You Can't Always Get What You Want

Beginnings are easy when it comes to stories. All that potential is out there. The possibilities are endless and the characters and the plot could take you anywhere. You might have an idea (vague or concrete) of the destination you're heading for or you might even be freewheeling it completely to see where it all takes you but the world is your oyster at this point.

Endings are tricky. You’ve got to bring it all together to provide something that is satisfying narratively and/or emotionally for the characters and the story they are a part of. It may not be the ending you want or one that you necessarily like but it should be the ending that fits (whether you knew you were getting there all along or not).

Ending an epic, and a popular one at that, is even trickier. There’s a greater weight of expectation given the longer duration and wider scope of the journey and the chances are higher that it’s going to have to work harder to give you that satisfaction of a deserved finale. Add in to that an avid fanbase who has been poring over the most minute of details in the hopes of clues towards that ending and the risk of dissatisfaction increases.

All of which brings us to the conclusion of Game Of Thrones.

(And, as always, I will try to be general; however, you may want to look away now if you don’t want any hints at all as to how it could all be finishing up.)

There have been articles expressing a certain amount of fan displeasure with this season, leading to a certain element starting a petition to have the entire final season rewritten and reshot (which is a frankly ludicrous position and one of the most recent examples of what is being dubbed “fantitlement”). Here’s why I think the writers were never going to be able to please everyone with this.

Outstripping The Adaptation
Some complaints have focussed on the fact that the series has overtaken the books has lead to a decline - that they are “terrible” writers when left to it on their own. I would disagree with this. This isn’t evidence of them being terrible writers but it is evidence of them being forced to write differently. George RR Martin himself has spent five books laying out plot threads and seeds that he’s allowed to grow and is now struggling to bring those together. TV show runners don’t have the luxury of waiting a few more years for the story to come to an end; the practicalities of production have meant that they had to make the choice to keep going and also when to end it - you can bet that people would have started complaining had the show gone on and on at the same pace as the early seasons without an end in sight. So they made the hard choice and this meant they would have to bring a lot of threads together to get to an ending.

Sometimes, People Don’t Pay Enough Attention
What was deemed a “sudden” character turn in the penultimate episode has also been criticised for making a beloved character into a figure of hate. It is sudden in the sense that the turn itself happened frighteningly quickly within the episode but the show has been signaling this for years (even as far back as season two which shows one of the main scenes of the last episode). It’s just that people didn't want to see that of a character that they liked.

Leading You Down A Visible Narrative Path
Given the above, this leads to me to my only real complaint (overall, I’ve enjoyed the series as much as I enjoyed previous ones - good stuff in some places, less good stuff in others):- it played out exactly the way that I thought i would with only two or three exceptions in the last series. The overall thrust of the story and the way in which it would have to end was pretty clear to me and that’s where it went. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as, from a story perspective, it payed off what had been set up but it makes things a little frustrating as there are no real surprises. It also means that, in order to hit the remaining key plot points, sometimes characters are doing things driven by the plot instead being borne out of their characterisation.

Some People Are Never Going To Be Satisfied
When you have a fervent fanbase, hardly any ending is going to satisfy them. Some people just don’t want it to end and are going to be unhappy with whatever you serve up.

So in conclusion, it was an ending that was unlikely to satisfy everyone and that looks to have been the case. Was it a bad ending then? No, definitely not - it brought the series to a close in a way that satisfied the demands of the plot. The drawback to that has been that, in order to service the plot, some characters have suffered as a result of that. And so, in that spirit, I’m going to draw this blog to a close because it has reached its end point. Right….here. (See? Endings are tricky.)