This narrative change wouldn't have fixed everything that went wrong in that final "Game of Thrones" season. It's extra frustrating because there could've been time to explore this story if the writers hadn't forced themselves into a different direction back in season 7. "Game of Thrones" was always at its best when dealing with tough, complicated questions, and "is it possible for Dany to redeem herself?" would've been such an interesting dilemma for the final season to chew on. Imagine instead if the characters still had the threat of the White Walkers to deal with, if Dany's moral downfall came with the added tragedy of her having divided and weakened our main characters at the time where they needed her most. Instead of having her gradually turn into the Mad Queen over the course of the entirety of season 7 and then dealing with the fallout in season 8, the writers crammed it all into three episodes. While this choice would undoubtedly be controversial no matter how they did it, the real problem was that the writers never dealt with her turn in an interesting way. Daenerys may be a war criminal, but Jon would still need her for her army and her dragons to save humanity.įrom a quick glance at the audience reactions to the final season, you'd think it was the decision to turn Daenerys evil that pissed everyone off.
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This would've put the show in a much more interesting place going into the final season: Daenerys would be given narrative time to reckon with what she'd done, and Jon would be forced to figure out how to navigate this new dynamic.
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It's not hard to imagine a different season 7 where Daenerys, frustrated by how poorly her attempts to humanely conquer Westeros had gone so far, decided to reject Jon's advice of focusing on the White Walkers and go full Mad Queen in the season 7 finale. Throughout the fourth episode of season 8, " The Last of the Starks," Daenerys went from a war hero who just risked everything to help Winterfell, to a desperate and insane tyrant ready to burn countless civilians to get the throne. The main threat to all these characters had been defeated, the story felt like it was winding down, but the show was still having Daenerys go through a major last-minute character-defining personality change that felt disconnected from everything that had come in the seven and a half seasons beforehand. Not only did it come across as an anti-climax, but it made the episodes afterward feel like an extended epilogue. And once the Night King was handily destroyed, they went straight back to the petty political power games as if none of that had ever happened.
The selfishness of so many of the main characters never had any consequences humanity was perfectly safe after all. As it turned out, it was okay for most of the characters to ignore the White Walker threat for seven seasons straight. By defeating the White Walkers halfway through the final season without many major casualties, the show undermined that theme.
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