
For a story so finely focused on questions of nature and nurture, “Thrones” did right by its Stark characters by story’s end. The show repeatedly picked at the idea of family and identity, from Jon Snow’s secret parentage to characters such as Theon Greyjoy, who grew up in a rigid Iron Islands culture but spent his youth as a ward of the Starks. Almost every character in the books and on the show had a unique spin on his or her identity, and how it was formed from their bloodline and their raising.
As for those Starks, some died unjustly, others endured. The Starks then are representative of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros: an entity torn apart by conflict and left to navigate a healing process in the aftermath of a horrifying generation-long war.
Time and again, Westeros has played the part of powder keg. But roughly 25 years passed between the moment the Mad King burned Rickard Stark to death (an event that preceded the show and the books) and the moment Daenerys Targaryen torched King’s Landing, which happened in the show’s final hours.
I suspect the show’s nurturing of rampant fan speculation, in part, is responsible for the chorus of disappointment at its conclusion. Create mystery, and some portion of your audience will push back when it finds the mystery’s resolution unsatisfactory.
But this show was never going to tie up all loose ends with a ta-da! To do so would be bad and pandering fiction.
Some of the journeys were cyclical: Jon Snow’s long journey from outcast to hero to almost-king ended right about where it started. Sansa Stark’s arc moved toward governance and independence. The debates about whether she needed to suffer so greatly to get from petulant child to able governor are valid and worth having. But her arc bent in a way that yielded an intelligent leader. Arya Stark’s path always steered toward adventure.
If the story in general felt open-ended, that’s because the ultimate vision for Westeros is far grander than “Game of Thrones.” The show — like the books — wasn’t designed to be self-contained. What happens between its starting and ending points represents a sliver of a much larger story. We were afforded a seat to this specific span of time in Westeros. But it was never designed to be an insular production.
Not the destination but the journey
Now I must shift from the story to the storytelling. I’m not dissatisfied with the story itself but greatly disappointed in the path taken to get there. Finding fault with the narrowness of the vision provided by Benioff and Weiss sounds ridiculous. Among big TV shows, “Thrones” was the biggest. But the show’s creators were stubborn in their execution — the insistence that this story needed to be capped after 73 episodes was a dubious idea proved terrible in the show’s two final seasons.
I can’t fault any creative person for wanting to leave a story after a decade developing it. But they placed other concerns ahead of the story, cramming the tale into too few episodes, like an oversize knight into undersized armor. By the show’s end, the result, not surprisingly, was awkward, clumsy and lurching movement.
Daenerys’ madness wasn’t entirely without clues. Those who say it is aren’t being entirely sincere because stories preceding the final season all referenced the possibility of her turning into the Mad Queen, following a path torched by her father, the Mad King. Nevertheless, the path to madness was grossly underdeveloped — it became a revenge narrative that would’ve benefited from support that wasn’t entirely expository.
And Bran’s path to King of the Six Kingdoms was dreadfully and insufficiently paved. “Hey, Bran …”
“I’m not Bran.”
“So, Bran …”
“I’m not Bran.”
“Hail King Bran!”
“OK, I’ll be Bran.”
The show’s post-bellum emphasis on history and information is an admirable one, but Bran’s story felt underdeveloped to the point that Tyrion’s line about stories landed with leaden insincerity. Bran said he’d never be the Lord of Winterfell because he wasn’t Bran. Suddenly he became the Protector of the Realm, an even grander role. What changed? As a viewer, I still don’t know.
That’s a storytelling flaw. It would be less frustrating except for much of the show’s run, its narrative found far more fuel from its conversations on the way to a fight than from the fights themselves. At its best, “Thrones” spilled expository dialogue with greater ease than it did blood, but skillfully so. Thousands of years of history ran through conversations, and characters evolved over the course of long travels.
A rush for the exit
For all the conflicted responses that followed the fade to black that ended “The Sopranos,” regard for that ending has mellowed as other TV shows fail to conclude in a satisfying manner. “Breaking Bad” nailed its penultimate episode only to fall apart in its last one with a preposterous piece of machinery.
The conclusion of “Thrones” felt so great because the content was so richly conceived. The show touched on all manner of allegorically relevant content: nationalism, preemptive violence, patriarchy, the cost of war, the cost of bad governance, the balance between ruling with a gentle and a stern hand. It sprang from rich soil.
But the harvest came too soon. And a show that existed in a sphere of its own creation — TV without boundaries — became constricted by an artificial time construct generated by its creators.
It’s a shame, but I suppose it may have an unintended consequence: to send people back to the books, which are under no artificial deadlines. Though admittedly author Martin’s pace bears its own frustrations. In a way, Martin’s sluggish process feels like a narrative thread worthy of “A Game of Thrones” or “Game of Thrones.” Resolution doesn’t arrive on our schedule.
But ideally, when Martin’s final books — “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring” — arrive, they’ll fill in the narrative voids because right now those empty spaces haunt me.
That’s my dream of spring.