A Thousand Endings
Every tale and life and universe has a thousand endings. Millions that could happen and millions that will. Every action holds within it a billion possible alternatives. And preceding them all, a trillion trillion stories that will never be told.
Game of Thrones, on the other, has only one ending. And nobody likes it. It’s the so-called “good compromise” Tyrion describes in the finale episode that no one is happy with, but that is still inexplicably necessary. Surely this line was the showrunners preemptively admonishing us, via their clever dwarf, to stop bitching about their decisions.
Well, I ask you, what is the point of art and entertainment if we can’t enjoy it and then bitch about it together?
Pushing past the disappointment of an unfulfilling ending and the inevitable disappointment of any end to something we love, there’s a lot we can learn about the questionable decisions made by Weiss and Benioff, hereafter “Wab.”
There’s a lesson about storytelling and life — and today’s mass death — that is worth exploring a bit. It’s an old lesson about cascading repercussions. If we make a little change here, a thousand alternatives change there. If we change up the order of our actions, then meanings, significance, and endings may also suddenly shift in unforeseeable ways.
In the case of Game of Thrones, dozens of endings dreamed up by fans and posted on message boards and YouTube may have been more satisfying, cathartic, meaningful, imaginative, emotional, and in the spirit of the story than the one Wab made. It’s fun and sad to dream, unbounded, on the myriad stories that could have been.
But for an exercise in exploring this lesson about cascading repercussions, let’s take most of the same character and story arcs — and the lazy, insufficient number of episodes — that Wab ultimately decided on and rearrange them to see what comes out, and to see what might have been and what might be…
1) Winterfell
Daenerys and Jon arrive at Winterfell and are soon followed by Jaime, as in Wab’s version. Jaime tells them of Cersei’s treachery and her plan to amass a fleet and army. “If we beat the Night King,” he say, “we will be left tattered and she could defeat us. If the Night King beats us, she may prevail over him and enjoy a hateful rule over Westeros in the absence of the dragon queen or king in the north.”
Instead of Daenerys shrugging off this new information, she succumbs to the entitled rage she’s nursed her whole life and declares that she’s returning to King’s Landing to take her rightful throne. And Jon objects, so single-mindedly focused as he is on defeating the Night King — who, we see, is making his slow way south, crushing all under his ice and death like an advancing glacier.
But Daenerys insists and the rift between her and the Northerners widens immediately. King’s Landing, she suggests to persuade the stubborn Northerners, is a better place from which to face the Night King anyway — larger, southerly, better fortified, an escape to the sea — and a seat of power from which to rally together all the lords of Westeros to face the existential threat that now bears down upon their whole continent. Grudgingly convinced, the North empties and begins a long march south.
We can imagine much of the episode taken up by a terrifying trek in the dark and snow-covered North. The miles-long line, of both soldiers and civilians, is fringed with torches, but still is harried by the Night King’s horrors. We see undead wildcats, and undead dire wolves, and the ice spiders of Old Nan’s tales, and packs of undead children, and some familiar undead faces as they pick off those unlucky lingering at the edge of the line.
But finally, tattered and traumatized, the line reaches the Neck, the domain of the Reeds. And Howland Reed, Ned Stark’s friend who saved him from Arthur Dayne, the only living soul who was with Ned at Jon’s birth, guides the line through the vast bog. We learn of Jon’s heritage with Howland confirming Bran’s story. Instead of being forgotten, Meera Reed plays a pivotal role in ushering the line south. They pass through the Neck and reach the South. The episode ends — or the next begins — with the Reeds in their floating castle, watching their bogs freeze, and their ancestral home overrun in the blackness of the undead.
2) The Bells
The armies turn east toward King’s Landing. The episode unfolds much as Wab orchestrated in the penultimate one. Cleganebowl. Jaime and Cersei die together. Daenerys unleashes fire and blood and the city crumbles. Jon may be taken aback by the dragon queen’s brutality, but they need her armies to confront the blue-eyed glaciers bearing down on the south, and he loves her still. Tension rises in his inner conflict. This will offer plenty of time to properly develop their laden romantic dynamics.
And now the petty politics of the game continue as the throne sits empty and the lords vie to fill it. The Starks, the other Northern lords, the free folk, the Arryns, the Tullys, Tarth, all rally behind Jon. He was the first known person to kill a wight in thousands of years. He has personally faced down the Night King. He wields a Valyrian steel sword. He’s the king in the north. And he’s a man. He should sit the throne.
But Dorne, the Greyjoys, the remaining Tyrells, and Gendry, the new Baratheon lord, support Daenerys. She has the armies and the dragons after all. In this return to the game, Varys’s scheming now means something. Tyrion’s Machiavellian skills are utilized again. But he is torn; his dragon queen killed his brother and speaks like a tyrant, and she even vaguely suspects him of some kind of treason. But he believes in her and so remains her Hand. Jon, meanwhile, just wants to save people from climate ch — uh the Night King.
3), 4), 5) The Long Night
Rather than one episode and one actual night (?!?!), the Long Night instead spans three episodes and a Westerosi year, at least. To pacify the lords and focus on the most pressing task, and because their love deepens despite Jon’s tyrant- and incest-aversion, Jon and Daenerys agree to share power in a delicate duumvirate echoing the fraught politics of Roman triumvirates.
