The Game of Thrones Season Finale Was a Crime Against Humanity and the Showrunners Should be Jailed For It

Season eight has been a flaming port-o-potty fire for the past several weeks, but the finale took the awfulness to a whole ‘nother level. This was so unbelievably bad, and yet who couldn’t have seen it coming?

Here is my running reaction as I watched the episode:

• I really felt for Tyrion when he found Jamie and Cersei’s bodies beneath the rubble. Great acting on his part, as usual. It was by far the most emotional part of the episode for me. The assumption is that Tyrion’s tears were for Jamie but it was probably for both his siblings even as much as he and Cersei hated each other. They were his only family left.
• But then the moment was diminished–and this has been a running theme this season–when you see how much of the castle apparently wasn’t ruined in the previous episode. Last episode they made it seem like the whole entire thing collapsed on Jamie and Cersei, but now this episode we see there’s a lot that didn’t collapse. So, like, Jamie and Cersei could’ve survived if they would’ve just stood, like, 20 feet away from where they were crushed. That broke my immersion in the episode and detracted from Tyrion’s performance, which again was stellar. I was sad for him, too. And for Jamie and Cersei.
• Obviously like all of you, I liked Jamie’s character, but I also liked Cersei’s character a lot. I was rooting for her. I thought she had become a good ruler, ruthless and badass. Of course she was the villain of the show but I liked her because she didn’t buy into any of that nonsense about “making the world a better place.” C’mon that was all so contrived. Nobody watching the show cared about making the world a better place for the common folk, who are rarely even seen on camera. Once the show overtook the books, the hack showrunners used that term “make the world a better place” so many damn times it made my head spin. It was not an idea of Martin’s. It was modern, bleeding-heart, save-the-world, adopt-an-African-child white liberal narcissism awkwardly forced into a show about swords, dragons and ice zombies.
• They ruined Jamie’s character arc, which had been building since like season 3, in the span of a couple episodes. He’s changed! He’s a good man now! He’s going to protect the Stark girls now. He broke his oath and killed the king because the king was about to incinerate a million innocent people! He’s going to fight for the living against the dead! He now realizes his sister-lover Cersei is a wicked monster! He’s going to join the good guys! And maybe now that the army of the dead is defeated he’ll complete his character arc and kill his evil sister and bring peace and harmony to the land!
• Psyche: he’s gonna just smash and dash Brienne and go back to his evil sister-lover. Five seasons of character development down to tubes. Got a little fan service sex scene with Brienne, but it ended up being completely pointless. The very next day he decides he’s going back to die with Cersei. Even though he could have lived if he just stayed on the side that has dragons. And even though a big part of his character’s story was finally realizing Cersei is a monster. All of that out the window. The only reason he went to Winterfell is so they could have a fan service moment of All Your Favorite Characters Together Fighting The Ice Zombies. And the sex scene with Brienne. They just took a steaming dump on Jamie’s character.
• Danys speech was uninteresting. The show runners thought they were so clever with the visual of her with the dragons wings behind her. I’m sure they’ll put that on a shirt and all the idiots who couldn’t see how horrendously bad this season was will buy it. It felt contrived. I just kinda rolled my eyes. Like so many other things this season, the showrunners probably thought they were geniuses for coming up with it, but in reality, I’m surprised they didn’t use that image or a similar one years ago. It’s one of those scenes that dumb people will look at and think, “Wow, that’s so deep!” How? Because it shows she’s the Dragon Queen? Like the show hasn’t been shoving that fact down our throats since 2011?
• Jon’s conversation with Tyrion was good. It was the only moment in the past few seasons where Tyrion felt like the old Tyrion, aka the best character on the show (or second best: Tywin Lannister was the best character in the series). I guess I’m glad we finally got the old Tyrion back.
• Jon’s true identity wound up never mattering at all. Fucking awesome. They’ll say it mattered because it made him kill Dany, given that he knew in the back of his mind she would have eventually killed him because he’s a threat to her power.
