Oops, it was so bad I almost forgot it happened. The all time worst ending for a series shall always be.... Dexter.
I'm a little weird in that after Steve Carroll left I thought the Office kind of got better, the show became less about Michael Doing stupid stuff and more about the other characters, guys like Daryl, Stanley, Kevin, Angela, all actually grew as characters and I liked it. I wasn't a huge fan of the last season but the final was fantastic!
Was anyone else hoping at the end somehow the Night King and the white walkers were still alive and killed everyone? Seriously though, how much better would the show have been if all the Kings Landing stuff happened before any of the white walkers breached the wall and we thought we had a happy ending and instead the final battle wipes almost everyone out? Of any show ever this show shouldn't have had a happy ending. Especially for so many of them. I kept waiting for a final twist at the end. There's no way Martin's final vision was all of these characters living and everybody just being so happy. This wasn't supposed to be Harry Potter. What was the point of having Jon be a Targaryen? Why is fire going to live in ice? Why would Greyworm take Jon prisoner instead of killing him? How the fuck were there still so many Dothraki and Unsullied alive? Why did Arya go all the way to the Red Keep to kill Cersei only to then just give up and become Christopher Columbus? Why did they waste time in the last episode showing Arya and the horse when she wasn't even on the horse? Why was there 3 Starks at that "trial"? Why would Greyworm be the only representative of Dany? Why would he give a fuck what those others had to say? Why wouldn't the other 6 kingdoms also not want to become independent? How is Sam a Grand Maester? Why did the Red Woman kill herself if Arya wasn't going to fulfill the prophecy? What about the prince that was promised? What about Cersei's prophecy? Why would a dragon care about melting the throne? These are questions I literally thought of off the top of my head as I just start typing away. I'm sure there will be lots of others once I actually think more.
Not a very satisfying ending. I wanted Jon to kill Dany and Sansa to end up as Queen in the North--those were satisfying narrative closures, but everything else was...off. Either things that didn't make sense (Greyworm simply accepting Tyrion's idea to let the lords of the realm choose a new king and that king decide what to do with Jon? Whether or not Greyworm can enforce his will on the whole realm, emotionally there's no way that's something he could accept) or just felt like generic bookkeeping ("We need to end the story for everyone...what about Sam? Oh, Grand Maester, cuz he likes the books. How about Bron? He's a mercenary so he's into gold...wouldn't it be funny if he were the new Master of Coin? Arya? Fuck if I know"). There was absolutely nothing about this episode that stayed true to the story Martin was telling beyond Jon killing Dany. It idled into a safe, easy ending, nothing hugely shocking happened that changed audience perceptions or turned the narrative on its head in a way that fit everything that came before--that was what made Martin such a good author. Making the plot unpredictable, but in ways that didn't feel like random left turns or nonsensical gotchas. This finale and, really, this season didn't produce any of that.
Did/do you watch The Walking Dead? Everything seemed gimmicky and they used tricks in story telling to make their twists try to be shocking. It just came across as stupid at times. With Martin the twists are compelling story telling. It's so much more intense when you know anything can happen. The last couple seasons certain characters were too safe and got too happy of an ending. It just was never meant to be like that at the end and it's extremely disappointing.
That was a mix of HORRIBLE and EMBARRASSING! Pure Direwolf Shit. The only thing that makes me happy is that I’m 100% positive GRRs ending will be NOTHING like D&Ds. I bet he’s laughing his ass off right now reading all the bad reviews of the finale. The past 3 season have pretty much been shit(minus a few episodes), after the source material was gone HBO decided to turn GOT into fan friendly television, pathetic. I can’t wait till Martin finishes this and absolutely nothing comes close to the tv series. Pretty smart actually, he lets HBO fuck up their ending and any GRR ending that even comes close to what he’s already written makes him look like a genius. Let’s just hope he lays off the cake until then, I will be unhappy if he dies before finishing.
And if this is what D&D have to offer as writers why the fuck would anyone watch an 8000 year prequel? Oh that’s right it’s not them it’s the woman who wrote X-men: First Class. Sounds like some deep storylines coming. And I agree Dexter was the worst ending ever. This sucked, but throwing your dead sisters body in a boat and driving it into a storm is next level garbage. Hopefully Westworld gets back on track in season 3(track being season 1). With all the potential storylines in that show it could be awesome, as long as they don’t pull a GOT with it. #ThandieNewton I’m done ranting.
I agree completely with the Dexter series finale, it’s weird though because I think Rita getting killed at the end of season 4 and Dex’s kid being left in her blood was one of the best season endings ever.
