Thrones Review, Season 8 Episode 6: "The Iron Throne"
Added 2019-05-21 21:11:31 +0000 UTCWow. It's over. Join Jeff and Emmett as they discuss the very final episode of Game of Thrones!
Comments
Agree totally with your take on the Tyrion/Jon dialogue. You articulated it perfectly. And you aren't alone - my Jewish husband visibly flinched at the episode's imagery and allusions in Tyrion's speech. He couldn't really put his finger on it in the moment or even on rewatch, but he was able to express how it made him feel later. Added to this, he's a career military man & combat vet who served his entire 22 year tenure in wartime. He's always appreciated the realistic depictions of the costs of war in ASOIAF & somewhat in GOT. While he couldn't lay it out as well as you do here, he felt the same way. Most especially about invoking the Nazis, Hitler, and/or the Holocaust via imagery/speech to grab some gravitas. Ultimately he sees ASOIAF as an indictment of most US military action first, and of war more generally. Folks forget how close Holocaust is to us - just a generation removed from my husband, an entire generation of his family was exterminated. But for 4 brave family members who fled with nothing to a new continent, my husband & children wouldn't be here. This is not ancient history. We should engage with it & reference it more thoughtfully.
Robin Lee Melendez
2019-06-18 19:07:36 +0000 UTCAnd book Sansa would not have slapped down Edmure at the Great- ish Council. She would have shown more courtesy. TV Sansa is a nicer Cersie, and is a creature of the South, not the North. She is a better little finger, albeit a middle finger.
Rob Gregor
2019-05-26 05:51:17 +0000 UTCBut you are, I hate to say it, WONG ABOUT SANSA. TV Sansa should not be Queen in the north She does not get her hands dirty, all her executions are by proxy - Hounds, Arya etc. She immediately broke a vow made in front of a heart tree, and Bran, am old God incarnate. She was a grumpy little shit in the crypts when book Sansa would be encouraging everyone with her.
Rob Gregor
2019-05-26 05:49:07 +0000 UTCAs ever guys, loved this episode, especially where Emmett explains the problems with Tyrion’s speech in the cells - being an Australian who has never lived a community directly informed by the history of Holocaust survivors, it is always great to have one’s world view expanded and I am grateful for it. I would never have understood the reference otherwise.
Rob Gregor
2019-05-26 05:45:03 +0000 UTCYup. Grasping.
Kelly
2019-05-23 16:25:05 +0000 UTCI couldn't have said it better myself. You articulated everything I've been feeling and thinking perfectly. And I love you guys (poorquentyn and Bblackfish), but I do not understand how two, as TRUE fans of ASOIF, managed to come out of a viewing of this final episode with the sentiments you expressed. I don't see how you are taking the DDs botched adaptation as canon. To me, the DDs have little credibility in their interpretation of the final events of ASOIF and I am left with little if any resolution.
Kelly
2019-05-23 16:24:06 +0000 UTCOh, and Jeff, when Dany was talking about bringing liberation to the world, I immediately thought of System of a Down's "B.Y.O.B.".
Bobbie Sperry
2019-05-22 23:53:42 +0000 UTCEmmett, this is YOUR podcast...ramble on. And your explanation of your disappointment made me feel hurt, too. Very well put.
Bobbie Sperry
2019-05-22 23:50:24 +0000 UTCIt'll be out soon for the general public. Thanks so much for the kind word, Juli! Much love!
NotAPodcast
2019-05-22 20:05:27 +0000 UTCI really wish I could share this episode with everyone. This is an amazing analysis of the episode. Thanks for expressing what I couldn’t put into words. The comparison of Daenerys to the Nazis was incorrect & appalling.
