JUNE 1 2019 LISTENER 71
TV REVIEW
T
ake me to church: it felt a bit
like that as an episode of Game
of Thrones became increas-
ingly like a sort of electronic
sacrament, a communion
with fans of the chilly, blood-
soaked HBO leviathan around
the globe who set themselves
to dissecting and deconstruct-
ing the action with the zeal of
biblical scholars.
The show was always
impressive. There were resur-
rections, battles, beheadings
and begettings, though
no one in the Bible, from
memory, begat three dragons.
Now it’s over, unless disgrun-
tled fans petitioning for a
season-eight remake prevail.
You might as well ask God to
rewrite the Old Testament.
I was never a true believer.
Many early seasons were
viewed from behind a cat
or a sofa cushion. Sights I
can never unsee: a man having his
head squeezed until it explodes, a
man having his face eaten by dogs
(even if it was evil Ramsay), a father
allowing his young daughter (sweet
Shireen Baratheon) to be burnt at the
stake with her toy stag as a sacrifice
to the show’s chronic bad weather or
something.
And yet the series alone was
worth it for Peter Dinklage’s wise-
cracking Tyrion Lannister. Consultant
to tyrants, he was a drunk and aAlways impressive,
Game of Thrones
got the mother of
all finales.
Endgames
The series alone
was worth
it for Peter
Dinklage’s wise-cracking Tyrion
Lannister.womaniser, but always a thinker. Sample thought:
“The Lord of Light wants his enemies burned, the
Drowned God wants them drowned. Why are all
the gods such vicious c---s?”
In the finale, he seemed to be in almost every
scene, trudging through a wasteland, the ashes
of the innocent raining down upon his head.
Spoiler alert: things had gone bonkers. Evil queen,
Cersei, and her brother and lover, Jaime, lay dead
beneath the rubble of the Red Keep. Daenerys,
freer of slaves, and her dragon had inciner-
ated the innocent inhabitants of King’s Landingbecause ... GoT scholars are working on it.
Jon Snow, looking more than usual like bursting
into wracking sobs, comes across the blackened
corpse of a little girl, still holding her toy horse.
Shades of Shireen and a world where innocence is
to be hunted down, even by the alleged good guys.
In fact, Daenerys did everything short of giving a
Ted talk with PowerPoint to demonstrate the folly
of turning humans, including a mother of dragons
with a sculptural coiffure, into a populist favourite
determined to make Westeros great again. As play-
wright Bertolt Brecht once said, “Unhappy the land
that needs heroes.”S
now was forced to stop staring
moodily and make a freak-
ing decision. With patient
prompting from Tyrion, he realised
Daenerys, his love, his queen, had to
go. He stabbed her mid-kiss after she
outlined her plan to make a better
world by killing everyone. You can
tell a tyrant by their fondness for
endless war. And by a Nuremberg-
style rally where she appeared, her
dragon behind her, to have sprouted
demonic black wings.
The survivors held a
great council, ignoring the
ana chronistic plastic water
bottles tele ported from the
future to go with the rogue
coffee cup from episode
four, to select a new king.
Samwell suggested the deci-
sion should be made not by
a ruling elite but by all the
people. Everyone considered
this gravely for a millisecond
before laughing like drains.
Democracy! Lol. All hail the
new King, spooky Bran the
Broken.
It was mad yet mag-
nificent, and sometimes
intensely moving. As Dany’s
last dragon, Drogon, nudged
his lifeless mother and
roared in sorrow, you felt sure Snow
was toast, and not in a metaphori-
cal way. But when Drogon let loose
with the dragon fire, it was aimed at
the Iron Throne. Did he somehow
know it was the corrupting lust for
power the throne represented that
really killed her? A psychic link
between Dany and her dragons has
been comprehensively established.
Maybe Drogon knew that a dying
Dany forgave Snow. All’s fair in love
and the game of thrones. lDIANA
WICHTEL
Game of Thrones’
Peter Dinklage:
a drunk and a
womaniser, but
always a thinker.