JACOB ANDERSON (Grey Worm): I found it heartbreaking. There’s like a cruel inevitability in this show where anybody who finds that happiness is going to have that taken away from them. So I thought either Grey Worm or Missandei, that one would be taken from the other. I honestly thought Grey Worm was gone. And I even had that thought, “Take me!” The way they dealt with it in terms of how it affects Dany and Grey Worm makes it even sadder. It’s like when she dies, Grey Worm dies too, and he goes back to being a robot death machine.
NATHALIE EMMANUEL: She was so brave and showed her strength and fearlessness even though she doesn’t wield a sword. She knew what she was doing and was confident and fierce. I didn’t want her to be crying. She believes in her queen and believes in her cause. I wanted to make her strong in that moment, which is really hard when you’re feeling emotional. It was a fantastic scene. There’s a real sadness to the fact that the character won’t go on. She was a catalyst to Dany’s crazy fury.
When I watched my character die on the show, I was really sad. I might have shed a tear. I really felt the loss of her.
Emmanuel has also said in interviews that she thought it was unfortunate Missandei didn’t have a one-on-one scene with Daenerys in season eight, or perhaps a conversation with Cersei during her captivity. In earlier seasons, Thrones typically took advantage of first-time character pairings by giving them at least one conversation together.
DAVID NUTTER: I think that because Missandei was not royalty, how we did it was good, because Cersei treated her as a pawn. That was appropriate. Anything else would have been fun to watch but not honest to the show.
Missandei’s death infuriated Daenerys, who readied to attack King’s Landing. She turned to Jon Snow once again, seeking love and acceptance.
EMILIA CLARKE: There was just this last thread she was holding on to, this boy. I think he loves me, and that’s enough. Is it enough? Is it? There was that hope and will and wishing that finally there was someone who accepted her for everything she was and all of her life choices, that he sees her and “I’ll do that with you.” And he fucking doesn’t.
Which led to the final season’s fifth episode, “The Bells,” and the show’s most debated moment. Daenerys destroyed King’s Landing’s defenses, Euron’s fleet, and the mercenary Golden Company army. The city bells rang—a signal of surrender. The Iron Throne was hers. Mounted on Drogon, Daenerys could see the Red Keep in the distance. Cersei stood at a tower window, awaiting her fate. Daenerys could have ordered her armies to take over King’s Landing with minimal bloodshed. Instead, Daenerys did something else. She launched a devastating attack, with Drogon firebombing soldiers and citizens alike, punishing all for the sins of their queen.
NATHALIE EMMANUEL: It broke my heart. I knew she lost her mind, but until you see it in all of its glory and the destruction it causes, you can’t really comprehend it. I’m not sure Missandei meant that by “Dracarys.” Missandei was in heaven somewhere going, “You kind of went over the top there. I meant get Cersei, not, like, everyone.”
Committing mass murder to punish a defiant enemy hiding in a castle has a history in the Targaryen family. When Aegon the Conqueror invaded Westeros, King Harren the Black refused to bend the knee and took refuge with his sons, soldiers, and servants inside his massive castle compound of Harrenhal. (“I built in stone,” Harren declared. “Stone does not burn.”) The Targaryen used his dragon, Balerion the Black Dread, to blast Harren’s five towers with so much heat that it turned the castle’s impenetrable walls into an oven that roasted everybody inside. “The riverlords outside the castle walls said later that the towers of Harrenhal glowed red against the night, like five great candles,” Martin wrote in Fire & Blood. “And like candles, they began to twist and melt as runnels of molten stone ran down their sides.”
Aegon didn’t just end House Harren, but set an example. The lords of Westeros quickly fell into line and swore fealty to Aegon. With Harrenhal destroyed, Aegon built a new city by the sea to serve as the realm’s seat of power. The city was named King’s Landing.