• Um, no: I’m pretty sure Jon killed Dany because she became a genocidal maniac who roasted women and children alive for no reason. That’s why he was looking around basically in shock all throughout episode five. Wasn’t that what the showrunners were getting at? That Jon was deciding right then and there, as he was watching Dany kill everyone, that this bitch needed to go?
• Jon’s true identity amounted to nothing. You could’ve removed that part of the story and nothing would’ve changed. In the end he’s back to being the same bastard Jon Snow he was in first episode.
• How come it wasn’t winter in King’s Landing in episodes 1-5 but it’s full on blizzarding there now?
• The scene where Jon kills Dany was weak. I wanted to see her death more drawn out. We needed to hear her say something after he stabbed her. We needed to know her last words. I wish they wouldn’t have made Jon surprise her with the knife to the heart mid-kiss. I wanted to see Jon slowly walk up to her and brandish his sword, then see Dany’s expression suddenly change from love and triumph to horror as she realizes what’s happening. “Jon. . . Jon?. . . WHAT ARE YOU DOING? JON! NO!! DROGON, HELP! DRACAR”–*STAB*
• And then Jon starts crying after he does it. Come on. Bitch move. I wish he wouldn’t have looked like he immediately regretted it. Like, come on: quit crying like a little bitch. You know you did the right thing. The chick went Full Genghis Khan on that city. She was obviously out of control.
• And then Drogon appearing: now the dragon is dumb and has no idea who killed Dany? He thinks she just dropped dead? Get real. He would have incinerated Jon on the spot. And they could have even shown this and Jon would have survived because he’s a Targaryen and can’t be burned.
• Instead Drogon just torches the Throne because, I guess the Throne killed her!
• Well, I guess in a way it kind of did, and I’m sure that’s the message the showrunners had in mind. They probably thought that was so genius of them.
• But how the hell is the dragon simultaneously too dull to realize that the guy standing over Dany’s body is the one who killed her, yet poetic enough to make a symbolic political point that obsession with power will ultimately be a ruler’s demise? Get the everlovin’ fuck outta here. The writers of this show are not even a tenth as smart as they think they are.
• Then Drogon just fucks off with the body and goes across the Narrow Sea to, uh, idk? So now there’s a fully grown, grieving, orphaned firebreathing dragon just loose in the world I guess. That will work out well. At least it’s an interesting question to ask: where does Drogon go and what does he do now? Maybe he goes to the ruins of ancient Valyria. When Tyrion and Jorah were passing through in season five they saw Drogon flying overhead, so that’s probably it. But we have no idea. I’m sure the showrunners have no idea too, they don’t care. They just wanted to be done with Game of Thrones. That whole scene was just another box to hastily check off, like everything in this season.
• Now they’re in the dragon pit for Tyrion’s trial and it’s not winter anymore. It actually looks quite nice out. The trees are full of leaves and there’s not a flake of snow on the ground. And suddenly everyone from from all over has assembled. But I guess that’s because they established the precedent that 21st century commercial airline travel has been available in Westeros since season 7.
• Fuck Yara. She wasn’t even there for anything. She’s only defending Danereys because she wanted to lez out and scissor with her. Plus no one cares what the Ironborn think. “Queen Yara” was not involved whatsoever in either of the two major battles this season. Sansa should’ve told Yara to shut the fuck up instead of Edmure Tully.
• Fuck Grey Worm. He’s a robot. Everything would be perfect for the characters if they just offed him. All the unsullied would be free to scatter, and for some reason the Dothraki obey Grey Worm which I don’t understand. Literally every word out of Grey Worm’s mouth amounts to “DANY EES MY QUEEN”.
• Sam stands up after Sansa rudely and for no reason de-pantses poor old Edmure Tully. Sam wants democracy! Yay! He’s supposed to be a progressive voice ahead of his time with an idea the world sadly isn’t ready for. But this just feels forced. Suddenly Edmure Tully isn’t the biggest dipshit in the room. Sorry Sam, love ya, but the writers really threw you under the bus there. Bastards.
