Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, “The Iron Throne”

There’s no limit here to the narrative conveniences that exist only to conclude the series’s eight-season arc.

Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, The Iron Throne
Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

If you were still granting David Benioff and D. B. Weiss the benefit of the doubt heading into the series finale of Game of Thrones, “The Iron Throne,” then the episode’s lack of a unifying theme probably seemed intentional. But whereas the possibility of things yet to come and Miguel Sapochnik’s bold directorial choices in last week’s penultimate episode, “The Bells,” certainly allowed for some creative interpretations, “The Iron Throne” runs things into the ground and rejects them all in favor of the laziest and hastiest of resolutions.

This is an episode about post-war reconciliation that’s structurally broken apart into two distinct chunks. Not just visually, with the gray and ashy aftermath of the razing of King’s Landing giving way, weeks later, to a sunny summit of lords, but also tonally. Whereas the first part is bleak and political, the second is comic to the point of nearly sitcomish levels. If there’s anything holding the pieces together, it’s meta-commentary, first in the key framing and preternaturally poetic choices of two shots involving Drogon, and then, more literally, with an excitable Samwell (John Bradley-West) handing over the manuscript for a historical chronicle titled, wait for it, A Song of Ice and Fire. (The punchline? Tyrion’s not mentioned in its pages.)

If there’s any hint as to what the writers were thinking when they penned this send-off, it comes from what’s supposed to be a rallying, mid-episode speech from Tyrion (Peter Dinklage). In truth, his words sound exhausted, like those you’d hear from someone who hasn’t slept well for weeks on end, tasked with trying to pen a happy ending. “What unites people?” he asks the gathered lords and ladies. “Armies? Gold? Flags?” he continues, essentially just throwing out a word salad of disconnected thoughts, stalling for time. “Stories,” he suddenly suggests, out of the blue. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” he claims, already forgetting that destroying stories was pretty much the Night King’s whole deal (just three episodes ago, in “The Long Night”).

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The essential gist, then, of Tyrion’s nomination of Bran “the Broken” as the new King of the Seven Kingdoms—well, six, actually, as the North is now its own independent realm, with Sansa (Sophie Turner) as its leader—is “Fuck it, it’ll make a good story.” This explains pretty much every choice Benioff and Weiss make—save for the part where any of it makes a good story. It also results in a surfeit of artifice, as there’s nothing organic about Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) striding into the foreground, with Drogon spreading his wings behind her so that it looks like the two are one and the same. Would that she had staged that moment herself, in order to awe her assembled Dothraki and Unsullied troops, but the juxtaposition, however awe-inspiring, is still a contrived visual shorthand of what Daenerys has become.

It’s telling that the 10 minutes of “The Iron Throne” that do work are largely silent, and are squandered right at the very start, with a series of tracking shots that follow Tyrion as he walks through the ruins of King’s Landing, ash still falling from the sky. We see a bloodied, half-naked man pass him by, and we see Tyrion pause to look back at the man. Nothing more could have been conveyed in this moment with dialogue, and yet from this moment on, the writers start increasingly spelling things out for us, as if we haven’t been together for 73 episodes. There’s a rich subtext in the first, brief exchange between Tyrion (“I’ll find you later”) and Kit Harington’s Jon Snow (“It’s not safe”), and you can hear the death of Tyrion’s optimism as he commits to it (“I’m going alone”). But things only get increasingly less subtle—more symbolically heavy-handed—from there, beginning with Jon and Davos (Liam Cunningham) almost coming to blows with Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson) over his merciless decision to execute the few surrendered soldiers who are still alive.

There would appear to be no limit to the explicitness of this episode, or to the number of narrative conveniences that exist only for Benioff and Weiss to neatly conclude the show’s eight-season arc. For example, Arya (Maisie Williams), last seen riding out of King’s Landing on a horse, slips past an entire imperial regiment of Unsullied to cozy up next to Jon and warn him that Daenerys knows who he is and sees him as a threat: “I know a killer when I see one,” Arya claims. A killer, sure, but also something like a child-god: all-powerful but naïve, willing to let Tyrion—who she’s just arrested for treason—speak privately with Jon, and then open to meeting with Jon alone, and without a single guard within reach. (The former meeting feels like this week’s SNL parody of Meet the Press, in which the hosts ask Republican politicians what, if anything, it would take to get them to stop supporting Trump, only in this case, it’s Tyrion who’s to find any chink in Jon’s loyal armor.)

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Perhaps Jon really isn’t convinced by Tyrion after their powwow. Maybe he doesn’t actually know that he’s going to stab Daenerys until she looks him in the eyes, so childishly sincere, and promises that the world will be better because she knows what’s “good,” and that nobody else gets to determine what that is. It doesn’t matter if the moment is earned or not, because as the scene plays out, it just feels like one more domino that has to fall. The same is true of the scene’s wrathful follow-up, in which Drogon shows up to avenge his fallen mother, only to demonstrate some kind of superior intellect and restraint, melting Daenerys’s precious throne of swords instead of incinerating Jon. What perfect poetic justice: responding to Daenerys’s now-meaningless pursuit of power by reducing the Iron Throne to equally meaningless slag. But then again, this isn’t a dragon, but rather a puppet with which the writers can show that the Iron Throne was always, no more and no less, just the emptiest of symbols.

If such imagery at least speaks within the broader context of Game of Thrones, other parts of the series buckle under the weight of so many words that this episode expends on delivering a message about politics, and one with contemporary resonances. See how Tyrion explains Daenerys’s rise to tyranny: “Everywhere she goes, evil men die, and we cheer her for it. And she grows more powerful and more sure that she is good and right.” Instead of this serving as the lever that convinces Jon to bury that dagger in Daenerys, seeing how convinced she is of her own merciless “good,” it’s one of a dozen equally potent arguments against violence, and you can practically hear the writers abandoning the books to yell through the screen at viewers when Tyrion tells Jon that his support, or lack thereof, does matter.

The episode’s second half, by contrast, has no deeper meaning whatsoever. It’s a series of disconnected sketches designed to check in with the surviving characters without affixing any real significance to any of them. We see that Bronn (Jerome Flynn) hasn’t only become Highgarden’s lord—as Tyrion promised—but that he’s joined the Small Council as Master of Coin alongside Grand Maester Sam, Master of Ships Davos, and Kingsguard Brienne (Gwendoline Christie). Grey Worm and the Unsullied, having fought for so much and settling for so little real justice, consign themselves to head back to Naath, presumably with the Dothraki, though who really knows or cares at this point? Jon, as punishment for murdering Daenerys, is once more stripped of name, claim, and title, and heads back to the Night’s Watch, alongside Tormund (Kristofer Hivju) and his direwolf, Ghost—which is pretty fitting considering how dispensable and pet-like both of those characters have been for Jon.

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All the complexities that have distinguished many a Game of Thrones episode over the years are absent here; in their place are easy, if at times quite cinematic, table-clearing gestures. This is especially true of the way in which one of the last scenes too-cleverly cuts between Arya, Jon, and Sansa’s final journeys. They’ve all gotten exactly what they want, with Arya charging to the west in relative anonymity aboard a ship, Jon comfortably integrated into a ragtag family of like-minded outcasts, and Sansa, as the Queen of the North, finally recognized for her unique strengths. You don’t doubt that they all face difficult journeys, but the way the story of the Seven Kingdoms is reduced in the homestretch to the rising of four Starks feels pat, especially as a choral version of the show’s theme song kicks in, unintentionally emphasizing how everything about Game of Thrones has grown so increasingly limited in scope aside from the cruelty of its violence.

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Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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