TV

Every Important Detail You Might Have Missed In The ‘Game Of Thrones’ Finale

This is it! The final episode of 'Game of Thrones'!

by Maria Lewis  20 May 2019
Game of Thrones season 8 episode 6 recap

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Here we are, after almost a decade we’re at the end of a very windy road as Game Of Thrones sticks a fork in it and says ‘I’m done’.

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Every Important Detail You Might Have Missed In 'Game Of Thrones' Season 8 Episode 5

To say this eighth and final season of Game Of Thrones has been contentious is like saying Jamie and Cersei have a perfectly healthy relationship as twins who fuck.

There have been high highs, but arguably those have been outnumbered by the recent low lows, to the point 600,000 people have signed a petition to have this season remade with different writers.

Regardless, despite a prequel series that no one cares about coming down the pipe, we’re here at the end of HBO’s epic sword and sorcery series. It changed the landscape of television forever, heralded in the era of Peak TV, and made those guys who bullied you in high school for playing D&D give a shit about dragons.

Goodbye fan theories, goodbye pipe dreams, goodbye writers fatigue, goodbye nerd service … this is what we got from the final episode of Game Of Thrones forever (forever? for ever ever? for ever ever ever?).

Oh Dany Boy Girl

The episode opened with the aftermath; Daenerys Targaryen having slain the innocents of King’s Landing like Anakin slaughtering younglings.

The city is in ruins and the only person who seems happy about it is Greyworm, for whom it’s basically Murder Christmas, as he skips around town slitting throats of “all men who follow Cersei Lannister” and getting his vengeance for Missandei.

Although Dany’s transition into madness and the flipping of her coin was foreshadowed, foreshadowing is not the same as development. That’s what audiences wanted more of: they wanted more time to see her descent, more time to see her grief, more time to see her shift into madness, more development, and more logical steps to take us towards this Queen Of Ashes persona.

The reality is we got something else: Hitler comparisons. Dany making speeches in High Valyrian that sounded eerily like his, while the Dothraki and Unsullied stood before her in formation meant to draw parallels to Nazi Germany and dragon banners fluttering in the wind like it’s the Third Reich.

Her vision from the House Of The Undying in season two is fulfilled, ash and snow mingling together as she strolls through a destroyed throne room to stand in front of the Iron Throne.

There’s a bit where she pleads with Jon to lead with her, imagine a better world with her.

“You can’t hide behind small mercies,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine something that has never been before.” He wonders: “How do you know it will be good?”

It’s dialogue reminiscent of The Wish from season three of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where Giles sets out to reverse a wish made by Cordelia to the vengeance demon Anyanka.

“You trusting fool,” she says to him at one point, as he’s about to destroy her magical pendant. “How do you know the other world is any better than this?”. The Watcher responds: “Because it has to be.”

In a surprise to absolutely no one, Dany had to die and she had to die at the hands of Jon Snow.

Her true love, her nephew, Aegon Targaryen, who slipped a dagger into her belly after recalling the words of Maester Aemon: “Love is the death of duty.” And duty, often, is the death of love.

Now look, I’m not saying this scene wasn’t poignant and whatever, but it was also EXACTLTY how the finale of the criminally underrated Penny Dreadful played out a few years ago: the reluctant hero forced to execute the woman he loves, who has become corrupted by her own dark power.

RIP Twincest

After the lacklustre demise of two of the show’s more interesting characters last week, there were theories that Jamie and Cersei Lannister would somehow survive an entire castle falling on their golden heads.

We were given a definitive ‘yeah nah’ to that concept, with Tyrion discovering their corpses together, cradling each other, among the rubble.

He’s A Motherfucking I.M.P

It was smart on the part of the showrunners to give arguably the show’s best actor Peter Dinklage a meaty monologue.

He hasn’t had a whole lot to do this season, besides deliver lines of varying quality and look horrified, so considering Dinklage has literally won two Golden Globes and an Emmy for the role of Tyrion, he needed a capital ‘m’ Moment. And he got it.

 Firstly, he handed in his notice as Hand Of The King Queen, knowing full well it would mean his doom.

“You freed your brother,” Dany tells him. “You committed treason.” Tyrion, always ready with the clapback: “I freed my brother. You slaughtered a city.”

He’s jailed and as he awaits his execution, Jon comes to visit him. “Now Varys’ ashes can tell my ashes ‘see, I told you’,” the youngest and only surviving Lannister jokes.

But he has more to do than just quip about his impending doom: he has a potential assassin to motivate.

He wastes no time attempting to convince Jon that he needs to kill Dany for the good of all, knowing full well that he’s the only one she trusts to let close enough.

“Everywhere she goes, evil men die. And we cheer her for it.” After that comes the big BUT. He’s successful, with Tyrion’s monologue sinking in enough that Jon does his duty at the expense of love.

