Game of Thrones season 8: episode recaps and reviews, spoilers, news, and analysis

Game of Thrones’ ending left many fans disappointed with what they viewed as lazy or misguided storytelling, or sloppy writing that abandoned many of the show’s longstanding plot threads.

Among the most hotly debated, even confusing choices the show made was the issue of who would finally rule what was left of Westeros. After the dust cleared, the answer was ... Bran Stark.

Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne,” is the show’s lowest-ranked episode ever on IMDB, with the site’s users grading it a 4.3 out of 10. And what’s the second-lowest-ranked episode of the series on IMDB? That would be the final season’s fourth episode, “The Last of the Starks,” coming in at a 5.6.

And if you look a little further, you’ll realize that IMDB users’ lowest-ranked six episodes of the entire series are the six episodes of the final season. The second episode, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” ranks the highest of the six, with an 8.0, but it’s still behind season five’s “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” IMDB’s lowest-ranked episode of Game of Thrones that’s not in the final season, with a score of 8.1.

With Game of Thrones over, one big question hangs over the TV industry, TV fans, and people who more casually enjoy water-cooler shows: Will there ever be another show like this?

I answered this question before the final season of Game of Thrones began with a resounding “yes,” because there’s always another huge TV show. And my colleague Peter Kafka explained some of the reasons there will be another event show at this level. It might take a while, but there will be another Game of Thrones.

The nicest thing I can say about the Game of Thrones series finale — and even its final season — is that a lot of things happened.

“The Iron Throne” included the murder of Daenerys Targaryen; Jon Snow returning North to a Night’s Watch that doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist; and Tyrion Lannister plotting his Queen’s death, avoiding execution, and then being installed as Hand of the King by Bran Stark, the newly minted ruler of what is now the Six Kingdoms. Sansa Stark became the queen of the North, ruling over an independent Winterfell. And Arya Stark set off on a ship in search of a new adventure.

Throughout Game of Thrones’ eight seasons, Sansa Stark’s appearance has always mirrored the powerful people she’s tried to emulate — or, in some cases, to protect herself from. At the end of the series finale, though, her hair was styled in a way we’ve never seen it before: pin-straight, completely loose, with no ornamentation aside from a delicate tiara.

As Cheryl Wischhover previously wrote for Vox, Sansa’s style evolution signals her character development. Her outfits and hairstyles are fairly simple at the beginning of the series, a sign that Northerners are less concerned with flashy looks than the Westerosi farther south. When Sansa gets to King’s Landing, though, she begins trying to dress like the fashionable ladies she sees in court.

Game of Thrones’ polarizing series finale has been met with plenty of unimpressed and negative reviews, but if you were a fan of Brienne of Tarth, the character’s final solo scene might have left you with an especially sour taste in your mouth.

“The Iron Throne” did see Brienne become the commander of the Kingsguard under the new ruler of Westeros, Bran Stark — but it also saw her pining over Jaime Lannister, and made her most meaningful screen time all about Jaime rather than her own impressive accomplishments throughout the course of Game of Thrones’ eight seasons.

If you thought Game of Thrones could make it through its series finale, “The Iron Throne,” without another coffee cup debacle, then you’ve clearly missed how many missteps this show has made in its final season. As it turns out, the controversial ending included two similar production gaffes, in which modern-day beverages were left on the medieval set while the cameras rolled. As the episode aired Sunday night, sharp-eyed fans pointed out the appearance of two highly anachronistic plastic water bottles visible during a key scene.

The flubs occurred on the set of the King’s Landing Dragonpit, a massive outdoor amphitheater. The production filmed all the Dragonpit scenes outdoors and on location at a real Roman structure — the Itálica, located in sunny Andalucía, Spain. And it must have been hot that day because both John Bradley, who played Samwell Tarly, and Liam Cunningham, who played Davos, were spotted with telltale water bottles at their feet while their characters debated who should rule Westeros.

