Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5 recap: The Bells
Fans have invested years in the young Targaryen’s tale … and this is what they get? | SPOILERS
Watching this final season of Game of Thrones feels a lot like Arya must have during this episode, running for her life through the formerly imposing King’s Landing as it disintegrates under dragonfire. If you slow down too much to criticise what’s going on, the sheer tonnage of nonsense would bury you, like so much masonry.
Cersei had nothing up her sleeve at all? Daenerys really needed to go street to street scorching women and children, why? Suddenly no one can launch a scorpion arrow? And when was the last time one of Tyrion’s plans actually worked instead of ending ironically, or in the deaths of his friends? Moving right along!
A lot of Daenerys’ fans are feeling raw after her Breaking Bad-homage, where she burned the people of the capital. Her remoteness during this carnage was rather chilling; we could hardly even see her on Drogon’s back. (I can imagine US Senator Elizabeth Warren and her presidential campaign staff agonising over her recent written endorsement of the Dragon Queen: “Let’s try ‘I was for her, before I was against her?’”)
Fans have invested in the young Targaryen’s tale for eight seasons, witnessed all her hardships, suffering and several triumphs, and now at the very moment she overthrows a tyrant to claim her birthright, she damns herself a tyrant too. Not so much as stopping the wheel in Tyrion’s parlance, or breaking the wheel as Daenerys herself once put it, but more like reinventing the wheel … that classic metaphor of pointlessness.
Put simply, her worst instincts for the use of raw power to instil fear won out, even after the bells of surrender sounded and the Lannisters dropped their swords. The moment was actually pretty tense, reminding me — in a metaphor that will please few pop culture fans — of the scene in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith when Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker bitterly wept as he saw the Jedi temple burning in the distance, trying to decide to do the right thing or slaughter younglings and join the Dark Side.
King’s Landing now looks like Harrenhal, which was similarly melted by Daenerys’ ancestor Aegon and his dragon Balerion. The late Varys was right. And the longevity of Daenerys’ reign does not look assured at all.
Elsewhere this episode we saw the siblings who loved too much, Cersei and Jaime, die in each other’s arms. It is hard to argue that either character deserved more, for all their sins, much as we might have grown in sympathy for them.
We also saw the siblings who hated too much, Sandor and Gregor Clegane, fight to the death in the long mooted “Cleganebowl” before dying in each other’s arms, after a fashion. Brutal, hateful, remorseless — it was everything fans had hoped for.
So, with one more episode to go, how will it end? (Presuming there is still an Iron Throne to sit on; scenes of the throne room were conspicuously absent this week).
Will Jon, with his superior claim to the throne, and Daenerys-hating sister-cousins Arya and Sansa, save the day? Will Bran wheel himself atop of the heap by some twist of fate? Will Tyrion betray his Queen? Will Bronn rule the country from Highgarden? Or Gendry from Storm’s End?
As Isaac Hempstead Wright (who plays Bran) told me, no one he knows has guessed the ending correctly. Are we in for a classic finale like Mad Men or Breaking Bad? A controversial one like Seinfeld or The Sopranos? Or a reviled hot mess like Lost? Only one more week to find out.
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