Juli Ramira
2019-05-22 17:11:15 +0000 UTCI'll put my two cents in here, because I know people are angry and that is valid and fine. However, I do disagree (which is also valid and fine). Was the show everything I wanted?... No. Did I complain about it throughout it's run over and over and over again?... YES (and so did Jeff and Emmett and...everyone else for that matter). However, the end of Game of Thrones was emotionally satisfying to me because the show has brought the fandom to what it is. Without Game of Thrones, you probably don't have Notacast or most of the other big podcasts. Moreover, the fandom wouldn't exist in the same way it does now. Not. Even. Close. Keep in mind that between 1996-2011 the first four books had sold 15 million copies (by one metric). This is an incredible number for any author. However, between 2011-2019 A Song of Ice and Fire has sold 90 million copies (that's 5x more copies in less than half the time, or a 1,000% growth rate). Game of Thrones wasn't perfect, but the story created the community we live in and I just don't know how to be negative about that.
Kyle W Ross
2019-05-22 15:33:23 +0000 UTC"Episode 6 was moving emotionally." Done with your insufferable contrianism tbqh fam. Unsubscribed
Guillaume
2019-05-22 14:08:00 +0000 UTCI really do appreciate you guys taking the time to point out some of the foreshadowing and groundwork that might lie behind some of these characters' end states, but to me, it feels like a lot of it is really grasping at straws. Maybe it's gotten to the point where GRRM has had so much foreshadowing that anything is possible, but if literally any outcome can be justified by the text, it sort of starts to feel to me like it's all pretty meaningless. Arya the Explorer comes across as terribly contrived to me. You did mention that maybe her liking Nymeria might be an early set up for this, if it is indeed her fate in the books, but Nymeria sailed away because she was trying to escape the oppression of the Empire of Valyria. That seems like pretty poor set up to me, if Arya's just decided to go on a quest because she's...a curious young girl who doesn't want to be pinned down by convention, I guess? She's never been set up as a seafarer (she rode a ship to Braavos that one time, I guess?), and she doesn't have Nymeria's motivations for leaving her homeland. If she's meant to be the parallel a Nymeria or an Elissa Farman, she just strikes me as a much less compelling version of either of their stories. All that time fighting to get back to her family, learning to change faces, and learning to be an assassin, and she ends up as a sailor? It's really just a head scratcher for me. I can think of half a dozen different endings to her arc that might incorporate one or all of those different parts of her journey, but this feels like it's just abandoned it. I'm also far from sold on King Bran. There's an obvious parallel between the situation with Egg and Aemon to what happens here with Bran and Jon, with the "unlikely" brother being chosen because a character higher up in the line of succession has taken (or will take) vows that preclude them wearing crowns, which I suppose I appreciate. Maybe it makes sense thematically, but I simply can't figure out how it works practically. Dunk & Egg tells us that a huge portion of the country supported Daemon I Blackfyre in the first Blackfyre Rebellion because in the eyes of many, "Daemon was the better man." There were many reasons people had misgivings about Daeron (the Dornish question, doubts about his own legitimacy, etc.), but a lot of the mythos of Daemon being "better" centered around him being more traditionally masculine, martially inclined, and having a dope sword (<---obviously I'm being a bit facetious here about Blackfyre and its symbolism as a Targaryen artifact, but still). Great Councils repeatedly passed over certain claimants for being "weaker" (usually bastards, women, or young children). On top of that, Bran follows the "wrong" gods in the eyes of the majority of Westeros - an even greater majority if the North does secede. Aegon the Conqueror converted to following the Faith of the Seven, but I certainly can't see Bran doing so, as he isn't exactly a casual follower of the Old Gods. If Bran does end up being chosen by a Great Council in the books, GRRM is going to have to do some serious work in order to convince me that the assembled lords of Westeros would choose a crippled, 10-11 year old follower of the wrong gods over literally any other possible candidate, especially if he's from a region that isn't even going to be part of the Seven Kingdoms anymore. Many of the other story beats at least made sense to me, although the show certainly didn't sell me on the execution of almost any character's journey in the last two seasons. But all I have to say is: if this is, broadly speaking, the ending to the book series, I really hope GRRM has some very compelling justifications up his sleeves.
