The Iron Throne (Game of Thrones)
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 How I Met Your Mother: I had the worst series finale.
Game of Thrones: Hold my Iron Throne. | ||||||||||||||
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"If your series leaves people writing fan fiction set after its ending, then at the very least you've done an alright job […] But Game of Thrones' ending saw everyone and their nans writing fan fiction replacing its ending; trying to rewrite the way the series concluded… yikes."
— Glidus
"The Iron Throne" is the final episode of Game of Thrones. It was written and directed by the show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and aired on HBO in the United States and Canada on May 19, 2019.
Plot
After much turmoil and bloodshed across the Seven Kingdoms, the battle for the Iron Throne comes to an end, and the kingdom's true fate is revealed.
Why It Melted Its Own Throne
- Poor pacing throughout the episode.
- Like "The Bells", it suffers from rushed production and screenwriting, but to a worse extent.
- The show becomes less of a drama and more towards a sitcom, especially during the royal elections near the end.
- Daenerys gets killed in the end instead of Varys, who was supposed to be killed for being the perpetrator of her descent to madness.
- Speaking of her execution in the hands of Jon Snow, it ended up as poorly enacted and phoned-in.
- Embarrassingly anticlimactic ending, which only features the surviving characters moving to different locations in Westeros.
- Also like "The Bells", it was so bad that the writers, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, received enough ridicule to the point that they were forced to move to Netflix, and also had to drop out their Star Wars project.
- Fans are now pretty much unanimous in agreeing that Benioff and Weiss deserve little-to-no credit for the higher quality of the show's first to sixth seasons, and that those seasons only turned out so well because they were pretty much directly copied from George R.R. Martin's books.
- In this episode, no one knows that Jon Snow was the heir to the Iron Throne, even during the elections.
- Many fan-favorite characters end up being downplayed and killed, such as Bron, Sam, Davos, Sansa, Arya, Yara Greyjoy and Brienne.
- Crappy and cheesy dialogue.
- Tons of Plot holes:
- Drogon, who was fiercely loyal to Daenerys, essentially allows Jon to kill her. When it seemed like Drogon was going to kill Jon to avenge Daenerys, he destroys the Iron Throne instead. It is never explained why Drogon did this.
- Jon gets treated like a criminal for killing Daenerys, despite her killing thousands of innocent people. Despite multiple characters knowing that he is the rightful heir to the throne and is arguably the best candidate to become the king of Westeros, he is sentenced to rejoin the Night's Watch, even though the group is now pointless due to the Night King's death. They try to explain this away as an attempt to appease Daenerys' surviving forces and the Ironborn, but this is an even stupider explanation considering that it requires the former to be angry enough to want Jon punished but not angry enough to just kill him the moment they find out what he did to their queen, and the latter aren't any sort of military threat anymore thanks to Euron wiping out Yara's fleet, and then Euron's own fleet getting wiped out by Daenerys.
- Overall, it ended the show on an abysmal, awful and ridiculous note to the point that it not only killed the huge popularity of the show, but also made people not interested in the prequel.
Redeeming Qualities
- As usual, Ramin Djawadi's score and acting were all great.
- Some people may find this episode to be a satisfying conclusion to the show.
- Just like the other seasons, the visual effects and cinematography are both visually stunning for the most part.
- The "dragon wings" shot of Daenerys.
- The final battle, as you can see in the photo above, is very entertaining.
Reception
"The Iron Throne" received mixed reviews from critics. Audience reviews were extremely negative. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 47% of 137 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's consensus reads, "If nothing else, "The Iron Throne" is a bittersweet —- if unfortunately bland —- series finale that ensures Game of Thrones fans will linger on the fate of their favorite characters for some time. Will they ever be satisfied by the show's conclusions? Ask us again in 10 years.". It is the lowest-rated episode of the series on the website. With an IMDb rating of 4.0/10 based on 239,000 votes, it is the lowest-rated episode in the entire series.