Fast forward an undisclosed amount of time and Tyrion gets to make another great speech and is eventually reinstated as Hand Of The King, albeit to a very different king. More on that later.

Who Sat On The Iron Throne?

No one, fucking LOLOLOLOL.

Drogon was clearly smarter than every other human in the show and knowing the root cause of thousands of years worth of problems decided to melt that shit down and be done with it forever.

Besides always looking incredibly uncomfortable, the Iron Throne specifically had caused the demise of so many Targaryens. So Drogon did what needed to be done while Dany lay bleeding on the ground, then grabbed his queen in his wee dragon claws and noped out of there for good.

Daario Naharis? More like DaarNO NAHris Amirite

So we’re just gonna wrap the show up with the ever loyal Daario Naharis being sent away in season seven, never to fucking return? Coooool cool cool cool.

Ser Shut The Fuck Up

Obviously a lot of people were unhappy about how the whole Brienne and Jamie thing went down back in episode four, understandably.

Since he ended up hella dead, we guess it was up to Ser Brienne to finish his story in the Knights White Pages? She ended his chapter with he “died protecting his queen”. Like, ergh, if you absolutely have to. It’s perhaps just another example of women being burdened with the fuck ups of men, not just in this show but in life generally.

The last time we see her, she’s one woman among five men making the decisions for the rest of Westeros proving that even in a show with an army of ice zombies, the idea of gender equality is perhaps the most high-concept notion of them all.

Game Of Thrones Invents Democracy

Months after Dany’s execution and the destruction of King’s Landing, the “most powerful people in Westeros” assemble to decide the fates of Tyrion and Jon.

And by most powerful, we mean essentially whatever characters of note are left alive: Sansa, Arya, Bran, Brienne, Gendry, Ser Davos, Yara, Sam Tarly, probably the Prince Of Dorne, you get the picture.

Sam Tarly proposed the idea of democracy in a full-on Mean Girls moment, attempting to break up parts of the crown so everyone can get a piece (including Gretchen Wieners).

“Maybe the decision about what’s best for everyone should be, well, left to everyone.”

It’s Tyrion, however, who leads folks to the conclusion …

All Hail Bran The Broken

AHAHAHAHAHAHA BRAN IS LEADING WESTEROS NOW, WTF AHAHAHAHA.

I mean shit, of all the fan theories circulating, few people saw that one coming. All hail our massive, weirdo, emo king *high fives*.

But yeah, sure, when Tyrion makes a case for it there’s some sense being made. “Who has a better story than Bran The Broken … he knew he’d never learn to walk again, so he learned to fly.”

He goes on to say “I know you don’t want it, I know you don’t care about power” only for Bran to accept the responsibility in a very weird, and very on-brand way.

Once his cabinet is assembled, A Song Of Ice And Fire also pops up for a brief moment, winking at both the literal source material and the readers of it.

Starks Assemble

Ever the reluctant leader, Jon did what he needed to do and killed Dany.

Then he did what he does best and brooded over it in prison, with he and Tyrion growing matching scene beards together. Each of the Stark children get a solid conclusion, with the audience glimpsing those different journeys in the closing minutes of the show.

Jon’s, unsurprisingly, was back with his boi Tormund Giant’s Bane and trotting off into the North with the rest of the fur-coated folks.

He looked miserable and cold, which is Jon’s natural state of being, so that’s how we know he got his happy ending. ALSO JON AND GHOST WERE REUNITED! AND IT WASN’T A THROWAWAY MOMENT! HE GOT TO PET HIM! THEY STILL HAD SOME CGI BUDGET LEFT! AND HE WAS MISSING AN EAR, FUCKING ICE ZOMBIES! BEST BUDDIES 5EVA!

Arya, after doing more than her fair share of murder labour, is hitting the high seas.

“What’s West of Westeros?” she asks Jon who — of course — knows nothing. “I don’t know,” he replies. Arya smirks: “No one knows. That’s where the maps stop. That’s where I’m going.”

With her hair pulled back into a business ponytail, Needle strapped at her side, and the Stark sigil billowing from a ship, that’s the last we see of her as a girl goes on her own adventure.

While Jon is off colonising the North, and Arya’s off to colonise the West, Sansa the Schemer declares the North an independent state.

Unsurprisingly, she’s hailed as Queen Of The North in her portion of the Starks montage and gets a classy piece of head-bling to commemorate the moment.

Checking In With Our Favourite Game Of Thrones Fan: T-Pain

And now, we conclude what is literally a novella’s worth of recaps the only way we know how: with T-Pain.

Game of Thrones Season 8 is currently streaming on Foxtel Now.

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Maria Lewis is a journalist, screenwriter and author of The Witch Who Courted Death, It Came From The Deep and the Who’s Afraid? novel series, available worldwide.