The final series, and especially the final episode, of Game of Thrones was excellent. I know this view puts me in a minuscule minority of GOT fans and I risk being stripped of my reproduction, feather-trimmed Night's Watch cloak but, I'll say it again. The final series, and especially the final episode, of Game of Thrones was excellent. And here's why I take this view. But first, a necessary bit of preamble.
I grew up in Northern Ireland - the state that offered the blueprint for apartheid in South Africa. From its ill-conceived foundation in 1921, Northern Ireland has witnessed its fair share of violence and bloodshed. Going back even further in the annals of myth, the province of Ulster was forever at war. Five years after my birth in 1964, things really started to take off what with the Catholic minority outrageously demanding the right to vote and the opportunity to apply for jobs within the Civil Service and subsidised industries. The Troubles ran from 1969 to 1998 and, living in North Belfast, I got a front-seat view of most seasons, 1972 being a particular gore-fest. So, I know about violence and its glorification. I know how power ( the fear of losing it and the desire for it) can make people conspire to murder their neighbours and seek vengeance for wrongs suffered in the past by their tribe. I've seen bits of people shovelled into bin bags for the crime of drinking in the wrong pub or queuing up at the wrong shop. And perhaps worse than this, I've known and loved people whose spirits danced when they heard about such events and called for more. So I know about violence and its glorification.
But, fortunately, I also know full well the wearisome nature of violence. I know about crying in bed at night wanting it to stop, wanting not to feel in danger all the bloody time, wanting not having to be outraged by the latest massacre. Even better, I also know what it feels like when the violence stops as it did in Northern Ireland in 1998. (Punishment beatings and sectarian killings still continue but it's more of a minority sport these days, although hatred for 'the other' ('them uns' in the local parlance) still thrives in the province.) I know what trying to build a post-conflict society is like and it's boring and mundane and petty and unspectacular.
It's no coincidence, in my view, that a great deal of GOT was filmed in post-conflict Northern Ireland (and post-conflict Croatia) because everything that I've written above can be applied to the eight seasons of the show. Let's be honest we enjoyed the violence (and nakedness) of seasons 1-7 but, by the time season 8 arrived, we were all a bit sickened by it. I couldn't revel in the gore with quite the same abandon after Stannis burnt his daughter at the stake to appease his god in Series 5. (Bonfires feature prominently in the iconography of Northern Irish sectarianism).
So what were fans expecting in Series 8 and on which the makers did not deliver? I suspect that, having lapped up the violence in previous series and now feeling a little 'icky' about that, they wanted their faith in violence restored. Like George W Bush in his reaction to the horror of 9/11, they wanted to believe that the world could be redeemed through violence. But you don't need to watch all five parts of the documentary series 'Once Upon a Time in Iraq' (even though you should) to know that violence has no redemptive power.
I mention 9/11 because clearly the penultimate episode of season 8 wanted to evoke it. Towers tumbled and dust-covered survivors wandered aimlessly amongst the senseless devastation wrought upon their city from the air. It also called to my mind Black Friday, an episode in the 1972 season of The Troubles when the IRA set off 22 car bombs in Belfast within a period of 30 minutes. All those who visit terror upon civilian populations, Bush and Blair, Bin Laden and Stalin, the IRA and LRA, Daesh and Daenerys, all do it in the name of freedom but it never works out. Violence begets only more violence until eventually everyone gets weary of it. And then what do they do? They have a meeting. And that's where all eight seasons of GOT ended - in a meeting of the newly restored Small Council. That's where 19 seasons of The Troubles ended - an imperfect, barely-functioning assembly of former combatants where they get to talk about transport policy and hospital budgets. It's all very dull and probably not how they thought it would feel to seize the reins of power but that's how it is in post-conflict societies.
Such a denouement doesn't make for great drama. Hence the near-universal disappointment with season 8 amongst GOT fans. They wanted fantasy and magic but they got reality because, like violence, fantasy and magic have no part in a post-conflict society. In fact, magic and fantasy, in the shape of the last surviving dragon, literally flew away in the final episode of GOT after obliterating the show's eponymous totem. Granted, Bran the Broken still has his eye-rolling supernatural powers but these have taken on a workaday nature, enhanced by (and I'm being very generous here) Issac Hempstead Wright's understated performance. In doing away with magic at the end of the narrative, the writers of GOT followed in the tradition of Britain's highest paid and highest regarded writers. In the final scene of Harry Potter, the Vanishing Spell has been performed on magic itself. The world has become normal. The main characters see their kids off to school before getting themselves off to work. In the final act of 'The Tempest', Shakespeare's final play, Prospero gives up 'rough magic' and promises to break and bury his magic staff deep in the earth and to chuck his book of spells in the sea. Not a bad way for the greatest playwright in history to sign off and likewise the author of the world's most profitable series of books. So the writers of GOT are in good company and, I, seemingly alone in the world, applaud them for it. Violence, myth and magic have not won. The awkward, unexciting business of living one's life and getting on with one's family and colleagues - that's what's won. The Game of Thrones has yielded to the Stuff of Life.
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