What an awful, awful finale. I’m sure that there are intelligent things to be said about last night’s episode, titled “Mother’s Mercy,” but I’m so furious about it that I’ve temporarily taken leave of my critical faculties. All I’m capable of is a rant.
This episode will be most discussed for it’s shocking deaths, so let’s start there. The one that’s getting the most play this morning is the one that ended the episode: Jon Snow. Olly comes running into his study saying, excitedly, that one of the Wildlings knows where his uncle Benjen Stark is. Benjen, you’ll recall, went missing way back in season one, so Jon is understandably excited to learn that he might still be alive. But then he runs outside and sees a traitor’s grave. He’s been lured outside for an assassination. One by one, Alliser Thorne’s men stab him in the gut, “for the Watch.” We end on a shot of him looking toward the sky, the life bleeding from his eyes as the snow around him fills with blood.
Is Jon Snow really dead? Well, yes, he’s definitely dead—perhaps the better question is whether it’s for good. Melisandre’s back with the Night’s Watch after she saw Stannis’s paltry army lose to the Boltons on the battlefield. Her Lord of Light has been known to resurrect guys: I believe the last one we saw on the show was Beric Dondarrion, resurrected several times by Thoros of Myr. In Season 3, Melisandre saw Thoros’s handiwork; she also, earlier this season, has shown an interest in Jon Snow. Does king’s blood run in his veins? Now that Stannis is dead, is he Melisandre’s best chance at shepherding a king to the throne? If so, she may attempt to revive him come season 6. We’ll see. (Or rather, you will, maybe—more on that below.)
Since I’ve already tipped my hand that Stannis is dead, let’s go there next: Stannis is dead. Though after the events of last week, I doubt if there’s going to be anyone to mourn him. Stannis was always an odd character: kinda boring to start with, he briefly became a fan favorite this season when it seemed like he was the best candidate to save Sansa and put a sword through Ramsay Bolton’s chest. But the thing is, Stannis is not a great dude, and he never really was. He killed his own brother through black magic, he cut of Ser Davos’s fingers for some dopey reason, he had dozens of people burned at the stake—and last week he had his own daughter burned at the stake, yet another sacrifice of king’s blood so the Lord of Light would give him a winter thaw. He got his thaw, but his wife also hung herself, and half his army deserted in the night. The battle for Winterfell turned out to be a rout, and Stannis, gravely injured, ended up dying at Brienne’s sword. (Though this, again, was a death that we didn’t actually see—but the outcome seems pretty clear.)
What else? Well, while Brienne was busy avenging Renly Baratheon’s death, Sansa was trying to escape and signal for help. Ultimately, she got hunted down by Myranda and Reek—but then Reek discovered a bit of Theon left in him and threw Myranda off the wall into the keep below. She’s dead, presumably. Then Theon and Sansa, together, escape Winterfell by Thelma-and-Louise-ing off the wall into the snowdrifts below. This scene played to me as suicide last night—better to die on their own terms than at the end of Ramsay’s flaying knife—but this morning people are saying that the snow drifts probably broke their fall. Whatever.
Basically, this was a dumb scene. First we get the trope of the talkative villain in Myranda, who explains Ramsay’s plan while Sansa stands at the end of her arrow (basically: “Ramsay will get a son out of you, then kill you slowly”), then we get Theon/Reek having an unexpected and largely unmotivated change of heart. I really don’t understand why this was the last straw for Theon, except that his sudden action was a required contrivance for the plot. Either way, we get the indignity of Sansa’s suffering being exactly what detractors had claimed it would be all along: motivation for a male character’s heroism. Then the two Butch-and-Sundance it off the wall. For this plotline to end in suicide would be a complete waste of a season’s worth of awful, horrific story material—but for them to survive that fall and just walk away feels like yet another narrative contrivance that strains credibility. Whatever. I’m done with it.
Arya, meanwhile, is checking off the first name on her kill list: Meryn Trant. But not before we get yet another unecessary scene of female characters being brutalized. Meryn has a thing for young girls, you see, and now he’s got three of them lined up in front of him and is whipping them mercilessly with a stick. He’s a bad guy, get it? Are you sure? Are you sure you understand he’s a bad guy? Did you see him abusing children? Maybe you missed it. Wanna see it again?