DAN WEISS: If you think about how long it’s taken her to get to this place and what she’s given up to get to there—two of her three dragons and her closest friend in the world—and she’s looking at the Red Keep with the Lannister logo on it where her family’s star of the seven is supposed to be; her family’s birthright was taken over by the people who have done this to her.
DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): And in spite of all those injustices, she tried her best to make peace with Cersei in the best interest of the whole country—and got betrayed for it.
DAN WEISS: Also, up north, she sacrificed people she swore to protect. Half of them are dead because she made the decision to be a good actor and then [Jaime] turned on her and defected. It was a perfect storm of bad shit swirling around inside her head.
DAVID BENIOFF: And throughout her career she had people by her side who have been able to temper her worse impulses, whether it was Ser Jorah or Tyrion or Missandei—people who could suggest an alternate path. They’re either not there or she doesn’t trust them anymore.
DAN WEISS: Dozens and dozens of factors going back to her birth to what she’s seeing in her eyes right now a mile away and how that made her feel, all of them stepping on the scale tilting her into a terrible decision. A lot of people we admire and have statues of have made those choices, whether they were coldly rational or made in the heat of battle, that for many thousands of people were horrible life-altering or life-ending decisions.
NATHALIE EMMANUEL: I was really sad she went crazy. I was such a Daenerys fan. She was such a female icon. She had nothing and built herself up and got this army. There was a part of me that was disappointed. But then when you think about it, she’s lost everyone around her that meant anything to her. You can understand how it happened. I would have loved it if she only killed her enemies and sat on her throne and was the queen of everything.
PETER DINKLAGE: We love Daenerys. All the fans love Daenerys. And she’s doing these things for the greater good. “The greater good” has been in the headlines lately when somebody is lumped in with somebody who’s done something far worse, and we think, “For the greater good all these people have to come to the front lines and be held responsible.” That’s what’s happening in our show in terms of the purification of this place. When freeing everyone for the greater good, you’re going to hurt innocents along the way, unfortunately. That’s what war is. David and Dan talked about decisions made in war like [the United States’ dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945]. Did we make the right choices? How much longer would the war have gone on if we didn’t make that horrible decision? You’ll never know.
CONLETH HILL: One thing the last season was about was the futility of war and conflict. If you get one thing from the whole show, take that.
BRYAN COGMAN: She’s a tragic figure in a very Shakespearian/Greek sense. Emilia threaded that needle beautifully. It was the hardest job anybody had on the show that season.
Daenerys won. She conquered the capital. Cersei and Jaime Lannister were buried in rubble. And the new ruler of Westeros gave an authoritarian speech promising many more wars to come: “We will not lay down our spears until we have liberated all the people of the world!” Daenerys declared in Valyrian to her armies. “From Winterfell to Dorne, from Lannisport to Qarth, from the Summer Isles to the Jade Sea, women, men, and children have suffered too long beneath the wheel. Will you break the wheel with me?” The speech wasn’t entirely different from the ones Daenerys had given in the past. But before her rhetoric had all been hypothetical and, perhaps, exaggeration? Suddenly her promise of fire and blood was all too real.
KIT HARINGTON: Jon was watching the speech. He doesn’t speak Valyrian. David and Dan said, “Just pretend you know it.” Just the way she’s speaking and what she’s doing was telling him everything he needs to know.
Tyrion was imprisoned for releasing Jaime, and Jon Snow visi
ted him in his cell. Tyrion was often an ineffective advisor, and he’d made a slew of strategic errors over the years. But in his cell scene with Jon Snow he informally served as Hand to the true king of Westeros, and for once, his advice was effective, correct, and devastating.
“Sometimes, duty is the death of love,” Tyrion told Jon, in a callback to Night’s Watch maester Aemon Targaryen once telling him that “love is the death of duty.” “You are the shield that guards the realms of men, and you’ve always tried to do the right thing, no matter the cost,” Tyrion continued. “You’ve tried to protect people. Who is the greatest threat to the people now? It’s a terrible thing I’m asking. It’s also the right thing. Do you think I’m the last man she’ll execute?”
