Note: This post contains major spoilers for the fifth episode of Game of Thrones Season 8, “The Bells”

Poor Tyrion Lannister spends the first thirty minutes of “The Bells,” the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, doing everything in his power to prevent the slaughter of the innocent people of King’s Landing. In scene after scene, we see Tyrion plead his case to Daenerys, Grey Worm, Jaime Lannister, Jon Snow, and Davos Seaworth, repeating his mantra of, “If you hear the bells ring, they’ve surrendered,” so many times that we half-expected him to self-actualize into a bell and ring himself.

He puts in the work. He arranges all the pieces. He checks all the boxes.

Turns out, it didn’t matter. The bells did indeed ring, but Daenerys torched the city anyway.

More than anything else, “turns out, it didn’t matter” was the running theme of “The Bells,” an episode that tossed aside seven-and-a-half-seasons of careful groundwork and character development in favor of unearned shocks, dizzying twists, and hasty resolutions. A significant portion of the Game of Thrones fanbase is understandably upset, after investing so much time and emotional energy into this show, only to watch it faceplant spectacularly at the finish line.

While some would argue that the foreshadowing in earlier seasons perfectly set up Dany’s Mad Queen pivot, you’d have to perform some Olympic-level cherry-picking in order to claim that as evidence of strong writing. While yes, there was a fair amount of foreshadowing that Daenerys would someday go full Red Hulk (although still not enough, as we’ll get into below), there was also a lot of other foreshadowing, along with significant plot threads and carefully nuanced character work, which was unceremoniously shunted aside in order to make way for the events of “The Bells.”

Here is an extensive, although probably not exhaustive, list of threads that Game of Thrones has carefully set up and cultivated over its previous seven seasons, only to drop-kick into oblivion in its penultimate episode.

The Wildfire Hidden in King’s Landing

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Image via HBO

Since the third season of Game of Thrones, we’ve known that there are caches of wildfire hidden all over King’s Landing, planted by Mad King Aerys, that, if ignited, could destroy the entire city. It’s what Aerys wanted to do back when Tywin Lannister first stormed King’s Landing -- which is why Jaime assassinated him -- and what Cersei has been on the brink of doing ever since. She used some of it to destroy the Sept of Baelor at the end of Season 6, but the rest of it has just been sitting there, waiting to go off.

Except, apparently not? The wildfire is, in fact, ignited in “The Bells,” but by the time it is, it’s merely a splash of green color in the red hellscape that is King’s Landing, and doesn’t make a bit of difference to the fate of the city.

It could have been interesting if (instead of Daenerys methodically strafing the city) she’d gone straight for the Red Keep, and had accidentally ignited the wildfire. The city still would have burned, and innocents still would have died, but the destruction of the city would’ve been an inadvertent consequence to a rash act of revenge -- and a payoff for her own father’s paranoid plotting decades earlier -- rather than an uncharacteristic and unearned act of wanton destruction. Jon and Tyrion could still have been properly horrified, everyone who died still could’ve died, and Daenerys still could’ve been painted as too unpredictable and unstable to trust as a ruler, but at least Chekhov’s wildfire could’ve actually meant something.

Euron Greyjoy

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Image via HBO

I dare anyone* to explain to me the point of Euron Greyjoy.

Yes, he has done several seemingly noteworthy things during his time on the series, but here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure none of it actually mattered. Let’s look closely at the list of his major accomplishments, and see if we actually needed him, personally, for any of it.

He killed Balon Greyjoy, but let’s face it, Balon was old and no one liked him. Anyone could’ve taken him out, or he could’ve just fallen off a bridge by accident.

He declared himself King of the Iron Islands, but before he did that, Theon had already thrown his support behind Yara, who is now back in charge of the Iron Islands. Since all road lead to Yara being in charge anyway, we didn’t really need Euron in there in between.

He stole the Iron Fleet, which is now totally destroyed. Maybe they would still be around if Yara was in charge, but they’d also likely be back at the Iron Islands, and still wouldn’t have affected any of the events at King’s Landing.

He kidnapped Yara Greyjoy for a little while, but again, she’s now back ruling the Iron Islands, which is where she wanted to be in the first place. Theon returned to the Starks after rescuing her, but it was hardly Euron who galvanized Theon’s resolve to rejoin the House that raised him. He was already headed that way once he escaped Ramsay Bolton with Sansa. So, no, Euron does not get points for that.