• Then Tyrion’s turn to speak comes and he proposes an idea that is so futuristic that it hasn’t even yet become reality in our own world: electing a supercomputer as president. Completely devoid of emotion and basically the internet in human form, Bran would make an interesting choice for king. He’s the ultimate technocrat, which of course is the real-world technocratic elite’s fantasy indulged: an egghead with 10 years of postsecondary schooling fully empowered to make every decision for the nation without challenge. Yes that’s what their world—and ours, of course—needs: a hyperintelligent technocrat with absolute power. A Philosopher-King.
• But hello? Bran may be a human encyclopedia who knows everything that has ever happened but he grades out as sorely deficient in the other categories important for leadership, such as, you know leadership. There’s also negotiation, charisma, willpower, communication and toughness, but whatever. None of that shit matters. He’s the only one who doesn’t give a fuck that the throne was melted into a puddle because he has his own chair already. Crown him!
• LOL at the fact that Dany thought her main threats to the throne were Cersei, Jon and Sansa, when in reality it’s Bran who takes her throne.
• No moment in the whole series made more painfully obvious the technocratic elitism of HBO and its target audience of Jon Oliver-watching, college degree-having, coastal, urban, millennial professionals than the moment Bran became king. This is how our own elite here in America view things: every question in politics has a right answer and a wrong answer, everything is objective, and all we’ve ever needed to do to fix everything is give absolute power someone who has all the right answers. Spoiler alert: they believe they’ve got all the answers. So we should just give them absolute power and watch utopia unfold.
• It can’t be that virtually all political questions are matters of competing interests rather than simply good and evil. Our supposed betters and elites are so brilliant and enlightened that they see the world entirely in black and white. It takes a whole lot of Ivy League degrees, PhDs and Senior Fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations to come up with an idea as monumentally stupid as giving some overly-educated technocrat absolute power.
• And why is Tyrion making his whole speech basically to convince Grey Worm? I get that Grey Worm is now the military dictator with Dany dead, but the guy is dumber than a brick. He has no idea what Tyrion is saying. The only thought his pea-brain is capable of comprehending is “DANY MY QUEEN.”
• And of course there’s no debate at all on the matter. Nobody voices a disagreement that perhaps someone else would be a better king, maybe Jon Snow, the rightful king who the show touted as the finest leader alive literally two episodes ago, who saved the world from the psychotic dragon bitch, and last but not least a guy uniquely positioned through his status as both a stark and a Targaryen to unite the whole realm. When Jon’s true identity as the rightful king was finally revealed at the end of season seven, it was one of the biggest moments in the show–or it seemed to be at the time. Now it doesn’t matter at all who Jon Snow is.
• Why not just tell Grey Worm to fuck off and do what everyone in the show wanted to do this entire season, and what the whole show has been building towards since season one, and what George RR Martin obviously intended, and MAKE JON SNOW THE KING.
• No, we can’t do that because GREY WORM MAD. And because the Hollywood elites who run this show are utopian technocrats who believe a PhD, or better yet, Wikipedia, would make the perfect ruler. Ugh.
• I still can’t believe nobody stood and said “Alright, let’s be honest here: we all know Jon Snow needs to be the king, so let’s just kill Grey Worm and make it happen.” Nope. Now they’re all standing hailing their new king who’s title is apparently “Bran The Broken,” not Bran the Brilliant, or Bran the Guy Who Knows Literally Everything. Gimme a break.
• All the sudden Grey Worm is calling the shots the second Bran makes his first order as king? Fuck Grey Worm. My goodness. This guy is just in the way of everything good. And why the hell is Grey Worm so mad at Tyrion? Tyrion didn’t do shit to Grey Worm. It doesn’t affect Grey Worm a bit that Tyrion freed Jamie against Dany’s wishes. Grey Worm is literally the worst. He’s enforcing the rules of a queen who has been dead for weeks. This is so stupid. Someone needs to tell him his queen is dead, he has no dick, and that he needs to shut the fuck up and go back to the stupid desert hole he came from.
• So as a compromise they decide to send Jon Snow to the Night’s Watch, which apparently still exists for some reason even though the Wall’s collapsed and the White Walkers are dead. And now the Wildlings are cool with everyone to the south so there’s really zero point to the Nights Watch. Zero.