Daenerys walked into the ruins of the Red Keep’s throne room and saw snow falling on the Iron Throne, just like in her prophetic vision from season two. She laid her hand on the throne and was just about to sit down when Jon Snow entered. He wasn’t determined to kill his lover. He first begged his queen to see reason while she insisted her plans were for the greater good. “What about everyone else?” Jon asked. “All the other people who think they know what’s good?” And Daenerys replied, “They don’t get to choose.” That declaration guided Jon’s hand.
KIT HARINGTON: This is the second woman he’s fallen in love with who dies in his arms, and he cradles her in the same way. That’s an awful thing. In some ways he did the same thing to Ygritte by training the boy who kills her. This destroys him.
Harington’s word choice was rather fitting. Arguably the best line from Martin’s novels that did not make it into the show was a warning that Lord Commander Jeor Mormont gave to Jon Snow: “The things we love destroy us.” It’s a prophetic quote that proved true for several characters in the series, such as Jon, Daenerys, Ygritte, Drogo, Jaime, and Robb. Though Clarke also offered a humorous take on the twist.
EMILIA CLARKE: He just doesn’t like women, does he? He keeps fucking killing them. If I were to put myself in his shoes I’m not sure where he could go with it aside from, I dunno, maybe having a discussion about it? Ask my opinion? Warn me? It’s like being in the middle of a phone call with your boyfriend and they just hang up and never call you again. “Oh, this great thing happened to me at work today—hello?”—that was nine years ago. . . .
KIT HARINGTON: We spent a week shooting it. It was hard because you had to keep the emotion at a certain level for a long time and keep returning to it. But it felt fucking epic.
EMILIA CLARKE: We reshot it more than any other scene, trying to get it perfect. It was a big deal, and it was logistically a massive thing. You’ve got the throne room, it’s fallen in, there’s some green screen, there’s a dragon, there’s snow. And I very much wanted her final moment to be childlike in her innocence—because there’s nowhere else for her to go. In the penultimate episode, I felt like I slammed against the wall of how manic or crazy she could be. Where else is there for you to go other than right back to the beginning?
I know it sounds completely ridiculous because it’s make-believe, but I’ve never been killed on camera before. I have an innate understanding of what death looks like because I was pretty damn close to it twice and then I lost my dad. So having Daenerys die, a lot of these things were coming out. It was like grieving my brain hemorrhages all over again, grieving my dad all over again, grieving what Daenerys could have been, and grieving the love that I had for the show, for Kit, for David and Dan, for Jon Snow, and for the dragons. In that one moment, the grief of a thousand deaths came back and it was like, “Oh my God, I’m struggling to find breath right in this moment.”
A furious Drogon turned his wrath upon the Iron Throne, destroying the seat of power. The Iron Throne had been forged by Aegon I Targaryen, who had his dragon melt down the swords of his vanquished enemies. Just like the Night King, the Iron Throne was unmade as it was made. Drogon’s action was not explained. But given Daenerys’s strong connection to her dragon, it’s fair to assume the creature understood that his mother had been obsessed with this particular object and that it had somehow led to her doom. Drogon picked up Daenerys’s body and flew away. We never learn where they went.
EMILIA CLARKE: People have asked me about that a lot. It’s my tendency to be funny with it and say, “Oh, Hawaii.” But honestly, if I’m really being very serious about the whole thing: I think he flies around with her body until it decomposes. I literally think he keeps flying until he can’t fly anymore. He just keeps grieving.
In Daenerys’s vision back in season two, she didn’t quite touch the Iron Throne. Instead, she walked out of the room and found herself transported to the Night Lands. There she reunited with Khal Drogo—whom Drogon is named after—who was waiting for her along with their child.