He leeched onto Cersei Lannister and was under the impression that he got her pregnant, but he most definitely did not. Next.

He killed a dragon. But the thing about that is, Rhaegal took such a beating at the Battle of Winterfell that it was honestly pretty surprising to discover he was still alive in the first place. It was almost as if the show resurrected him just to kill him again.

He captured Missandei, which led to her beheading (UGH), which one could argue, in conjunction with the loss of Rhaegal, was what led to Daenerys’ breakdown. But according to showrunner D.B. Weiss, Daenerys’ decision to torch King’s Landing was triggered by the sight of the Red Keep, not her Big Emotions over losing her friend or her dragon. So no, Euron Greyjoy does not get credit for that, either.

He gets in a dumb fight with Jaime Lannister, during which he gets in several good stab wounds that, ultimately, do nothing. Jaime still gets to Cersei, tries to execute his original plan to escape, and is crushed by falling rocks. Euron dies alone on the beach, declaring that he killed the Kingslayer, because of course Euron Greyjoy would spend his last breath trying to take credit for yet another thing he did not do.

In conclusion, Euron Greyjoy is The Worst, and he should’ve been unceremoniously incinerated by Drogon during his first pass over the Iron Fleet, the end.

*Please do not take me up on this.

Jaime Lannister’s Redemption Arc

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Image via HBO, Helen Sloan

Jaime Lannister starts the series at arguably the biggest moral deficit of all the Lannisters. He’s and Cersei are both up to their eyeballs in incest and callous selfishness, but then he also shoves an innocent kid out a window in order to cover up said incest. He is, er, problematic, to say the least.

But over the course of the series, Jaime is put through both the physical and emotional wringer, which forces him to grapple with his own preconceived notions of honor, love, morality, and nobility. Gradually, he begins to find his own voice, one that is not constantly drowned out by Cersei’s, and starts to use it to speak to what he believes is right. It’s a complex journey, filled with second-guessing and backsliding and self-sabotage, but if you were to plot the significant points of Jaime’s story onto a graph and draw a trend line through it, it’s clear that he’s been on an upward trajectory since Season 2, from his earliest encounter with Brienne of Tarth.

Season 8 seemed to mark Jaime’s highest point yet, as he finally broke free of Cersei -- causing her to feel so betrayed that she hired someone to kill him -- allied himself with his former enemies in the name of the greater good, and became romantically involved with the one woman who always fought to see the best in him, even when he couldn’t see it in himself.

And yet, in “The Last of the Starks,” he abruptly decides that none of it matters, that he’s exactly the same man he was back in the beginning of the series, and that he might as well return to square one.

The problem is not that he backslides right before the end, or that this backslide leads to his ultimate downfall; it’s that he backslides for no reason. He takes all his work, all the hard-won ground he has gained over the past seven seasons, all the difficult decisions he has agonized over and lines he has refused to cross, and tosses them all aside to go running back to Cersei, seemingly on a whim.

After all, he already knew that Cersei was likely going to die the instant Daenerys took control of King’s Landing. He knows his sister, and that she’ll never give up the Iron Throne willingly. That was the entire reason he chose to stay behind at Winterfell while the armies marched south; he knew what was bound to happen, and knew that when it did, it was in everyone’s best interest for him to be far away. Sansa receiving word that Euron had killed a dragon and informing him that Cersei was likely toast did nothing to change this; Jaime already knew Cersei’s days were numbered.

When Brienne pleaded with him to stay, her argument was basically, “You’re better than this,” while Jaime’s retort was, “No, I’m not.” Which might be a poignant and resonant theme to explore, if the show hadn’t put so much work -- literal years of effort -- into showing us that yes, he is.

And yet, I guess he’s not? Jaime ends the series exactly as he started, in the arms of his sister, insisting that nothing else matters besides the two of them. And I guess that’s true. None of it did matter, despite the many seasons the show spent trying to convince us otherwise.

What was the point of it all? To demonstrate that redemption is a lie? To prove that the pursuit of self-betterment is futile? To sneer at the audience for hoping for something more than bleak nihilism for a character who has long symbolized the idea that positive change is possible for people willing to put in the work?

