It’s been a year since the Game of Thrones finale. Twelve months of simmering after that blockbuster final episode which was instantly savaged by fans and critics alike. Daenerys got shanked by Jonny Boy, her dragon then burned up the Iron Throne and flew off with her corpse, Bran got made the new King of Westeros, Tyrion got made his Hand and organised a new small council with all our faves, Sansa got to be Queen of the North, Arya got on a boat to go travelling west of Westeros, and Jon got sent back to the Night’s Watch where he gets to go wandering north of the wall with his old mates once more.

It was messy. The plot set-ups and the character motivations weren’t enough to make it make sense and the whole thing just felt sorta unsatisfactory. Personally, I liked it more than most, I definitely didn’t see it as the travesty that many others did, but yeah it’s pretty obvious that the ending didn’t live up to what came before it. Which is sad, dude. Because one year on it feels like that unsatisfactory ending has drowned out the legacy of one of the few telly shows of the modern era which has captivated such a massive crossover audience. Like, this was an HBO show about a fantasy medieval-esque world. With dragons and magic and strange religions. With an enormous cast of characters. It’s not exactly Friends, you know? But when a new episode of Thrones emerged it was Event Television.

And a lot of that’s been forgotten now, or at least overshadowed. Apparently you’re only as good as your last episode or something... which goes to show how important it is to stick the landing when it comes to these telly things. Poor old Game of Thrones tried to wrap up one of the most complicated worlds ever depicted on the small screen in a nice little package and it just made them look silly.

To be fair, it wasn’t the finale that did the damage. Or even the last season. The further the show got away from the books they’re based on, the more that fascinating world seemed to shrink. In the early days characters were killed off suddenly and shockingly – Ned Stark, The Red Wedding, etc. - and in a way which eschewed the generics of storytelling. Ned Stark died because it was realistic. There were powerful forces that wanted him dead. And to throw that curveball out there near the end of season one was a statement that this was not going to be one of those shows where the Stormtroopers always miss when they shoot at the hero. Rather than the characters being tools for the story, it was more like George RR Martin wound up the cogs and then stood back and let things play out the way they naturally would.

But the more the show diverged from the books (out of necessity, to be fair – the last couple books still ain’t even written) the more those characters seemed to loose their natural agency. Three dimensional chess turned into checkers as all these complex characters started acting in a way that served a single unified ending rather than their own competitive interests. I know this was a show about dragons but it was always made to parallel real world power structures in the real world there aren’t tidy endings like that. There’s always another And Then. Obviously you have to wrap it up one way or another but to do so in a way which streamlined all the subtleties of Westeros into a tidy package did feel like a bit of a betrayal.

Not to mention that old mates Benioff and Weiss never seemed to grasp the mythology of the show... which was kinda the whole point. At it’s peak (seasons four and five, probably) this was a show that deconstructed the idea of heroes and villains, of good and evil, by injecting it with the most corrupt elements of human nature – greed, ambition, self-interest, etc. As much as the finale tried to make a point about storytelling with Bran’s coronation... it was too little too late to salvage what they’d already wasted. Don’t even get me started on the irrelevance of the Night’s King either.

Again, it wasn’t the worst. There was plenty to be commended from those last few episodes (S08E02 is up there with the best eps they ever made, IMO). But it wasn’t what it once was. The finale felt like an episode of a different show which is probably why the reaction was as visceral as it was from fans who’d ordered one dish and were served up another.

I’ll refrain from spoilers here but when I think of other top tier telly shows and how they finished things up there’s usually still some elemental theme that instructs their endings that speaks to the purpose of the show. Breaking Bad and Mad Men absolutely did that, Mad Men’s ending was a bit more ambiguous but that’s no problem. The Sopranos ended as ambiguous as it gets but in a way that felt like the whole show had been building towards that moment (depending on your interpretation, I s’pose). The Wire dropped off in season five compared to what had come before it but still maintained that same sense of the complex machinery of society in which all the characters were, on some level, predestined to their fates because altering that institutional structure is just too difficult. You know, something that Game of Thrones once sort of had in common with it (only with dragons instead of street drugs).

Nothing spoke to the lack of depth of that last Star Wars movie more than the lack of people speaking about it within a couple weeks of its release. It worked fine as a blockbuster film but the moment you started pondering its plot holes it crumbled into dust. Game of Thrones didn’t end in a pile of dust even if the Iron Throne did get barbecued into magma but when people stopped moaning about the ending they pretty much stopped talking about it altogether. You’d think it might have a moment now as a binge-able lockdown rewatch too but apparently not.

That’s a shame. It really is. That show was legitimately great for a while there... and anyway there are a bunch of supposed spinoff shows that HBO have in various states of production, gotta wonder whether the poor ending of the main show will effect the appetite for any of those jokers. One thing it’s definitely ruffled up a hunger for is GRRM’s last couple of books... but we’ve long learned to stay patient with that fella.

Tell you what though, just have a listen to those opening seconds of that theme tune and tell me it doesn’t bring back happy memories…

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