The King is Dead

How Bad Writing Killed Game of Thrones

READERS BEWARE: The following article contains heavy spoilers from Season 8, Episode 5 of Game of Thrones. Read at your own peril.

Look, when I started this blog, I promised myself I would try to avoid writing reviews as much as possible. Unfortunately, the latest episode of Game of Thrones has forced me to break that promise. And while I will try my hardest to focus on the bigger picture and use GoT as a case-study to discuss general no-nos in the world of screenwriting, I want to make sure that there isn’t any misunderstanding here: I didn’t just dislike “The Bells”– I think it’s objectively one of the worst episodes in TV history, because it violates some of the most sacred rules of storytelling.

Now, as Daenerys probably told Drogon when the bells of surrender rang throughout King’s Landing: let’s break it down, shall we?

Basically an allegory for what the script for this episode looked like.

CRIME #1: MULTIPLE CHARACTER ASSASSINATIONS

Hot take: I actually don’t share a lot of the criticism that has been directed at the showrunners regarding the development of certain characters. I think Sansa has every reason to distrust and eventually plot against Daenerys: given the people she’s had to deal with throughout the entire show, she has every reason to suspect the worst of her. I also think Jon’s decision to tell his family is perfectly in-character for him; this isn’t a bunch of Wildlings he’s being asked to deceive, it’s his sisters, from whom he has been separated for years. And I actually liked that Arya was the one to kill the Night King. For one, it had been foreshadowed multiple time, going back even all the way to Season 1. And honestly, I was not a fan of the whole “Inscrutable, Soulless Evil as the Final Big Bad” direction the show had seemed to take. Game of Thrones has always been a series about human characters, with virtues and flaws. So I was very happy when the show decided to deal with the undead horde quickly and favor a climax that focused on them instead.

The real character assassinations happened last night. The first, and most brutally maimed victim was Tyrion. Here we have a man that the series set up as the smartest person in Westeros completely ignore the painful writing on the wall that reads “DAENERYS IS GOING CRAY-CRAY” and instead sell out his only real ally in Dany’s court to a queen who almost immediately after threatens to have him burnt to a crisp if he keeps screwing up. And Tyrion has been screwing up the entire season, first by trusting Cersei, then by trusting Jamie, then by spilling Jon’s secret to Varys. This season has turned a man who is supposed to be able to read people like children’s books into a complete illiterate.

He's re-evaluating his character choices right there.

Cersei was the next one on the hit list. The Cersei we have come to love to hate is stubborn and spiteful: so even though she knows that no matter how good of a fight she puts up, she’s going to lose, we expect her to have some mutually-destructive ace up her sleeve. And yet, despite the series’ insistence that she poses a serious threat to Daenerys (more on that later), the Mad Queen spends the entirety of the episode looking out of a window. This is the same woman who blew up an entire church full of her enemies, mind you. Even worse, she never gets her comeuppance. Arya doesn’t kill her, nor do Jamie, or Tyrion, or Daenerys. Lena Headey is a beast of an actress, and she really sells the character’s fear and desperation, but it’s jarring how not only was Cersei basically a passive antagonist throughout the episode, but her death scene also weirdly frames her as someone deserving of a “good death” – because let’s face it, dying in the arms of your brother/lover is a pretty damn good death for someone as vile as her.

This is it. This is LITERALLY all she does for 80 minutes.

But what about Daenerys? Surely hers was the worst character assassination of them all? Well… yes and no. Look, it made sense for Dany to become the series’ final villain. The signs were all there: she deals in absolutes (and you know who also deals in absolutes, right?), she relishes in destroying her enemies more than she relishes in saving her people, and she has made a series of questionable choices ever since she came out of her husband’s pyre. Remember that one slave dude who killed his master without her permission, so she had him publicly executed? Remember how she’s held a “take no prisoners” philosophy when dealing with anyone who refused her rule? Her journey to the Dark Side has been gradual but consistent.

The problem is that until “The Bells”, Daenerys was en route to become a morally complex antagonist. The final battle should have been a clash between two equally flawed would-be rulers: one who is kind and honor-bound, but doesn’t want to rule, or even knows how; and one who is ambitious, ruthless, and tyrannical, but only for the sake of maintaining the peace and ensure the prosperity of her reign. That’s not what we got. Instead, the writers decided to default back to the “Targaryen madness”, and therefore turned Dany into yet another uncompromisingly evil villain by making her slaughter thousands of innocent lives out of sheer insanity. Look, for Daenerys to become a villain, she had to cross a certain line – but she should’ve been forced to by her enemies, not by a genetic predisposition to psychopathy.

