Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  SOPHIE TURNER: I wanted to keep my necklace—the black one with the chain leading down. They wouldn’t let me, so I just kept my corset instead, the thing that brought me so much pain. It’s the one thing I had that led me through this experience to the end.

  On one of my last days on the set, I had a moment where I was just walking in my Sansa costume on the grounds of Winterfell and thinking, “This is one of the last times I will be here, as Sansa, in your home.” It was this emotional, powerful moment when I really truly appreciated the character and Game of Thrones itself.

  Arya Stark, on the eve of the Battle of Winterfell, shared a night with her former traveling companion and friend Gendry, much to his surprise.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): I thought the script was a prank. They’re like, “We haven’t done that this year.” Oh, fuck! When do I shoot this? I need to go to the gym. David and Dan were like, “It’s the end of the world, what else would you have her do?” This maybe is a moment where Arya accepts death tomorrow, which she never does. “Not today.” So it was that moment where she said, “Tomorrow, we’re probably going to die. I want to know what that feels like before that happens.” It was interesting to see Arya be a bit more human, speak more about the things people are scared of, and that paved the way for the rest of her story.

  JOE DEMPSIE (Gendry): It’s obviously slightly strange for me because I’ve known Maisie since she was eleven, twelve years old. At the same time, I didn’t want to be patronizing toward Maisie. She was a twenty-year-old woman, so we just had a lot of fun with it.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: David and Dan said, “You can show as much or as little as you want” [in the scene]. So I kept myself pretty private. I don’t think it’s important for Arya to flash, and this beat isn’t really about that. And everybody else has done it on the show, so . . . they did it and I don’t need to!

  At the beginning [of filming the scene], everyone was really respectful. No one wants to make you feel uncomfortable, which kind of makes you feel more uncomfortable, because no one wants to look at anything that they shouldn’t, which, in turn, makes you feel like you look awful because everyone is kind of like [looks away]. You want people to act more normal.

  Then by the end we were rushing to finish the scene and David Nutter is going, “Okay, you’re going to come in and do this and do that and, great, take your top off,” and then walked off. I’m like, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  Arya journeyed to King’s Landing, intending to kill Cersei and cross a big name off her death list. In several ways, Arya had been on a path similar to Daenerys. They were both heroic young women who were victims of terrible tragedies who then became increasingly skilled at survival, yet also murderous and apathetic. When Arya poisoned a feast at House Frey in revenge for the Red Wedding at the opening of season seven, it was not unlike Daenerys’s crucifying the masters—they’re evil as a group, yes, but what about as individuals? Did everybody at the banquet deserve the same fate? Arya halted a servant girl from drinking her poisoned wine, but what if she hadn’t been right next to her?

  BRYAN COGMAN: Both of the Stark girls were taken to the edge, where humanity can get lost. They come right up to that cliff and then come back. The final season for Arya was deconstructing this darker persona she’s had to acquire and rediscovering a bit of her lost humanity.

  Arya had her final conversation with the Hound. After witnessing so much horror and devastation, she changed her mind about going after Cersei. She made the opposite choice from Daenerys—to embrace life over death—at almost the exact same moment in the series. It was not a move that gave fans what they wanted, but it arguably gave Arya what she needed.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: I wanted her to kill Cersei, even if it meant she dies. Even up to the point where she’s with Jaime, I thought he’s going to whip off his face [and be revealed as Arya] and they were both going to die. I thought that’s what Arya’s drive had been.

  LENA HEADEY: I lived that fantasy [of an Arya-Cersei confrontation] as well until I read the script. There were chunky scenes, and it was nothing that I dreamed about. It was a bit of a comedown, and you have to accept that it wasn’t to be.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: The Hound said, “You want to be like me? That’s what you want, you want to live your life like me?” In my head the answer was, “Yeah.” But I guess sleeping with Gendry and seeing Jon, she realized she’s not just fighting for herself anymore but her family. All these human emotions that she hasn’t felt for a long time. When the Hound asks her that, she has another option. All of a sudden there were so many more things in my life that I can live for, that I can do, that I can see. It was a shock for me. Then I realized there were other things I could play, and bring her back to being a sixteen-year-old again.

  Arya said farewell to a lovestruck Gendry, rejecting his offer of a domestic life—“That’s not me.”

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: Arya had always been a lone wolf. She’s always felt like a bit of a misfit in her own family. I don’t think being with a partner is what would make her feel the most at home or the most fulfilled. They will probably see each other at like a friend’s wedding and say, “Oh, hey, it’s good to see you. . . .”

  Instead, Arya set sail for destinations unknown, to explore “what’s west of Westeros,” a young woman going into the hostile unknown, but we know she can take care of herself.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: It’s not a Game of Thrones ending. It’s like a happy ending for her. It let me take Arya to a place I’d never thought I’d go with her again. I hope that doesn’t sound wanky and actor-y.

  Jon Snow could have become the king of Westeros. Many viewers felt that the reveal of his mysterious parentage, teased from the very first episode, should have had greater impact on the final season’s storyline.