They rebuild King’s Landing as a war fortress. They send emissaries to rally not just all the lords of Westeros and their armies, but even representatives from the free cities, from the slave cities of Essos — Qarth, Volantis, Astapor, Meereen (a return of Daario to throw off the romantic dynamics between Jon and Dany?) — and even the far east. This is a global threat, after all, and they must rally a force commensurate with the scale of it.
“The Night King and his army are marching South and if they defeat us,” their ravens plea, “they will freeze the Narrow Sea and march on Essos, and — as the Dothraki prophesize — cover even the Great Grass Sea in ghost grass. Send aid here at the frontlines or risk your own demise.”
And some cities of Essos send troops and supplies as the world truly rallies together to confront this ultimate existential threat. But the consequences of Daenerys’s past conquests come to haunt Westeros and petty politics march on even in the face of mass death. The good masters remember her butchery in Astapor and Meereen and refuse, from their pride and hubris, to lend support.
Through Bran, we see in these episodes castles across Westeros being overrun, the cold dark descending on every part of the continent. The Citadel falls. Even the Dornish sands are covered in snow. We also get more glimpses of the past. We see moments from the last Long Night and what is really at stake. We see Azor Ahai of legend and how the last Night had ended to give us hope.
We learn about the Night King. Once a Stark, the Night King nursed bitterness and resentment toward both the Children who made him and the First Men who abandoned him to be transformed into this weapon. And he bided his time building his army and ever pointing his purpose toward expanding his dominion. The Night King’s conquest — like climate change — is still just the product of petty human urges, still just the game of thrones and the tragedy of human lust for domination.
Over these episodes we see armies from all over the world mustering in and around King’s Landing, and snow and ash mingling in the dark. We see Red Priests and maesters working together. We see people of color, instead of disposable and alien foreigners, arrive as saviors and fellow fighters come to join this ultimate battle for life. We see the small moments among all these different people from different corners of the world fighting and fucking and playing. Some have long-running grudges that erupt in conflict, all packed together. And others find new camaraderie and new reasons to live. Everyone from all over the world has rallied together, representatives of life, to battle the oncoming dark, and whether they can defeat it or not, at least they can rage against it together.
6) Dark Realism
Finally, by the last episode, the Night King has covered all of Westeros in a desert of ice and snow. Drogon encircles King’s Landing keeping alight a constant moat of flame. The last stand of light.
Perhaps it starts as a street brawl. Maybe it starts in the royal bedroom. Maybe it’s a whisper or maybe it’s scream, but all the fraught, delicate politics, the scheming and back-stabbing, the perpetual petty impulse for power has sown deep divisions in the peoples and armies barracked at King’s Landing and one of the myriad sparks finally catches. The noble factions supporting Daenerys and those behind Jon draw their swords, despite the protests from their monarchs, and in the streets of King’s Landing skirmishes between all the forces break out. In a chaotic echo of Caesar’s assassination, Daenerys is murdered by a group of Northern lords while Jon is detained elsewhere.
The Night King and his generals and his dragon and his army do nothing. They stand outside the gates of King’s Landing and let the armies within deplete and defeat themselves. They raise the corpses left from the battles and walk softly through the dragon’s flames — Drogon in exasperated self-preservation having fled to Valyria or wherever — and march undisturbed through the mostly dead city. They find the last holdouts in the Red Keep clinging to the treacherous throne and dimly burning torches. The last are slain and the final scene shows the Narrow Sea begin to freeze.
Or…
6) Plausible Optimism
The army of the dead lays siege to King’s Landing. The full force of the threat hits everyone within and they put aside their squabbles and rally together. Their best military minds and maesters and clever planners all come together to devise ingenious strategies — e.g., not sending a cavalry charge into the dark, however cool it may look — and after many deaths and sacrifices of many of our favorite characters, the Night King himself is exposed.
There is not one hero to leap from the pages of the worst Hollywood clichés and strike the killing blow, but a team, a group from far-flung lands, all help one another to give a chance to Arya, and/or Jon, and/or Tormund, and some anonymous soldiers, and, fuck it, Sam the Slayer, to stick blades of obsidian into the body of the Night King and his generals. They melt away. The corpses fall in waves still and rotting. The fighters and planners and lords all rejoice.
But they left the threat too long and now Westeros is covered in ice and the animals are dead and the crops are gone and though some stingy relief is shipped in from Essos, starvation ravages the surviving Westerosi. While the lords hoard the little food remaining, reluctant cannibalism takes hold among most of the soldiers and civilians as they slowly fade.
But the game continues and Daenerys takes revenge on the lords who opposed her and begins executing them wantonly. Instead of pretending, as Wab lazily do, that anyone in power gives a shit about slaughtering King’s Landing peasants, it’s really the murder of the lords that unites all of them against Daenerys. With her dragon gone and army weakened, they strike. And finally Tyrion or Varys or some poor fool paid by the lords levels the blade that ends her reign as they hold Jon to the ground and he grieves to lose her.
And the Long Night persists in this grey, broken King’s Landing. Few of our heroes remain. Even fewer of the anonymous poor remain. Some who can attempt to flee to Essos. In an absurd coronation, those remaining lords crown Jon — or Bran, or whatever — to rule over the corpse land, king of the dead. And finally the episode ends with a thaw, and the few remaining characters, ragged and miserable, step outside. And some hint of the inexplicable return of resilient plant life, or a rabbit or deer emerging from some crevice — the mercy they scarce deserve — heralds a dream of spring.
