I’d love to say that’s where the idiocy stopped, but I’d be lying. And don’t tell me about the supposedly colossal intellect of dragons as “confirmed” by a throwaway line of speculative dialogue in an earlier (much better) season, because this is the same dragon who, just a couple of episodes ago, couldn’t spot an entire fleet waiting in ambush despite being in the air directly above it. What, we’re just supposed to accept that he implicitly understood this? All he does is sleep and eat sheep! He’s a big, dumb lizard. This is where the real stupidity arrived in earnest, beginning with Drogon waking up from his nap, finding Dany dead, and then somehow figuring out that the Iron Throne and the aimless pursuit of power were to blame for everything all along, turning his smelting fire on the chair in a knowing metaphor that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was all very Anakin and Obi-Wan, just less romantic. So he went to interrupt her while she was getting unsubtly turned on by stroking the arm of the Iron Throne and shanked her in the middle of one last incestuous smooch. Jon, true to form, insisted that, despite her genocidal rampages and mental subtitled warmonger speeches, Dany was still everyone’s queen. He got his moment to sassily toss his Hand of the Queen brooch away, and he was sure to make the show’s thematic underpinnings as explicit as possible. Tyrion gave speeches in “The Iron Throne”, just like the old days, and they were even relatively well-written. But did we really have to do the whole Maleficent thing to get that point across? Did nobody in the writer’s room think that was silly? Then again, someone in the writer’s room had Tyrion develop what can only be described as a kind of imp sonar to locate the mangled corpses of his brother and sister, presumably so he could sob over how good this show was when Cersei didn’t spend an entire season looking out of the window drinking wine and then getting unceremoniously crushed by falling debris. I’ll happily concede that this has been the plan for Dany all along, of course, and I suppose the underlying subtext of the show in its entirety, which is that power - the lust for it, the accumulation of it, the right to it - corrupts even the best of us. She barbequed an entire city! And she’s wearing all black! As flecks of tumbling ash dapple their shoulders, they survey all that their queen hath wrought, and they are sad because at this point it’s apparently difficult to work out if Dany is going to be good for the Seven Kingdoms or not, despite the fact she’s clearly a cartoon villainess now. With King’s Landing now a charred ruin and Grey Worm happily executing every living man, woman and child he can find, it’s only right to have our morally upstanding heroes - that would be Jon, Tyrion, and Davos, if you’re keeping count - stroll through the carnage. Not that they phrased it quite like that, obviously.
What follows, then, is a more or less random collection of observations and complaints that occurred to me throughout “The Iron Throne” and for a little while after, as I scrolled through Twitter and laughed at the people frantically sharing gifs and thanking the show for all its determined efforts to betray and disappoint its ardent viewership. The slightly longer answer would be terribly and nonsensically, but I have a word count to meet and it’s always good to show your work. But how did it end? The short answer would be terribly.
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