  BRYAN COGMAN: It was a subversion of the expectation. When you have your “main character” discover that he’s meant to be king, on any other show he would become king. That’s not our show. He was never destined for that. But the truth about his parentage does affect the dominoes of the season and how they fall. Being able to ride a dragon was a factor in the destruction of the Night King—not the ultimate factor, but in the war against the dead everybody had an essential part to play to get Arya to the right spot, and if you took away any one element, the Night King would have been victorious. And his parentage was a factor in the chain of events that led Daenerys to her eventual tragic ending.

  Bran Stark agreed that punishing Jon Snow was the only way to keep peace with the Unsullied. So Jon Snow was sentenced to serve out his days in the Night’s Watch at the Wall. Like Grey Worm fulfilling Missandei’s dashed hope for their future by journeying to Naath, Jon Snow fulfilled Ygritte’s dream that he would embrace a life free of the restraints and responsibilities of Westeros. He left his post at Castle Black with his friend Tormund Giantsbane and headed beyond the Wall with the Free Folk, never to kneel again.

  KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): There’s no trauma or cheer. He got closure. The closure doesn’t necessarily feel joyous. It’s just the end of something. There’s a satisfaction to that. It’s not a happy feeling. “At least this is done and I’ll continue to be hurt by this—forever. But it’s done and I need to let go of it now.” Everyone has told him he belonged in the true north and he’s finally going there. I don’t think he’s coming back.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Ultimately this show is about this family, this family that has split apart, and finding a way to bring all that together again. I don’t think it’s an accident David and Dan ended the series with that montage of Jon and Sansa and Arya going on their separate ways on their new journeys.

  ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT: One of the cleverest things about the ending is it didn’t conclude everything very neatly. The kingdom is in disarray. Arya is going off to start her own journey. Sansa is now Queen in the North. Bran is now king. The Starks are left unfinished. There’s no full stop. There’s no period. It’s almost as if the world of Game of Thrones exists,
still, somewhere.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  And Now the Watch Has Ended

  Fans were booing. That wasn’t good.

  Game of Thrones cast members waited anxiously backstage at Comic-Con in San Diego, preparing to step in front of six thousand people and celebrate the show’s final season. The show’s last episode had aired just two months earlier. HBO had scheduled a final Thrones Comic-Con panel for the San Diego Convention Center’s massive Hall H and tapped an unsuspecting journalist (me) to serve as the moderator. In the weeks leading up to the event, fans upset with the final season had circulated posts on social media gleefully detailing creative plans to disrupt the panel with protests in the ballroom.

  Aware of the threats, a Comic-Con official took the unusual step of going onstage before the panel started to remind the audience that it was in the spirit of the convention to always express support for shows regardless of how fans might feel about them. That’s when the boos happened.

  “This panel is screwed,” I thought, my head filled with visions of taking the stage to fans howling “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

  The stage lights went down.

  A Thrones highlight reel played.

  Then it was time to face the crowd. . . .

  * * *

  —

  Game of Thrones aired its final episode, “The Iron Throne,” on May 19, 2019. The seventy-nine-minute series finale was divided into two strikingly different parts. The first depicted the gray postapocalyptic aftermath of Daenerys’s King’s Landing attack and the rise, and demise, of her fascistic regime (one might say it felt like “the winds of winter”). The latter half picked up months after Daenerys’s death and showed Westeros being reborn as the survivors determined the fate of the realm and grappled with their new roles and destinies (“a dream of spring”).

  With each passing episode in the final season, the volume of fandom debate about the show increased. Every minute detail of the series was passionately discussed. Perhaps the best example of the extraordinary level of scrutiny was when an errant modern-day coffee cup was accidentally left in a shot during a scene at Winterfell, barely visible, and it sparked global headlines.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): I couldn’t believe it. When we got the email about it the next day, I honestly thought someone was pranking us, because there had been things before where people were like, “Oh, look at that plane in the background!” and somebody had Photoshopped it in. I thought, “There’s no way there’s a coffee cup in there.” Then when I saw it on the TV I was like, “How did I not see that?”

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): I’d seen that shot one thousand times and we’re always looking at their faces or how the shot sat with the shots on either side of it. I felt like we were the participants in a psychology experiment, like where you don’t see the gorillas running around in the background because you’re counting the basketballs. Every production that’s ever existed had things like this. You can see a crew member in Braveheart; there’s an actor wearing a wristwatch in Spartacus. But now people can rewind things and everybody is talking to each other in real time. So one person saw the coffee cup, rewound it, and then everybody did.

  The final season was watched by nearly forty million viewers in the United States and tens of millions more around the world. The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman declared that the show, “ended just about as well as one unwieldy, sprawling, complicated epic could end,” and io9’s Rob Bricken wrote, “The story was the ‘best’ ending people could have hoped for . . . things worked out shockingly well for everyone but Daenerys and Jon—and that was exactly what Game of Thrones needed to get right.”