JASON MOMOA (Khal Drogo): The woman just wanted love her whole life. If you see the whole journey she went through and how she was obviously mishandled by her family, and then had a husband she fell in love with, and then has her baby taken away, and then has to kill her husband. And then all the people and dragons and things that she’s loved . . . she’s just had the shit beat out of her and then she crashed. She goes off on everyone. It’s just sad.
BRYAN COGMAN: Jon asked, “Were we wrong?” Tyrion said: “Ask me again in ten years.” Which I think is valid.
EMILIA CLARKE: After ten years of working on this, it was logical, because where the fuck else can she go? It’s a logical change of events that happens. It’s not like she’s suddenly going to go, “Okay, I’m gonna put a kettle on and put some cookies in the oven and we’ll just sit down and have a lovely time and pop a few kids out.” That was never going to happen. She’s a Targaryen. And your childhood and upbringing affects your choices in life so greatly. She was brought up with the Iron Throne being the only goal. That need to say, “I did it for my family, for my everything, I went there and we conquered.” That no member of her family died in vain for this. That her life hadn’t been for nothing. That she hadn’t been struggling for nothing. She was that close to fulfilling that seal of approval, that thing we all secretly want. That plays a major role as to why she goes there.
But having said all of the things I’ve just said . . . I stand by Daenerys. I stand by her! I can’t not.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Many Partings
From survival to annihilation, from finding love to enduring heartbreak, from promotion to exile, the remaining Game of Thrones characters experienced an array of final-season storylines. As with Daenerys, each character’s fate reflected their journey, either as a reward for their skills and growth or as a consequence of their flaws.
Brienne of Tarth was knighted by Jaime Lannister at Winterfell on the eve of the Army of the Dead battle. The moving scene emerged in an offhand manner, as Jaime made the abrupt decision to reward Brienne with the official legitimacy that was always unimaginable for somebody of her gender and status in Westeros. At first, Brienne thought that Jaime was once again, mocking her. Then the weight of the moment took hold.
BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): We wanted to take the audience by surprise. It’s not a ceremonial scene on a cliff at sunset with billowing capes. It came out of a throwaway moment. Even some people in the room thought it was a joke, and then they quickly realized it was not. It’s a monumental thing. It’s a moment of grace and beauty in the middle of a nightmare.
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth): She was in Renly’s Kingsguard but had never been part of the establishment. No matter how much you carve a place for yourself outside of things, there’s something about acceptance from people that you love that’s irreplaceable. That’s what that moment represents. It’s also an idea of the possibility of equality in all this fighting and doing the honorable thing. In that moment, she feels it’s an acknowledgment of all of that and the body she has doesn’t matter; it’s about the acts she’s performed and how she’s behaved.
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): Jaime
understands Brienne and the feeling of being an outsider and people having preconceived opinions about you. With her people think, “She’s a woman, she can’t fight, she so big”—all the things he used to attack her with when they first met. He now understands her pain and that she just wants to be recognized.
DAVID NUTTER (director): Nikolaj said he left his body during that scene. He said afterward, “I don’t know what just happened,” that he actually became Jaime Lannister for a minute. For an actor, those are the best performances.
After fighting alongside each other in the Winterfell battle, Brienne and Jaime shared a night in bed together.
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: Sharing the experience of surviving war together and saving each other’s lives continuously, moment to moment, proved a very heady combination. Physicality often releases emotion. Working together unlocked them. If you’re facing and survived death, you want to experience everything life has to offer—it wouldn’t be as human to not explore that. She’s a woman, and that means she has a sex drive, so why shouldn’t she?
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: I never thought it was going to happen. They survived. There was this party. They buried the dead. There was this enormous relief. We did it. There’s drinking and happiness. And there’s flirting and she leaves and he goes to see her in her quarters and suddenly it happens.
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: It’s important to me how these things come about. I felt it was important to see a moment of choice from Brienne where she chooses to do this. As far as we know, Brienne hasn’t had a sexual or romantic encounter before. I was pleased about that, as a character who, in the books, sleeps in her armor to protect herself, that if something happened between her and another character, that she wanted it.
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