It’s certainly satisfying when Arya unmasks herself and stabs Meryn in both eyes, a couple times in the gut, then finally slits his throat. As Jamelle Bouie tweeted: “I NEED AN ENTIRE SERIES OF ARYA JUST STRAIGHT OFFING DUDES.” Hear, hear! Except that any satisfaction we get from Meryn Trant’s death is short-lived, because apparently the Seven-Faced God didn’t want him dead. I’m sure there’s some deep meaning to be unearthed in who this god does and doesn’t want dead, as well as in the way Meryn’s killing reveals Arya’s failure to properly become no one—but I barely care at this point, and any deeper meaning was lost in the multiple, seemingly arbitrary reversals of the scene: Arya has to drink poison now, but wait it’s actually Jaquen H’ghar who drinks the poison, only it actually wasn’t Jaquen H’ghar, Jaquen H’ghar is still alive! Also now Arya is blind!
In Mereen, Dany’s people are hanging in the throne room, moping around on the steps. (But wait, how did they escape? Weren’t they surrounded by Sons of the Harpy? Did all the dudes with knives just shrug and go home after Dany escaped on her dragon? Shhhh….don’t bother asking such questions of a show that has clearly stopped giving a shit.) There’s not much to this scene, so I’m going to cut to the chase: basically, Tyrion’s going to stay in Mereen and rule with Missandei and Grey Worm and Varys, and Jorah and that one sexy guy whose name is currently escaping me are going to go look for Dany. Dany, meanwhile, is out in the hills with Drogon, and she’s like “Hey Drogon, let’s go home,” but Drogon’s all “No Mom, I want to sleep,” so she wanders off and is suddenly surrounded by a bunch of…Dothraki I guess? Who are the ones with the curvy swords?
In Dorne, meanwhile, a final scene only serves to highlight exactly how pointless this entire subplot has been. Everyone’s saying a fond farewell—including Bronn and one of the Sand Snakes, who I guess are an item now? Like boyfriend-girlfriend or something? Because she showed him her boobs this one time? Anyway, Ellaria gives Myrcella a long goodbye kiss, and plants a slow-acting poison on her in doing so. As they’re sailing away, Myrcella gets a nosebleed and, presumably, dies—and right in the middle of a nice father/uncle-daughter/niece moment, too.
I think that, finally, brings us back to King’s Landing, and what is easily the worst scene of the episode, perhaps the season, perhaps the series: Cersei’s humiliation. As an audience, we’ve hated Cersei in the past, and perhaps we’ve wanted to see her laid low—and the show delivers exactly that, somewhat in the style of a cruel pet owner rubbing a dog’s nose in its own shit: “Look at this. Look at what you did. This is what you wanted. Now choke on it.”
Cersei has finally confessed to the High Sparrow (not everything, but still), and is temporarily released. But her freedom comes at a cost: she must walk barefoot, shorn, and naked from the Sept to the Red Keep, as the people of the city heap scorn on her and throw vegetables and feces. This was a long scene. I don’t know exactly how long and I’m not going to go back and count, but it felt like five minutes at least, maybe more. We saw every step of her humiliating walk. We saw several full-frontal shots of Lena Headey’s naked body, covered in blood and feces and rotten food. We heard her verbally assaulted multiple times. We saw her, finally, break down in tears.
I’m sure this scene will have its defenders. This kind of public shaming is—well, it’s something that happens, I guess, in some cultures and in some time periods. And it basically represents us, the audience, being given exactly what some of us may have wanted, in a way that complicates and problematizes our desire to see certain hated characters destroyed. I get that. But after Sansa, after Shireen, after Meryn Trant brutalizing little girls in a brothel, all I saw in this scene was a show that takes joy in humiliating and abusing its female characters.
And honestly? I think I’m done. The best part of last night’s finale was that the show is going away for a while—and when it comes back, I don’t think I’m going to be watching. This show hates its characters, hates its female characters especially, and at times even seems to hate its audience. Even as its cruelties have compounded, its pleasures have diminished, its shocking reversals playing as paltry parodies of the twists of seasons past, far more The Happening than The Sixth Sense. For the first time, I look toward the next season not with an anticipation of what might happen next, but with dread at what the show is going to do to its characters next, what fresh horror I’ll be forced to watch, to become complicit in.
So enough. So long, Game of Thrones. If the show gets its shit together, I may stream later seasons. But come next spring, I won’t be wasting my precious Sunday nights on it any longer. To quote another of last night’s tweets:
