« In Which We Woke Up This Morning And All The Direwolves Were Gone »

Fully Thronesed

by DICK CHENEY

Game of Thrones
creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
HBO

It was a show that barely got a second season order, so constrained by budgetary limitations that in early seasons Jon Snow's direwolf Ghost was portrayed by a toy poodle from Tom's River, New Jersey named Lady Sunstein.

All the direwolves are gone now, and all the Lannister children as well. They were all the product of an ill union between brother and sister - and, it is intimated, so too may some of the Stark children be the product of a similar relationship. The way Ned Stark looked at his sister as she was dying in childbirth was a bit on the creepy side. Maybe we find out later, in the vast books of the Citadel, that Rhaeger was impotent.

There was something a bit trite about these climactic scenes as they finally arrived. The first twenty minutes of this show was brilliant and probably should have been in last week's episode. It was amazing how Cersei sort of gave up on her son and left his bay windows open for a deadly fall. I was so happy that I would never be forced to watch Natalie Dormer or Jonathan Pryce act again that I almost cried.

Grandma Tyrell's indignation at this state of affairs seemed rather forced. I don't really understand why the Golden Girls need to be affliated with Daenerys, since she seems destined to enter into a love relationship with her nephew Jon Snow. On the other hand, the absolute insane amount of people that have been killed off means that the remaining characters are necessarily inhabiting a larger role.

The worst part of the finale was undoubtedly the turgid scene between Daenerys and Tyrion. What kind of woman throws out a perfectly good terrible actor and replaces him with a much shorter terrible actor? Tyrion as a character would have a lot more relevance if he exhibited any emotion at all. Like, what is even the point of this mutual appreciation party? Cersei may not have liked him very much, but didn't he already get his revenge?

The power struggle in the North is a nice wrinkle, but a couple things. The Onion Knight was absolutely fine with Melisandre for like a year, but suddenly he's accusing her of being a murderer? He's been acting like they were best friends the entire season. Also, I'm pretty sure the little girl was going to die from greyscale any day. Melisandre could have plausibly used that in her defense. I guess it's time for her to meet up with the Brotherhood without Banners. She could finally bring Catelyn Stark back from the dead.

So many people were and are still caught up in thinking that Arya Stark never left that little shit room in Braavos, and the Waif is now Arya Stark. I guess it's possible, although why she would go and eat all of Walder Frey's children I truly don't know. I felt like that probably could have used an episode in itself. Arya should have infiltrated the camp and shown all her skills. This way it just seems like she teleported to her destination and the kill has so much less effect.

Cersei Lannister should be a tremendous villain, but I'm sort of failing to see where she went wrong in any of this. Bran saw her fucking Jaime in Winterfell. She took mercy on the boy and never killed him. She returned to Westeros. Her husband was a dangerous alcoholic so she got rid of him, but in the nicest possible way. She did kill Ned Stark, but in her defense, he was very nosy and anyway I doubt she could have stopped it from happening. The Golden Girls killed her daughter and the Tyrells killed Joffrey. So exactly how did she lose the moral high ground in any of this? This entire season she's been nothing but trod upon by a group of religious fanatics who stole her remaining son.

I honestly don't know why he even bothered finishing the series of books. It feels like we are so close to end of things that the rest of Game of Thrones will just approximate the feel of this episode. The finale was just a big epilogue, a Where Are They Now? for a group of people that have already experienced all the tragedy they will ever know. How do you punish the punisher, or torture the tortured? There was a finality to everything, a sense that we could watch these shifting alliances forever, until we decide ourselves to leave well enough alone.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He will return to his reviews when the remake of Lost hits ABC in the year 2026, or when Game of Thrones returns, whichever occurs first I guess.