One year ago today, the biggest show on television came to its epic conclusion. Known for its grand scale, mature content and shocking plot twists, the game-changing adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s still unfinished “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels was riding higher than even most big-screen IPs can hope to reach.
And then it all came crashing down like a dragon shot out of the sky.
After turning down an initial offer to run the show for ten full seasons, show-runners and head writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss opted instead to end it in eight, with Season 7 airing in 2017 with only 7 episodes instead of the usual ten. Two years then passed to produce the final season, which would have just six episodes but promised longer-run times and epic scales.
The response was huge. A record-shattering 19.3 million viewers tuned in to the final episode. The response to what ultimately transpired on the screen, however, was less than record-shattering. While the first three episodes enjoyed fairly decent reviews, the last half of the season received scathing feedback, with the online fan reception proving even worse. A year later, a show that was once the king of entertainment, considered by many to be the last bulwark of popular monoculture in an increasingly fractured and niche television landscape, was all but gone from the public consciousness.
So as we sit in quarantine today mourning Thrones’ fall from grace and praying that George R.R. Martin is using social isolation to finally complete “The Winds of Winter,” it’s time to look back on the dragon-sized corpse of a pop culture juggernaut and ask that classic question: “What Went Wrong?” In case you haven’t guessed, yeah, here there be spoilers.
In hindsight, red flags can be spotted from the earliest episodes, foretelling the problems that would ultimately sink the show. Motivations were altered, characters flattened into single dimensions and the central themes of Martin’s source material were ignored if not directly contradicted. That last note is certainly unsurprising, given that back in 2013 Benioff said in an interview with Andy Greenwald that “Themes are for 8th grade book reports.”
The best case study for what happened to Game of Thrones’s latter half can be found in Season 2. Sandwiched between the ground-breaking first season and legendary seasons 3 and 4, Season 2 was a mixed bag. And the dividing line between what worked and what didn't could not be more clear.
The storylines adapted from the books, most notably Tyrion’s maneuvering in King’s Landing and Theon’s time ruling Winterfell, fire on all cylinders. The major divergences, however, fall far short of the expected standards for the show: Daenerys’ time in Qarth plods on and by the end of the season has failed both to advance the plot AND to make any sense. Why did Xaro betray Daenerys? Why did Doreah betray Daenerys? And why was Xaro's vault empty?
Meanwhile, inserting original creation Talisa as Robb Stark’s new love and wife alters his trajectory completely. His ultimate tragedy changes from failing to meet an impossible standard of honor to being too horny for his own good and marrying a girl he’s just met. It’s basically the plot of Frozen if Frozen ended with Anna being murdered at her uncle’s wedding.
The flaws with the showrunners’ original content didn’t go unnoticed. Things like the Qarth plot were criticized at the time, but the next two seasons stayed close to the source material with iconic results. For a time, it seemed that all was well. Unfortunately, as tends to happen in the world of Game of Thrones, all was not well.
After the Red Wedding at the end of Season 3 rocked the world with its sudden brutality and game-changing casualties, Benioff and Weiss discussed how they began the series hoping that they could at least keep the show on air long enough to make it to that moment in the third book. But as Season 4 closed the final pages of “A Storm of Swords,” it became unclear if the showrunners actually had much interest in what came after that narrative turning point.
In the season finale, as Tyrion Lannister says farewell to his brother Jaime, readers of the book noticed a crucial omission. In the book, Jaime reveals the truth about the brutal fate of Tyrion’s first wife. In retaliation, Tyrion reveals the truth of Cersei’s disloyalty to Jaime, a duel reveal that sets the characters’ lives on dramatic new trajectories. When the scene passed with that pivotal conversation nowhere in sight, it was a clarion call that the series would be diverging from the source material at a hitherto unknown level.