• I guess now the Night’s Watch is just a government-funded men’s club/penal colony where guys can go hunt and drink and fuck around in the wilderness as long as they promise to never boink another chick again. Sounds like a good deal considering now that there’s no actual threat for the Nights Watch to protect the realm against, so the vows don’t mean shit and won’t ever be enforced because the whole organization is a joke. The Night’s Watch is now the Westeros equivalent of White Collar prison where they send all the rich kids who get in trouble. If you have political clout in Westeros you can avoid the gallows and have your misbehaving, spoiled rich kids sent to Club Fed On The Wall instead.
• And how the hell does Grey Worm know Jon killed Dany? Hello? There’s no body. The dragon flew off with it. Was Jon a dumbass and admitted to it? Did the showrunners make him that monumentally stupid? Hey dummy: no body no crime. Jon could have dipped out of the throne room and said “idk where she went, bro. Probably flew off with her dragon to burn some more innocent children seeing as there’s none left here. You think I killed her? Where’s your proof, Grey Worm? Kiss my ass, you cockless dummy. I’m the king now.”
• Jon got utterly screwed this season because the too-clever-by-half showrunners wanted to THUBVERT EXTHPECKTAYSHUNTHS. Jon didn’t get to kill the Night King—y’know, the whole reason he was brought back from the dead—because the showrunners thought it would be Too Obvious. Jon couldn’t be king even though George RR Martin explicitly set it up for him to be king, because Everyone Would Be Expecting It. And as we all know that’s the only thing that can make a movie good: if it subverts our expectations.
• Hey dummies: EVERYONE KNEW FRODO WAS GOING TO BE THE ONE TO DESTROY THE RING. EVERYONE KNEW HARRY POTTER WAS GOING TO DEFEAT VOLDEMORT IN THE END. EVERYONE KNEW LUKE SKYWALKER WAS GOING TO BE THE HERO IN THE END. The fact that we knew all these things did not in any way detract from Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. My goodness. It doesn’t matter if the audience knows the destination AS LONG AS YOU MAKE THE JOURNEY MEANINGFUL, MEMORABLE, COMPELLING, BELIEVABLE AND SATISFYING. But apparently these two blithering idiots Dan and Dave felt they weren’t capable of doing so, so they took the coward’s way out and SUBVERTED OUR EXPECTATIONS by ruining virtually every major character arc in the show.
• God these guys are the worst.
• And to make matters worse Jon is still being a bitch about killing Dany. He’s whining to Tyrion about not knowing whether he did the right thing. Dude, it’s obvious to everyone you did the right thing. That’s what the showrunners intended us to think. All the other characters know it was right. Now the showrunners are making it seem like Jon has regrets over killing the psychotic genocidal child-murdering megalomaniac? This writing is so unbelievably awwwwwwwful.
• What’s stopping the main characters from making the gesture of sending Jon to the wall just so Grey Worm finally shuts the fuck up, and then having Grey Worm and his stupid cockless soldiers all murdered in their sleep, and then bringing Jon back? This can and should happen. George RR Martin, the guy who brought you the Red Wedding, would totally do something like this.
• But no: Jon has to go to the Night’s Watch for the rest of his life because GREY WORM MAD.
• When Jon leaves, there are Night’s Watch guys there to escort him. How? Wouldn’t everyone in the Night’s Watch have deserted the moment the Wall fell? Why would anyone feel the need to keep the Night’s Watch going after the events that just took place? Don’t you think the guys up there would have all just said, “Okay this is pointless, let’s get the hell out of here and go somewhere warmer.”
• This is why I haven’t been able to enjoy any of this season: literally every five seconds something happens that totally breaks my immersion in the show and makes me go, “Wait, this makes absolutely zero sense.”
• Jon could’ve just challenged Grey Worm to a trial by combat, whooped his ass and stayed. Yes, Jon would’ve won, because Jon has a dick and Grey Worm doesn’t.
