“The Bells,” the penultimate episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, gives fans all the bloodshed they’ve been clamoring for, especially with the realization of the Cleganebowl fan theory, but does so in a way that constantly chastises the audience for demanding it in the first place. At times, you may be justified in thinking that Michael Haneke was behind the camera. There’s the crucial moment when Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) sits atop Drogon on the outer walls of King’s Landing, having just eradicated all those scorpion ballistas and shattered the Iron Fleet. The battle is essentially won, but she’s gripped by rage, and instead of respecting the ringing bells that signal surrender, she and Drogon proceed to methodically mass murder the city’s people.
Several plots are resolved anticlimactically, almost out of spite, and the heroes—those who don’t become villains, at least—don’t win so much as survive. Two episodes ago, Arya (Maisie Williams) stared down the existential threat of the Night King and said, “Not today.” But here there’s no room for quips in the face of so much needless violence. There’s no pretext of war to defend anyone’s actions, just 30 minutes’ worth of straight-up murder; this isn’t like the Red Wedding, where there was at least a tactical advantage gained by the heinous act.
The episode, so fixated on people’s failed attempts at righteousness, is filled with haunting vignettes depicting mothers desperately trying to shelter their children. At one point, Arya attempts to pull a mother to safety, only for the woman to insist that she abandon her and take her daughter alone. And it’s then that the daughter pushes Arya away, running back to her mother, whereupon the two are instantly immolated—heroism be damned.
Even the scenes that seem safe to unapologetically applaud are turned on their heads. It’s one thing when Harry Strickland (Marc Rissman), leader of the Golden Company, flees in vain from the Dothraki charging toward him. But when this same shot is mirrored later in the episode, only now with an ash-covered Arya running toward the camera, we’re left far more conflicted about the consequences of the war we asked for. Something similar is articulated in the showdown between Cersei’s (Lena Headey) two lovers, Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Euron (Pilou Asbæk). It’s not an elegant fight between knights, but a desperate scrap between a one-armed man and a half-drowned pirate, and while Jaime technically survives, Euron dies knowing that he’s delivered a fatal blow. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
The battle between Sandor (Rory McCann) and his undead brother, Ser Gregor (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson), follows a similar script. Sandor hacks away at his brother, but to no avail. The fight is gorgeously staged, with Gregor at one point standing so tall on the staircase above his brother that he eclipses the sun, and it culminates in a haunting act of self-sacrifice. Knowing this battle is unwinnable, Sandor tackles his brother through a wall and the camera watches from afar as their tangled bodies fall down and into the fiery depths below. Battling for vengeance results only in death, and if Sandor chuckles at his fate, it’s only with the satisfaction of knowing he may have saved Arya from a similar end.
Although “The Bells” is subversive, it isn’t written out of left field by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. For better and worse, this is what they’ve been building to. In fact, they spend the quieter first third of the episode reminding viewers of that foundation. Varys (Conleth Hill) is executed by dragon’s breath, and just as Daenerys promised if she ever learned of his insolence. Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) admits to turning Varys in, which the once-invaluable eunuch accepts with equanimity. “Goodbye old friend,” Varys says, bravely staring down death, knowing that he at least tried to do the right thing. And that’s a sentiment that’s later echoed in the episode, when Tyrion frees his brother against Daenerys’s wishes, hoping that Jaime can succeed where he failed by convincing Cersei to surrender.
The seeds are sown for Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington) realization, too, that doing the right thing may mean turning against his loyalty to Daenerys, especially given their earlier conversation. “I don’t have love here, I only have fear,” says Daenerys, explaining why Jon’s secret was so dangerous to share. Jon tries to convince her otherwise, but when he uncomfortably breaks off her kiss, she transforms before his eyes: “All right then. Let it be fear.”
The episode’s story strands are certainly neatly braided together, but it’s easy to question Daenerys’s moment of decisiveness. Given how simple it was for her to force a surrender, which is to say without that much collateral damage, it’s odd that her council was so dead-set against it, and to the point of Varys committing treason. For three seasons, the writers have been stretching things out by suggesting that there was no way for the dragons to take King’s Landing without so many innocent casualties, and that was when she had three of them, and Qyburn (Anton Lesser)—so quickly and obligatorily disposed of in this episode—hadn’t yet built an arsenal of ballistae. It’s a rather convenient bit of writing that gets us to the tipping point where Daenerys, having won, essentially scores an own goal.
Where it matters, though, “The Bells” delivers. Daenerys’s line about fear or love is echoed by Sandor’s warning to Arya about moving past vengeance, and these two dichotomies are the ones that ring true throughout the episode. “Look at me,” bellows Sandor as the Red Keep begins to crumble around them, noting that Cersei’s already lost, whether Arya does the deed herself or not. “You want to be like me?” Shots of Sandor fighting his brother—a manifestation of death itself, which Sandor ultimately embraces—are juxtaposed with those of Arya choosing life, abandoning her kill list and attempting to flee the city. When Sandor gets knocked down, there’s nobody to pick him up, but when Arya falls, a kindly refugee comes to her aid.
Sandor has been rushing toward his inevitable death for some time, and the episode ends with Arya, however improbably, riding away from hers, out of the hallucinatory ruins of King’s Landing atop a pale horse. And though Jaime and Cersei die futilely, the keep collapsing on top of them, they do so bittersweetly in each other’s arms, gazing at one another: “Nothing else matters.” As Benioff and Weiss show with this masterful rebuttal of an episode, a upending of so many expectations, it’s never too late to choose a different narrative.
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