champagnerain
2019-05-22 00:40:32 +0000 UTCGuys, I swear I enjoy your podcast, I support it every month and will keep doing it. I like your insights into the various dimensions - psychological, political, sociological - that give depth and substance to what is already a compelling plot development. I have to admit though that while listening to your review I had to ask myself whether you were talking about the same episode I watched a couple of days ago. You were walking about emotions, a sense of closure (though imperfect), a perfect landing for most of the characters (most of all Jon going back north), the show having captured the essence of the timidly hopeful dream of spring that the books subtext alludes to. Jeff gave the episode a 9 out of 10. The episode I watched left me hollow because the show was so devoid of any compelling narrative, plot or character development that was utterly unable to transmit any sense of emotion - truly I felt disconnected from story and character alike. The only exceptions concerned Daenerys and Jon, but not because I felt any connection to them but because I felt bitter about how the show runners utterly destroyed them as characters. As for Daenerys, this episode was the final insult to one of the greatest characters ever in fiction, the empathic, impetuous, courageous and ruthless rebel who rose from the ashes to become conqueror. I was ready to suffer with her, for her, while watching her tragic, grandiose downfall. Instead I got a poor woman apparently genetically doomed to become worse than her mad father (arguably the worst person in the whole series, along with the likes of Ramsey) who snapped out of the blue and committed mass murder for no reason I could recognize either in the plot or in her mind. I know you have different views, but foreshadowing isn’t character development: for every hint at Daenerys’s dark sides Jeff listed in the review of the previous episode there are a bunch of acts she actually did that point in the opposite direction. I watched this once wonderfully fascinating character speak Hitleresque nonsense, embark in delusional fantasies as if she were totally schizophrenic (I guess she was hearing voices too), forget her newly found paranoia and let her be killed with ease by the man she was supposed to see as the greatest threat to her legitimacy. Man, that was cruel to Daenerys. But arguably even crueler was what the show runners did to Jon: a character they spent 7 seasons building up as a leader reduced to a secondary player who has no agency in almost 8 hours of tv apart from this ridiculously construed, totally fake moment in which he has to perform his plot function of killing Daenerys - even that he does in a very uncharacteristic way for Jon: not confronting Daenerys but sticking a knife into her heart while fucking kissing her. This was Aegon Targaryen, the son of ice and fire, who rose to be a leader of men to immediately become the most miserable servant of poor plot development. And he’s sent by his brother to a night’s watch that does not even have any sense. His reward is going back where he started without him having gained anything, not only in terms of recognition but in terms of inner development and growth. He’s less than what he was in season 1. He’s a spent force, a shadow of himself. Man that was more than cruel, that was inhuman to do to a character so good as Jon Snow, whose true identity - arguably the center of the plot for 7 seasons - only served the purpose of making Daenerys paranoid and give some superficial credibility to her descending into genocidal madness. On the top of that I saw the once smartest guy in the realm give a ridiculously illogical speech in which he somehow argues that the best criterion to select a king is to choose the one with the best story...I won’t comment further on that because I’ve already written too much. I will only say that 90% of the characters had a better story than Bran, whose purpose in the show is actually to have had no purpose at all. But fans had Tyrion where they had liked him the most: as hand of the king and true ruler. This was as emotional as staring at an empty open fridge. So I was left hollow, and bitter, and angry. A cold and calculating Sansa becoming queen of an independent north left me cool and Arya becoming a new Colombus annoyed me almost as much as her killing the night king did, because it was so contrived and fake. That’s not a closure, that’s the total breaking of the pact with the viewers. That’s an unmitigated artistic disaster, a narrative mess, a psychological nonsense. So I’d give the episode a 1 out of 10, not so much for its myriad inconsistencies but because of the way it completes the suicide the whole show has committed with this season, leaving us all ask ourselves whether the journey was worth. As of now, I’d say it wasn’t for me. But we still have Martin, and your fantastic weekly reviews. Which I will keep listening to. I swear this isn’t a rant, it’s a heartily felt dissenting voice. Love you and ASOIAF. Keep up with your fantastic work
Ric_Rome
2019-05-21 22:36:58 +0000 UTC
