What Should Game of Thrones Do With Cersei in Season 8
With only six episodes left the show needs to make a pivotal decision about it’s best (though not the main) villain
A compelling villain is more important than the hero. For the story to have any kind of emotional gravitas we have to, at least for a second, believe that the hero might lose. We have to believe that a villain might prevail. That is never the case in Marvel movies where most bad guys boil down to their most primitive forms and simply exist as two dimensional vehicles Marvel uses on the way to printing money (Vulture in the recent Spiderman movie a rare exception). What made The Dark Knight so memorable, so outstanding and helped place it into the upper echelon of not just superhero movies, but cinema in general is the fact that we believed the Joker might win (and in the end he did).
For seven seasons, Game of Thrones has been burrowing deeper and deeper into the psyche of Cersei Lannister, one of it’s premier bad guys. She killed her husband’s father figure, her husband, conspired to kill most of her enemies. Driven by a prophecy from a young age, Cersei was ruthless in both her proactive and reactive (retribution if you will) action. For years, she struggled to reconcile two of her primeval desires: to keep those she loves alive and close to her and to consolidate the power of the Seven Kingdoms under her iron fist rule. She failed in both regards.
The Season 7 finale shone brightest when Cersei was on screen. Her level of petty to point out Daenerys was late just seconds after seeing the first living dragon in centuries is everything I aspire to be. Her ability to stifle her fear and keep the position of power, while also mathematically deducing the fact that two dragons are not three dragons is what made her such a compelling villain in the first place. Where things get tougher she digs in harder.
The show really drove that home in her conversations with both her brothers, the dualities of Cersei’s core, the love and hate of her life. She makes clear to Tyrion that there are no length she will not go to in order to protect those closest to her, however few. In her conversation with Jaime however, she drives him further away from her, unwilling to give up the power she worked so hard to gain, revealing that she will not in fact send support to the North and let them die fighting their own battle (otherwise known as the “no, you guys go ahead, I’ll just meet you at the club” play).
But what the episode also put the most emphasis on (outside of a return to George R.R. Martin’s fascination with incest on multiple family levels) is that the threat in the North is very much real. The final shots of the Night King tearing down the Wall (I NEED CONFIRMATION OF TORMUND’S LIFE) on a dead dragon (I’d like to point out that while watching a show where the dead come to life and dragons are real I still found the time to firmly question how the dragon was able to fly with so many holes in his wings, aerodynamics be damned) established the main conflict for Season 8. So what do you do with Cersei?
As the show outpaced the books it ran into a unique issue that it never had before. The lack of time turned into lack of focus as we are now at a point where we must reconcile multiple story lines over a sprawling narrative to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The pacing has suffered at times during this season in order to wrangle all the loose ends into a final confrontation with the Night King and the fate of the Seven Kingdoms. The moment the army of the dead crossed the wall, Cersei became a loose ends.
Keeping her story line alive deep into Season 8 threatens a lack of focus for the show away from it’s main conflict and the recently revealed true heritage of Jon Snow. Now that Bran and Sam finally sat down for a pow wow, in what felt like every conversation I’ve had while trying to make sense out of what my stoner friends were saying, this is firmly the Jon Snow show. Even Daenerys’ claim to the throne pales in comparison to his direct birth right (let’s also not brush over the fact that Sam, like a true male in corporate America, managed to claim Gilly’s discovery as his own).
I am sure Cersei still has a role to play, but the show also painted her into the corner. There aren’t many platitudes left for her character to take outside of the final stand with her mercenary army, courtesy of Euron Greyjoy (“so the dead can’t swim? See you guys next summer”). But she is the villain few in the show itself care about now. Her actions, while important in the long run and can set up further conflict are of little consequence in contrast to the army of reanimated corpses marching on the Seven Kingdoms (oh, and it’s snowing now so let’s hope no one in Game of Thrones is superstitious).
While Cersei is the series’ strongest villain, overplaying her role in Season 8 would reanimate all of the nagging issues with Season 7, in particular the lack of razor sharp focus on a resolution. After the final six episodes are done, there will be no more room to tie up loose ends and provide an ending that makes sense. Sure on one side perhaps that was the point of the Song and Ice and Fire, but given the avalanche of revelations and reveals over the past seven episodes, there is a sense a definitive conclusion is forthcoming. And Cersei cannot be a part of it.
The show has two approaches, deal with Cersei at the very beginning, fulfilling her prophecy and freeing up a plot-line to focus more on the Night King his march against all life. This doesn’t seem likely as the show may not want to part with their most bankable bad guy in such a fashion. The second approach is keep Cersei in the background as a looming threat to deal with after the Night King. Given how isolated she is right now (with Jaime rolling north solo) she has very little incentive to move or do ANYTHING until trouble comes back to her doorstep. There is nothing to be done to advance her plot-line outside of a direct confrontation with the other players and the other players couldn’t give less of a shit about Cersei even if they tried. We’ll just have to wait and see. Hopefully we won’t have to wait until 2019.
Update: the previous version of this article incorrectly stated that there are eight episodes in season eight, while there are six.