Most alarmingly, Daenerys’s insanity completely unmakes years of character development that made her one of the biggest feminist icons in TV history. There’s definitely something alarming about a show in which both women who manage to rise to ultimate power go crazy.

Me, throughout the entire episode:

CRIME #2: COMPLETE DISREGARD OF THE CAUSE-EFFECT SYSTEM

Real life is often random, full of dead ends and things – good and bad – happening for no reason. That is why storytelling in all its forms provides catharsis: in a story, every action has a consequence. Game of Thrones has, for the most part, abided to this simple rule. The Red Wedding didn’t happen because Walder Frey was bored that night; it happened because Robb Stark broke a promise, something that was strongly foreshadowed. When Arya chooses to disregard the Faceless Men’s credo and murder Meryn Trant, she is aptly punished with the removal of her sight. Even Joffrey’s death, seemingly motivated purely by the fact that everyone in-and-out of universe wanted him dead, is actually the result of Olenna’s talk with Sansa about the little brat’s monstrous behavior.

But last night’s episode tossed this rule out of the window faster than Tommen tossed himself after the explosion at the Sept of Baelor. Tyrion frees Jamie so he can convince Cersei to surrender… which never pays off, positively or negatively, as he doesn’t get to her in time. Arya follows the Hound to King’s Landing so she can kill Cersei… and turns around at the last second, becoming a nameless POV for the ensuing destruction. Hell, even the completely unmotivated fight between Euron and Jamie has no real consequence (except for Euron dying, which… who cares? He’s a last-second, plot-convenient minor antagonist). Jamie, although victorious, is seemingly fatally wounded, but that doesn’t factor into his reunion with Cersei at all: he neither dies from it, nor does it slow him down. Why then have Euron gloat that “he killed Jamie Lannister” when he clearly didn’t?

The worst instance of this crime is, however, the initial premise of this episode, which was the whole raison d'être for the one preceding it, and was repeatedly stated by multiple characters throughout both. The tension of last night’s episode hinged squarely on this one very important cause-effect chain – after Cersei didn’t show up to help fight the Night Walkers and Rhaegal got shot out of the sky, the two armies are now evenly matched. Five different lead characters outright say as much between both episodes. So when Cersei’s army gets downright obliterated – the same Scorpions that managed to kill one dragon and successfully force another one to retreat now suddenly completely useless – all that tension dissipates faster than half the universe did in Infinity War.

The random horse in the middle of the wreckage was probably the least confusing thing about the episode, TBH.

Which brings us to the third, and most heinous crime….

CRIME #3: UTTER DISRESPECT FOR ITS AUDIENCE

The only accidents in writing are typos. When a writer assassinates characters and disregards the cause-effect rule, they do so either because they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that that is good writing, or because they think they can get away with it. And honestly, considered we’re talking about the showrunners of one of the most popular and critically acclaimed series of all times, I sincerely doubt that the failure that was last night’s episode – and this season in general – was the former.

The truth is, show creators seldom give their audience the credit it deserves. When a series screws up even the tiniest of details – like giving Gendry the wrong bastard surname, or accidentally showing a coffee cup in a shot – viewers notice. When it completely derails a character’s story arc, viewers notice. And when it tries to mask a nonsensical turn in the story that completely undermines four episodes of buildup by appealing to shock value, viewers definitely notice. And yet, Game of Thrones did it anyway. That shows a complete lack of disrespect for its fanbase, the people for whom the series was created.

Many think a show should never “sell out” and do things for the sake of fanservice. On that, I agree – ultimately, any story is its teller’s, not its listeners'. But there is a difference between pleasing fans at the cost of going against the established narrative, and having a pulse on general expectations and ideas -- because I assure you, most of them are grounded in the rules and setting that you, the creator, have laid out for them. It’s always fun to be controversial – as long as the controversy stems from the story itself, and not a lack of logic or structure. The Game of Thrones I like to remember used to know the difference.

But hey, at least we got Cleganebowl, right?