I'm glad you noted it was more than just this season where the show got derailed. The minute they introduced Dorne, was the same minute they started putting out bad episodes. That was a few years ago, so I've had plenty of time to go through my five phases of grieving and was prepared for the season we ended up with. So, I'm not upset or disappointed and I thought the episode was consistent with what Benioff/Weiss have re-made the story into. Forget the book prophesies, ignore mythology, scrap the book inclinations that lineage and blood are important and matter, and finally take a dump on fantasy genre's fundamental story of heroes and villains. In other words, take out all the fun stuff and focus on the pragmatic wheel breaking message that apparently was what the show was all about. Evaluating strictly with what the show has become, I thought it was pretty good. There was some poetry (amateur-ish) in Jon Snow becoming a wildling. Didn't see that coming, but it's not the worse ending for him, albeit it's a pretty strange, incongruent journey he went through to become one. Still, given his lack of ambition and simple nature, wildling life is not a bad way to end up. Tyrion had to sorta win, right? Little guy overcoming is what breaking the wheel is all about. Bran had to win. Robbed of his dreams and aspirations from day one, he deserved justice because that's what happens when the wheel is broken. Aria gets to be a you-go-girl and travel the world and be a free, strong, independent woman. Ain't no titles going to weigh her down. I won't go thru all of them, but basically all the little guys and gals in the show that were squarely under the wheel and probably suffered the most, are the last ones standing and I suppose laughing. As it should be in a just, wheel free world. It's crazy how they neutered Martin's story. I'm very curious to see what, if anything, they took from Martin's actual ending.
1. I guess to be another thing to create friction with Dany and help push her over the edge. I've got another post on that later. 2. No chance. In fact, I think once it's discovered Jon's killed Dany, the Unsullied and Dothraki probably slaughter everyone. She was more than a queen to a lot of them. But how convenient that she has no guards with her in the throne room. 3. I explain this away as there were reserves somewhere. Maybe Dragonstone. It would be logical to do that ... but then the Iron Fleet's ambush at Dragonstone makes even less sense. 4. Made no sense. Honestly, why does the Hound even let her get so far only to tell her to turn back when she is mere feet from her objective? Dumbness. 5. Trying to be art instead of entertaining and then having nowhere to go with it. Although the dragon wings on Dany was a magnificent image. 6. Yeah, I asked this, too. And how does a trial within minutes become a counsel to elect a king on the speech of the prisoner who was told he wasn't allowed to speak ... and then the judge, Grey Worm, lets him speak anyway. 7. Dorne almost certainly would, one would think. 8. Apparently it's good to be the best friend of the cousin of the king. Nepotism. 9. I think Melisandre saw her own purpose being fulfilled and that she was going to be executed by Davos anyway if she didn't end herself. 10. Just a legend used to muddy the waters. 11. Just a legend used to muddy the waters. 12. See Arya's white horse. They went big on the kind of symbolism these last few episodes they never would have done in the first seven seasons. Maybe even a bit of fan service. They make you think that in death Dany somehow completed her stated objective, although that's not clear. It actually looks like Bran manipulated things. He doesn't want to rule but he makes the trip to King's Landing because he knows they are going to pick him to be king? Ummmm. And yeah, those are only some of the questions. Maybe they didn't have time to wrap this up properly because everyone wanted to move on to other projects, but the way they tied it up wasn't good. And it didn't have to be popular or satisfying. But so much of it didn't make sense, or there were better, more plausible ways to reach the same end. That would have sat better with me.
The whole Dany thing ... The writers couldn't seem to make up their mind on what to do with her. In Episode 5, the actions of torching hundreds of thousands of innocents in King's Landing is explained as being either Targeryan madness or grief-lit rage as a result of all she's lost in her campaign in Westeros -- neither of which makes sense to me because she's had similar experiences in Essos and still never turned into anything near this. But the showrunners do an about-face on that in the finale. Now, she's deluded. She's a misguided messianic figure who will save the world from itself. She's Thanos, but prettier and with a better personality in her downtime. She's sees the innocents as guilty because they didn't turn on Cersei, even though they did when they rang the bells. So now her actions are clouded even more. We've gone from a ruthless but righteous ruler who listened to her advisers often to her detriment and accepted personal loss in the name of a greater goal for the whole to a character who snaps and undoes her own victory for the smallest of triggers to being this naive girl who thinks she can save the world through cleansing it. It was like the writers themselves couldn't reconcile what they needed Dany to do in Episode 5 to drive their story home with her character, and that they knew viewers would have a problem with it, so they tried to give some fan service and make her more of a tragic position in the finale. Except none of the three Danys they wrote can exist in a world with either of the other two. So it's a mess.
My daughter started watching the show so I've been rewatching it too. We're halfway through season 2 and so far Dany is like a completely different person that would never in a million years burn a city of civilians down. Every time she makes a comment about doing the right thing I just cringe.