I’ve gotta say, it seems a little weird to seem to want to punish your audience for caring about the very things you’ve spent eight years convincing us to care about, but maybe that was the point. Except ultimately (and unfortunately) it wasn’t about subversion so much as weak writing.

The Golden Company

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Image via HBO

Cersei spent every last penny she had (and quite a few she didn’t) on hiring The Golden Company to come fight alongside the Iron Fleet and the Lannister armies to defend her claim to the Iron Throne. Much has been made of their 20,000 men, their undefeated track record, their impressive skills in battle, and the elephants they didn’t bring.

And yet they didn’t… do… anything? The first time we ever see The Golden Company in action, they never even get a chance to fight, since they’re too busy trying to avoid getting charbroiled by a dragon. Not one of those 20,000 men makes a bit of difference to the outcome of the massacre of King’s Landing. They may as well not have been there.

Technically, Cersei still owes a massive debt to the Iron Bank due to hiring them, but the odds of them coming to collect from the Crown seem pretty low. No one wants to be the collection agent sent to strongarm a woman who recently incinerated half a million people just for the heck of it. And if they try to collect from Tyrion, he seems to be in the habit of giving away holdings that aren’t his lately, so he’ll probably just throw Riverrun or The Twins at them and call it a day.

Cersei Sending an Assassin after Jaime and Tyrion

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Image via HBO

In the first episode of Season 8, Cersei hires Bronn to go kill both of her brothers, presumably because she’s so pissed off that Jaime would leave to go fight at Winterfell (even though, at that point in the episode, we last saw Jaime still by Cersei’s side in King’s Landing in the Season 7 finale, so this whole “hire Bronn as an assassin” thing feels very odd), and because Tyrion is, well, Tyrion.

(When has Cersei not been trying to kill Tyrion? I mean except for that one time when he was standing directly in front of her with a dozen arrows trained on him and she decided not to. Except for that.)  

We all knew that there was no way that Ser “I just want a castle” Bronn was actually going to be the one to kill either Lannister brother, but the fact remains that Cersei hired him, and Jaime knew she hired him.

And yet in “The Bells,” he just goes waltzing (well, okay, stumbling and wheezing) up to Cersei without a wisp of concern that she may still want him dead, and she exclaims in surprise, “You’re bleeding!” as if she didn’t just order his death four episodes ago.  

If Cersei doesn’t care that she hired Bronn to kill him, and Jaime doesn’t care that she hired Bronn to kill him, and Tyrion knows that Cersei is always hiring people to kill him, and Bronn doesn’t care about anything… what was the point of any of this?

Cersei’s Actual, Very Real Pregnancy

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Image via HBO

I don’t know about you, but the biggest surprise for me in “The Bells” wasn’t that Daenerys would dracarys an entire city, or that all it took to get Arya to turn away from her vengeance quest was a “don’t be like me” speech from The Hound, but that that freaking pregnancy was actually real.

Since Season 7, I have been positive that Cersei was making it up to manipulate the men around her, because that is 110% something she would do. She saw Jaime was slipping away from her, and she used it to reel him back in. Then, when he left anyway, she used it to snag Euron Greyjoy (which, why?) It was Peak Cersei, weaponizing her femininity to hold on to her power, and working the patriarchal structures of her society to her advantage by being willing to cross lines that anyone with a reasonably calibrated moral compass wouldn’t even approach.

But apparently not, because she was actually telling the truth the whole time? Sure, she still tried to use the pregnancy to manipulate Jaime and Euron, but the fact that it was real in the first place just seems so… odd. This show has never been one to lean into happy coincidences, yet Cersei just happens to get pregnant right when she needs to sink her hooks into Jaime and forge an alliance with the Iron Islands? Since when is that a thing that happens in Westeros?

Not that it mattered, in the end. Cersei’s pregnancy didn’t affect any of her actions (despite Tyrion’s certainty that it should), Jaime never showed any signs that it influenced either his decision to leave or to return, Euron died having no idea that the baby wasn’t his, and Cersei and Jaime got buried by rocks. Yet another plot line that was spun up only to go nowhere.