• Wait. WHAT?? Grey Worm and all his dickless buddies are now fucking-off to the Isle of Nath, where Grey Worm’s other dead bitch Missandei is from?
• So you’re telling me that this guy Grey Worm, who is literally the sole reason Jon Snow is being sent away, is now leaving the continent, and Jon still has to leave? Everyone else has to go along with Grey Worm’s ruling even though Grey Worm is leaving the continent? This is so unbelievably stupid. I hate this show so much.
• Sansa to Jon: “I wish there’d been another way.” YEAH, THERE IS ANOTHER WAY: watch Grey Worm and his dickless buddies sail off, wave goodbye, and then say, “Okay Jon you’re good, you can stay. The dickless dummy is gone now.”
• It’s impossible to put into words how idiotic this show has become.
• Okay, now Jon’s leaving and I don’t care about anything else. There’s like 10-15 minutes left in the finale and I want to fast forward through it all because literally all the questions have been resolved. They’ve been resolved horrendously, but they’ve been resolved. So there’s no tension or uncertainty anymore. This is not anything like I would have imagined this show’s final minutes to end. If you told me back in 2014 that I would be wanting to fast forward through the final 15 minutes of Game of Thrones, I would never have believed you. And yet here we are.
• Arya’s sailing west. Cool, too bad we’ll never get to see what she discovers.
• Brienne is writing some Nice Things about Jamie Lannister in the Big Book of Knights. Whoopdie-fucking-do. The guy’s character arc was completely obliterated by the writers, so Brienne has literally no reason to feel sad for Jamie: he took her virginity, made her fall in love with him, then abruptly left to go be with his sadistic ex/sister and was crushed to death by a collapsing castle (and that’s because he happened to be standing in the only part of the room that actually collapsed).
• Brienne can write about all of Jamie’s accomplishments but it doesn’t matter because the idiotic show deprived him of his final moment of redemption that it had been building up to since season three. And Brienne’s last words for Jamie are “Died protecting his queen.” Are you kidding me? That’s Jamie’s moment of redemption? That he deserted the good guys to go back to the villain? I’m supposed to feel good about this? This show has so many plot holes it’s become a paradox. Jamie didn’t even die heroically like he was supposed to. How can we–or Brienne–feel good about him?
• You know a show is horrible when you’re not mad at the characters for the things they do, but instead you’re mad at the writers for making the characters do them.
• Oh, look: Sam and his buddies at the Citadel wrote the whole history of the show. Ripped straight out of Lord of the Rings. And let’s have a joke at Tyrion’s expense–“Teehee! The dwarf isn’t even mentioned in the book! LOLZ” Okay, fine, have a joke at Tyrion’s expense but this means the Maesters who are supposedly the wisest guys in Westeros are complete fucking idiots. Tyrion was obviously a central part of the story and is the sole reason the current King of Westeros is even on the throne.
• Bronn makes an appearance. The writers don’t even let him crack a joke though. Did I mention the writers are horrible and should all be given lifetime bans from every studio in Hollywood, evicted from their Los Angeles-area homes and deported to Canada immediately?
• King Bran (honestly, I kinda like him as king, even as much as I hate the idea of it and how this has all played out) says he’ll go find Drogon and possibly warg into him, meaning King Bran now has his very own personal dragon that he can pilot with his mind.
• Bronn is the Lord of Coin? The Treasury Secretary of Westeros? A glorified accountant? A bean-counter? Instead of the Lord of Roughing People Up & Assassinating Enemies of the Crown? Whose idea was this? I guess it SUBVERTED OUR EXPECTATIONS™, though!
• Okay, now they give Bronn some cheeky lines. He’s concerned about the brothels being destroyed. There’s the Bronn we all know.
• Now that I think about it, how the hell does Bronn even end up here? Nobody but Tyrion even knows who he is. He fought on the other side of the war between Dany and Cersei, and that’s just ignored? Tyrion must’ve just told Bran, “Hey so I owe this guy Bronn Highgarden in exchange for him agreeing to not kill me the other week. I know he fought against our side in the war and I know you’ve never even met the guy in person, but can we give him one of the biggest and most valuable castles in the realm and make him the Master of Coin?” And Bran’s like, “Alright sure.”
