Spoilers inevitably follow – particularly for the earlier episodes in the season. If you don’t want any hint of what’s going on this season, look away now!

 

In the wake of the devastation wrought at Kings Landing, the survivors try to make sense of the new world order.

So, here we are. Seventy-three episodes, eight years and many deaths later, the final episode of what has been one of the most talked-about TV shows ever is upon us. It’s been an uneven season to this point, with some amazing highs and disappointing lows, but could writers Benioff and Weiss stick the landing and bring us the satisfying conclusion that the season deserved?

Mostly, the answer is yes. There’s a couple of forward jumps in time which do their best to paper over the fact that there was a lot more story left to tell and an increasingly short (self-imposed) timescale in which to tell it. This also explains the fact that not everyone gets to have had a truly satisfying final appearance as the show ends and the credits roll. But for the most part, Thrones wraps up fairly well, with everything neatly tied off.

And that’s perhaps part of the issue. I’ve seen some intelligent commentary on the show suggesting the real gear change in the last two seasons has been from the sort of sprawling, messy, human narrative which Martin liked to create and into a more focused, ‘traditional’ type of television ending, where everything falls into place and everyone gets the resolution they need. Nowhere is this more evident than here, as the writing methodically ticks off everything it needs to in order to resolve all the remaining plot threads, without really resolving them in the way long-term viewers might hope or expect.

After the exhausting dragon-based apocalypse of last episode, it’s somewhat of a relief to see the show return to where (in my opinion) it’s always done better, with lots of intrigue, interesting dialogue and characters bouncing off one another. War has never been where the Game of Thrones really got played, and watching the quiet aftermath of all that devastation, and the decisions taken in its wake, is far more compelling to me than any number of scenes of dragonfire melting things and people.

If I have a specific criticism, it did become a little tiresome as the episode opened that the camera continued to focus on the hurt and betrayed feelings of the men at the actions of their queen. Not that the opening, as characters wander through the silent remains of Kings Landing, isn’t powerfully filmed, but honestly, I didn’t need to see men gurning at the camera to know it was bad, because I’d seen it for myself last week.

Daenerys has been a force with which to be reckoned for the entire run of the show, and I should have liked, last week, to have seen more of her emotional journey and how she had tipped from liberator to tyrant from her own point of view. Robbing her of this agency robbed the ‘turn’ – which was debated mightily by fans for the last seven days – of much of its resonance and impact. As I have said to many people, I had no issue with the destination, but the journey in this season had felt truncated and contrived. This week, as the episode progresses, we get a bit more satisfaction on that score, but like everything, it can’t help but feel a little too neat, a little too rushed, and therefore not quite as satisfying as I might have hoped.

Broadly though, it’s an episode that does a lot to redeem the mis-steps of the previous couple of instalments. It isn’t the perfect ending we might have hoped for, and it can’t ever help feeling like it’s all being chivvied along a little too rapidly towards the finish line, but given everything, it’s an ending that works as well as it can.

Verdict: All the narrative sleights of hand in the world can’t hide the fact that this simply doesn’t have enough time to do what it really ought to have done, but in the context of what it has, it does a solid – if unspectacular – job of drawing proceedings to a close. 7/10

Greg D. Smith