Cleganebowl

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Image via HBO

The showdown between the two Clegane brothers has been a popular Game of Thrones fan theory for years, but when it finally happened, it had surprisingly little impact on much of anything. Sandor “The Hound” Clegane had just finished explaining to Arya Stark why it was pointless for her to continue to press into the Red Keep in the hopes of killing Cersei Lannister, because Daenerys was destroying everything and Cersei was going to die anyway.

For the first time in her entire life, Arya immediately changed her mind and performed an abrupt about-face, but The Hound disregarded the argument he’d just made in favor of continuing his search for his zombie brother, Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane. When he found him, the brothers duked it out before plunging together to a fiery death (but not before the show treated us to yet another shot of The Mountain gouging a man’s eyes out with his thumbs, because that’s apparently a thing we needed a callback to).

It would have perhaps been a poetic end to these two characters… if The Hound hadn’t just made such a convincing case not 30 seconds before that The Mountain was definitely about to die anyway. As it was, it just seemed gratuitous, doubling down on The Hound’s revenge quest immediately after listening to him argue that revenge quests are pointless, and drawing out the death scene for a character who was both already dead, and would’ve died yet again even without his brother’s help.

The Valonqar Prophecy

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Image via HBO

Ever since A Feast for Crows was first published in 2005, fans have been speculating about the prophecy that Cersei would one day be killed by the “valonqar,” which is High Valyrian for “little brother.” Cersei has always been certain that the prophecy meant Tyrion, which is one of the reasons she’s been so intent on killing him first, while most of the Game of Thrones fandom suspected that the valonqar would turn out to be her beloved Jaime, the younger Lannister twin.

Granted, this prophecy has never been included in its entirety in the show, but most fans still believed that writers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff would stick to whatever roadmap George R.R. Martin had given them when it came to the deaths of two of his central characters. After all, even though the final Game of Thrones books aren’t out yet, Martin has said for years that he knows how they end, and that Benioff and Weiss are aware of his ending. It seemed reasonable to assume that when Cersei Lannister met her end, we would finally find out who the valonqar was, once and for all.

But surprise! Just kidding! It’s rocks.

All of Daenerys’ Character Development

Oof, this one hurts. For the entire time we’ve known her, Daenerys Targaryen has been banging the drum of liberation and justice. She’s even fashioned her worldview into her very identity, working “Protector of the Realm” and “Breaker of Chains” into her incredibly long and self-appointed title. Yes, she’s always been power-hungry and entitled, but she’s always viewed herself as one of the good guys, and has repeatedly insisted that there are some lines she is unwilling to ever cross, not even if it guarantees her victory.

Remember back in Season 4, when Drogon killed a little girl, and Daenerys was so horrified that she chained up Viserion and Rhaegal just to ensure that no more innocent life would be lost if she could help it? Daenerys has always been ruthless and uncompromising with her enemies, but she’s always had a strong moral center and deep empathy for the innocent. Every single previous time in the series when she’s used her dragons to inflict punishment, it has always, without exception, been because the opposing party either oppressed others or sided against her.

And yet now she decides to burn tens of thousands of innocent, oppressed people alive, people whose city has surrendered, simply because, according to D.B. Weiss, “she makes the decision to make this personal.”

I’m sorry, what?

In the wake of “The Bells,” there has been a lot of talk about whether Dany’s turn to the Dark Side was foreshadowed (it was), but occasionally mentioning that “when a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin and the world holds its breath” isn’t the same as patiently laying the groundwork to show that she is capable of something like this. Daenerys has been emotional many times in the past, and she has taken many things personally, but she has never shown herself to be someone who lashes out unnecessarily at the people in the periphery. She sometimes gets incredibly angry, but her anger is always laser focused on the people who have offended her. Nothing of Dany’s previous characterization suggests that strong emotion + taking something personally = razing a city to the ground.

Consider a story where the main character occasionally mentions how much they’d like to go to Disneyland, but never bothers saving any money and actively makes choices that would inhibit their going to Disneyland. It would feel strange to turn the last couple pages and find them abruptly in Disneyland, even though this is hardly the first mention of Disneyland in the story. Yes, it was foreshadowed, but it wasn’t earned. While some of the character’s words may have put the idea of Disneyland in your brain, their actions led somewhere completely different.

And yet here we are in Disneyland.

Except Disneyland is on fire.

And everyone is dead.  

The Game of Thrones finale airs Sunday, May 19th on HBO.

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Image via HBO