And diverge it did. Seasons 5 and 6 abandoned and altered huge sections of “A Feast For Crows” and “A Dance With Dragons,” most egregiously in Sansa Stark’s arc and the Dorne plot (which have enough problems to earn their own “What Went Wrong" installment). And it quickly became clear that no lessons had been learned from Season 2, with predictably uneven results. Some original moments proved excellent, such as the White Walker’s assault on Hardhome or Cersei’s destruction of the Sept of Baelor. But as the ashes of the sept dimmed, the show had finally reached the point of no return: It had outpaced Martin's writing.
Without source material to follow, a full reliance was placed on Benioff and Weiss, who still maintained near-full control over the storyline. And the distraction that had begun post-Season 4 now proved all-consuming as their eyes turned elsewhere – to a controversial “Confederate” series and a flashy Star Wars deal, both projects that died in the aftermath of the final season.
Seemingly eager to move on to these new projects but unwilling to hand off the show to a new creative team, the showrunners turned down HBO’s 10 season offer, which brings us back to where we began: A brief 13 episodes to wrap up a sprawling saga. And instead of crafting an ending of their own to fit the changes they hda made, they opted to attempt to tack on a series of notes Martin had given them on his endgame, an endgame for characters in wildly different places than where the show had taken them.
After so confidently attempting to craft their own unique, if uneven, storyline, the sudden return to the source left plotlines abandoned, character development shredded and characters forced into unearned and unjustified choices and positions. And that is how we got here, a year later, writing an autopsy instead of a tribute.
The epic saga of Game of Thrones proved behind the scenes to be an epic lesson in the need to learn from your mistakes and to know when to have the humility to walk away when your heart is no longer in your work. But the truth is, it was not impossible to craft a satisfying finale from the pieces Benioff and Weiss gave themselves. The ultimate fatal flaw, the dragonglass dagger in the icy heart of the show, proved to be that singular quote I mentioned earlier:
“Themes are for 8th grade book reports.”
This jarring statement could easily be seen as an immaterial side comment. But looking back at the show in comparison to the books, it becomes an all too real story-telling philosophy. Some of the most prevalent messages underlying Martin’s work are fairly simple: War is hell, a game the privileged play where everyone else suffers no matter who wins. And on a more personal level, violence, even when justified, is an eroding cycle of self-destruction.
Book 4, “A Feast For Crows,” is the most theme-heavy in the series. The titular “feast for crows” is a metaphor for the waste left behind by the wars of the past three books, waste that characters like Euron Greyjoy have come to feed on. It is no coincidence, I think, that it was almost entirely cut from the show.
Under Benioff and Weiss’ direction, the violence and war that helped Game of Thrones go viral ultimately morphed into a blockbuster “cool factor”. Consequences, both external and internal, were eschewed for hero shots, with no time for moral complication. Moments like Arya mass executing House Frey and Sansa feeding Ramsay to his own dogs are not treated as shockingly life-altering moments of revenge. They are “badass stunts”, begging for applause, because the killers are our heroes and their victims are the baddies.
This especially applies to Daenerys’ journey. Whether it was locking Xaro and Doreah within an empty vault, crucifying slavers, or burning her enemies alive, it was always seen as justified. Killing the bad guys was just what the heroes did. Until suddenly the plot demanded that, for Daenerys at least, that was no longer the case. When she razes King’s Landing to the ground in the penultimate episode, the audience is told in the span of one hour to stop cheering for her and condemn her to death.
This sudden turn failed so badly because in order for a narrative point of this magnitude to work, it has to be based on the body of work that came before. And the story that tells us Daenerys shouldn’t end the war in this way is very different from the story that was told in the last 78 episodes of Game of Thrones.
A story is not just text on a page or images on a screen. Intentional or not, the messaging beneath the surface forms all the same, fed by every decision made by the creator. When all is said and done, it is those messages that are the true identity of the story. Any writer that fails to recognize and reconcile with them will discover that the narrative castle they have built is set on a hollow foundation and, like the High Sparrow, will watch even the best laid plans go up in an explosion of wildfire.
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