  But many critics—as well as the vocal mass of fans—were quite displeased. “Tonally odd, logically strained, and emotionally thin,” wrote The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber of the finale. And The New York Times’s Jeremy Egner opined, “It all could have worked better if the past two seasons had felt less like headlong rushes toward predetermined outcomes. . . . So many of the things that drove fans loudly crazy this season most likely wouldn’t have if they’d been given more room to breathe.” The season’s Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb scores plummeted compared to previous years, and a fan petition was signed by thousands asking HBO to remake season eight.

  The decision to end the series at its peak of popularity combined with revealing the oft-tragic and convention-defying fates of dozens of beloved characters over the course of just six episodes was inevitably going to result in some frustration and controversy along with accolades and cheers. Yet the amount of blowback was beyond what was anticipated.

  Many of the show’s insiders felt that a good percentage of the criticism was a casualty of Game of Thrones being a momentous pop culture event that was hyped to a level that no drama series could possibly satisfy. And with Thrones, there was the added consequence that its finale marked the end of an era. With more than five hundred scripted shows on television in 2019 and audiences increasingly bingeing or delaying their viewing rather than watching programs live, Game of Thrones didn’t just conclude a TV show but ended a sense of global community at a time when people were feeling increasingly isolated. “Game of Thrones is the last great show to bring us together,” mourned Wired’s Emily Dreyfuss. “Maybe that’s part of why everyone seems so upset about this final season.”

  Or, as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau put it: “How can any ending be good . . . when you don’t want it to end?”

  CAROLYN STRAUSS (former programming president at HBO; executive producer): No matter what you do in the Twitter age, you’re going to get killed. There’s always going to be somebody in their comfy chair who has the better ending. It’s a very tricky balancing act, and there were a lot of practical and storytelling factors that were never considered by someone doing a theoretical finale. If other people have a better idea, well, they can go do it themselves.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): I hear both extremes. There are people who say they hate the show and say, “George, write your books and ‘fix’ things.” And there are people who love the show who say, “I don’t care about George’s version anymore, it’s a novelization, it’s fan fiction, who cares.” When I finish my books people can argue which is right, which is wrong, and which is the “real” story. None are the real story. These are fictional characters. Which one resonates with you more?

  DAVID BENIOFF: There definitely are things [over the course of the show] we would do differently. I don’t know if there’s anything I would want to discuss publicly.

  DAVID WEISS: Prince once said something about how any record you listen to that you think is terrible, somebody worked themselves to the bone to make it. So many people work so hard on any aspect of a thing. So when you say something critical it can sound like you’re blaming somebody else. And really the only people who are to blame are us—and I sure as hell don’t want to blame us.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): I have no regrets about the last season. I thought it was the best work we had ever done. Once everybody gets over the anger of the Internet, they will see they wrote some fantastic stuff. The criticism doesn’t seem to fairly consider what an extraordinary achievement the whole thing was. When people say, “I wasn’t happy with the ending,” I think, “If you wrote the ending you wanted, I bet nobody would have been happy with your ending either!”

  MICHAEL LOMBARDO (former HBO programming president): Most people thought it was an unbelievable season of television. I was at HBO when The Sopranos ended and everyone was outraged. Now it’s looked at as a perfect ending. When Seinfeld ended it was like the world had stopped. It’s hard to land those planes. They left an incredible testament. Only time will be the true judge.

  In an unprecedented move, HBO put five Game of Thrones prequels into script development, all from different writers, in a competitive “bake-off” in hopes of finding a show that might prove a worthy successor. One of them by Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass), even sh
ot a pilot in 2019. The project starred Naomi Watts and was set thousands of years before the events in Thrones, in the lead-up to the events of the original Long Night. HBO decided not to move forward with the show, perhaps proving once again how difficult it can be to make Martin’s world come alive. But HBO hasn’t given up. The network gave a full series order to another project, House of the Dragon, based on Martin’s history of the Targaryen family, Fire & Blood. Martin is quite hopeful about the new series, and the network promisingly tapped Thrones veteran Miguel Sapochnik as the project’s director and co-showrunner (along with Colony writer Ryan Condal). The other prequel projects remain in development, while Dragon is planned for 2022.

  Now let’s go back to that Comic-Con panel.

  One by one, seven Thrones stars (Maisie Williams, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Conleth Hill, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Liam Cunningham, Jacob Anderson, and John Bradley) took to the stage.

  The massive Hall H audience roared at them . . . with love. Fans laughed at their jokes (“What did I steal? The scenes I was in!” quipped Hill). Each panelist had a coffee cup in front of them, a wink to the coffee cup goof. They made heartfelt speeches that brought applause and tears. And when the event concluded, the panel received a standing ovation. No boos, no protests, no shames. It didn’t mean everyone in Hall H was thrilled with the final episodes, of course. But it suggested their overall love for Game of Thrones, and particularly the work of its cast, had endured.

  A couple of hours after the panel, the actors went out to dinner together. A silent question hung over the table. It was the same question that had lingered over all gatherings of Thrones’ cast and crew ever since the series had wrapped production: Will all of us ever be together again?