Game of Thrones: The Head That Wears the Crown

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz discussed the new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we'll be posting our thoughts in installments. (David Sims is filling in for Christopher Orr for this week’s finale.)

David Sims: For six seasons, Game of Thrones has been promising the future: Daenerys the conqueror, glorious Stark revenge, Cersei’s cup of madness running over. Well, it took its time, but the future is finally here, in all its grim glory. “How about the fact that this is actually happening?” Tyrion asked Daenerys midway through this super-long finale episode, and I, for one, appreciated the reminder. After many false starts and narrative detours, there was a tremendous sense of momentum to “The Winds of Winter,” a feeling of bows being tied up, of story threads dovetailing in satisfying fashion (with plenty of murder and darkness mixed in, of course). I loved it.

Part of the appeal of George R. R. Martin’s series has been his efficient subversion of every fantasy trope and his unwillingness to navigate toward easy, heroic conclusions for his characters. That conundrum has seemingly tripped him up as he tries to write the end of his book saga, but make no mistake: Game of Thrones is coming to an end, with the long-awaited sight of Daenerys’ fleet of warriors (Dothraki, Unsullied, and Westerosi among them) serving as an epic punctuation to an episode filled with closure. For all the misery of “The Winds of Winter” (and there was plenty), there were also healthy soupçons of wonder, from Sam beholding the glorious Citadel of the maesters (a solid Hogwarts knock-off) to the multi-colored banners of Daenerys’s new navy.

How about that misery, though? There was a haunted quality to Ramin Djawadi’s piano score in the opening montage, as many crucial characters dressed for the final time, but once Cersei donned that scaly leather armor (looking straight out of Dune), I steeled myself for the worst. Cersei’s story has always been two-fold: She’s a political chess player who wrongly thinks she’s one move ahead of everyone else, and she’s a fearsome mother who wants to protect her children while not quite knowing how. Her wildfire plan was perfectly simple—how else to rid yourself of your enemies (RIP, Margaery) than by blowing them all up at once? But it sealed her fate as a Mad Queen worthy of the vacated title, and the price she paid (Tommen’s artfully shot, silent suicide) felt dreadfully appropriate.

No wonder there was a funereal sense to that coronation scene, with Cersei still clad in black—she finally has the power back, but talk about a poisoned chalice. Her kids are all dead (she couldn’t even bother with a proper burial for Tommen), Jaime looks ready to turn against her, and her seat of power is a smoldering wreck. A side note: Why do any nobles still bother to live in King’s Landing at this point? You’d think when the ruling queen blows up one of the landmarks and roasts half the royal court inside it, that’d nudge you into hunting for real estate in sunnier shores. Perhaps Oldtown? Things seem peaceful over there, even if the Citadel desk clerks are a bit persnickety.

A much more enjoyable bloodbath came up at The Twins, where Walder Frey met an end just as awful as the one he provided for Robb and Catelyn Stark, munching on his own sons (in pie form) before getting his throat cut by Arya. Yes, it was a little clean from a storytelling perspective, but why else would you have the viewer suffer through two years of assassin camp? Seeing the Starks begin to reunite on the same continent had the same heft as seeing Daenerys’s fleet—Arya may still lurk in the shadows, and Bran might stick to hanging out by the weirwood trees, but there’s just something reassuring about having them all (minus Robb and Rickon) be closer together.

For all the misery of “The Winds of Winter” (and there was plenty), there were also healthy soupçons of wonder.

Then again, the finale also brought a quiet coup at Winterfell as Jon Snow was seemingly legitimized by popular demand, crowned the new King in the North simply for his military prowess. The ambiguous note of that triumph was thudding, but necessary. I maybe didn’t need the knowing glances from Littlefinger (he’ll never stop scheming, no matter how many times Sansa politely declines his hand in marriage), but I did tense up at the idea that Jon should ride to glory mostly thanks to his gender after he mostly blew his grand battle with the Boltons. Also, part of his appeal as a great hero in Martin’s narrative is his experience with the Free Folk, and the great empathy it gives him for the people of Westeros beyond their family allegiances—I don’t want him to lose that once he’s swaddled in the robes of a king.

But perhaps it’s inevitable, because “The Winds of Winter” also canonically sealed the long-running theory about Jon’s parentage by finally revealing just what happened at the Tower of Joy. Young Ned, indeed, found his sister Lyanna near death, bleeding out after what seemed like a medieval Caesarean section, and made her brother promise not to tell Robert that the child was fathered by Rhaegar Targaryen, the oldest son of the Mad King. “The Winds of Winter” was already wrapping things up, so it made sense for David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to make it official by acknowledging the truth of the long-running R+L=J theory. I appreciated the artfulness of the info-dump—Lyanna’s repeated “Promise me, Ned,” and the cut from that baby’s black eyes to Jon’s haunted stare—but more than anything, the scene felt like a gleeful thumbs-up to the audience.

That’s fine. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has sometimes struggled to justify the existence of its weird side-plots as it barrels toward a conclusion, and there were some threads that will feel incomplete forever (again, RIP Margaery). Others may get picked up again next season (the Hound is still floating around). But the trade-off is the sheer glee that comes from watching the big puzzle pieces finally fall into place. Lenika and Spencer, were you similarly pleased customers?  

Entries from Lenika Cruz and Spencer Kornhaber to come