(But wasn’t it kind of unsettling to watch Jon and Tyrion lament her fixation on freeing slaves to an extent that implied any sane monarchs could countenance some amount of slavery?) Drogon took up the anti-fascist position, directing his fire at the seat of power. Mad Dany was struck down because she believed so deeply in the righteousness of her crusade against tyrants and masters that she no longer valued human life. To its credit, the finale devoted more time to political debates than most episodes in the past three seasons. Do good ends justify cruel means? Or should we, like Ned Stark, feel obligated to do the right thing even when it’s suicidal? When someone wrongs you, do you turn the other cheek or do you add their name to the kill list? Can any person be trusted with absolute power? It would’ve been nice if the show had followed these quandaries through to the end. Its struggle between would-be monarchs had depth because it was also a struggle between conflicting ideas about freedom, justice and leadership. In its heyday, Game of Thrones was a political thriller more than a fantasy epic. In this case, it was all I could do to stay awake through the end credits. A happy ending isn’t the same thing as an ending satisfying enough to keep you up at night, thinking about how the show’s elemental questions were resolved (see: Six Feet Under, Mad Men and, just this week, Fleabag).
There’s no question that Bran and his sassy council are better news for the people of Westeros than Cersei, Joffrey, the Mad King, Robert Baratheon-or, in all likelihood, Daenerys. Does he have a core set of beliefs, in the same sense that Dany or Arya did? I’m not sure his Three-Eyed Raven body-share arrangement allows for the formation of subjective values. A dispassionate tautology of a person, he has all the answers because he knows everything. Bran is a strange twist on that archetype his omniscient view of the past and the present makes him a sort of flesh-and-blood A.I., blessed with better decision-making tools than anyone this side of IBM’s Watson.