• And they’re back to Jonny Snow, now arriving at the Night’s Watch, even though, again, there’s no reason for him to be there, and there’s no reason for the Night’s Watch to even exist.
• Now Arya’s leaving, but we’re never going to see where she goes. And Sansa is back to being Queen of the North, like she was for the past two seasons, but now I guess it’s a big deal because the North is officially independent now, even though Sansa was in open rebellion against Cersei the whole time and didn’t recognize Dany’s legitimacy ever. I guess the only difference now is Sansa has a crown. Cool. Good for her. She’s hot.
• Jonny finally gets to reunite with Ghost, and we’re supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy inside about this and forget that there was no good reason for Jon to ever let Ghost go in the first place in episode four. Okay, I’ll admit, it did make me feel warm and fuzzy. I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for dogs.
• Now Jon and the Wildlings, who are apparently the Night’s Watch now, are leaving to go on an excursion north of the wall for some reason, even though there’s nothing out there anymore. I guess they’re gonna just walk around in the freezing wilderness and come back? Whatever effect the idiotic writers intended this closing scene to have on the audience is not entirely clear, but I can tell you that I’m not feeling it, whatever it is.
• And that’s how the show ends. With a big, “. . . . . . .oookay. . .?“
• They didn’t show King Bran wearing a crown? Why not? Dumb.
• One thing that’s been annoying as hell about season eight: the idiotic fanbois still delusionally clinging to this show and hearing no evil, speaking no evil and seeing no evil. When you bring up the fact that almost nothing in this season was believable, they retort, “It’s a fantasy show with ice zombies and dragons; it’s not supposed to be believable! DUHHH.” As if this excuses the fact that there’s a gaping plot hole literally every five seconds this season.
• Hey, geniuses: we’ve already accepted that the world itself in which Game of Thrones takes place is fictional and fantastical and unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean nothing INSIDE that world has to make logical sense. How is it so hard to understand this? In these idiots’ minds if I’ve accepted the fact that this show has dragons, I’m also supposed to accept the fact that these characters can suddenly travel across an entire continent in the span of an episode for no other reason than that the plot demanded it and the showrunners wanted to wrap things up as quickly as possible so they could get to work on defiling the Star Wars franchise even more than Disney already has.
• I just hated virtually everything about this season. It may have been the worst season of any show in television history. And it’s so uniquely bad not because the writing was corny, or the scenery looked cheap, or the CGI was bad or the premise of the show was dull—no, none of that was the case. It was bad because the showrunners simply didn’t give a fuck. They released an unfinished product.
• It’s like a video game that comes out and is full of so many glitches and bugs the game is unplayable. It’s like if I’m typing away at a paper due at midnight, and when midnight strikes I just submit my unfinished product with no editing, proofreading or refining. My teacher’s reading through it wondering why some paragraphs just abruptly end mid sentence, or why my notes in parentheses saying (explain this more) and (flesh this section out more) were included in the final draft. That’s this season.
• To say the showrunners did a disservice to Game of Thrones by having the gall to actually release this abomination to the public is a colossal understatement.
• What they did was the equivalent of a homebuilder just stopping the project abruptly mid-build and handing the keys to the new homeowners while the house still has plywood floors, no insulation on the outside walls, no baseboards, and unpainted drywall with the screws still visible.

This show’s ending was terrible. I didn’t enjoy it because this is how it should’ve ended:

Jon should have put his woman in her place, took the Throne which was his by birthright, and began his stern yet just rule of the Seven Kingdoms. King Jon Starkgaryen, First of His Name, would have overseen an era of peace, prosperity, unity and order. His heirs would marry Sansa’s, because incest is cool in this show, and because it would ensure harmony between the North and the South.

I did, however, like the show’s lesson that women just can’t be trusted with power because they’ll inevitably turn into murderous psychopaths. Leave the business of governance and ruling to the men.

Thanks, Game of Thrones, for teaching us that!