When Game of Thrones premiered, all the way back in 2011, I was a graduate student studying international relations. Part of what captivated me about the show (and the books it was based on) was its political realism: The nuanced motivations of the Seven Kingdoms’ leading players, the mundane workings of the Small Council, and the long history of Westerosi conflict and how it shaped the protagonists’ worldviews. After I graduated and became a journalist covering global affairs, I started writing about the show professionally — publishing piece after piece after piece on how it related to and illuminated the real-world workings of global politics.

Maybe that’s why Game of Thrones’ final episode, “The Iron Throne,” felt like such a personal slap in the face.

In its last two episodes, Game of Thrones turned Daenerys Targaryen into a war criminal and then had her die at Jon Snow’s hands.

This ending is already one of the most divisive conclusions to a beloved television series in recent memory, with some counting it as a colossally disappointing coda to a show that lost its way, and others seeing a clumsy but ultimately tolerable sendoff.

Game of Thrones has come to a polarizing conclusion with its series finale “The Iron Throne” — but the books the HBO series is based on, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, remain unfinished, with no end in sight.

The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in what Martin hopes will be a seven-book series, still has no planned release date. Martin says he will only set a release date once he’s close to finished with the book — and he’s still not finished, he confirmed again on Sunday, not long before the show aired its finale.

Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne,” didn’t exactly deliver the ending that many fans expected. But there was at least one character who got justice after being treated horribly in an earlier episode: Jon Snow’s beloved direwolf, Ghost.

Ghost became the subject of social media outrage after the final season’s fourth episode, “The Last of the Starks,” saw his owner, Jon Snow, give the animal to Tormund and send him north to Castle Black — all without so much as a goodbye pat on the head.

The end has finally come: Game of Thrones is over.

Across eight seasons, we’ve watched and waited to see how this saga of politics, sex, families, power, dragons, and magic would shake out. There was a Red Wedding and a Purple Wedding. There were wars against villains, against dragons, and against an army of the undead. And there were so many vibrant characters — or there were, before the last couple of seasons culled many of them (RIP the one true queen, Olenna Tyrell).

Huh.

That’s my take on Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne.” Huh. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t really like it either. I watched it, and it entered my brain, and I thought about it to some degree. But I don’t know that I have any feelings about it at all. Anticlimactic might be the best way to describe it.

Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne,” wrapped up the story that author George R.R. Martin titled A Song of Ice and Fire with a brutal resolution for those characters who best represent ice and fire, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen — namely, Jon killed Dany in front of that Iron Throne.

Dany had massacred the civilian population of King’s Landing, burning the city to the ground and ordering the execution of even more prisoners afterward. She then announced her desire to continue onward to violently “liberate” the rest of the continent and the world as well.

As the dust settles over Westeros after Game of Thrones’ series finale, the eight-season battle for the Iron Throne has come to an end, and the person seated on the famously prickly chair — at least symbolically, since Drogon melted the actual throne — both is and isn’t a surprise. On the one hand, the new ruler of Westeros is arguably someone whom many fans least expected. But on the other, given Game of Thrones’ often contentious politics, what happened in “The Iron Throne” was completely predictable.

Game of Thrones has always pursued a narrative agenda built around violent spectacle, quite often at the expense of its gender politics, its racial politics, and its largely untenable world-building. Ultimately, the Iron Throne itself got shafted in this exchange, because the show’s final solution to its years of shortchanging all those other elements amounted to, “Eh, just let whoever’s left after all the bloodshed be in charge.” If Game of Thrones was ever interested in broadening the possibilities for Westerosi political leadership beyond simply continuing the monarchy and the status quo — well, that interest clearly faded at some point.

Major spoilers for Game of Thrones follow. Seriously. Really major spoilers. Don’t read this if you don’t want to know what happens in the series finale.

The game of thrones is over, just as Game of Thrones is over, and even though Drogon melted down the Iron Throne for scrap, the Seven Six Kingdoms continue apace with a new king — Bran Stark, a.k.a. the Three-Eyed Raven.

It’s finally here: We’ve reached the end of Game of Thrones.

And after Daenerys Targaryen’s fiery siege on King’s Landing in “The Bells,” not much is left standing. Dany obliterated the Iron Fleet and the Golden Company. Euron Greyjoy was killed. Cersei and Jaime Lannister were squashed like panini beneath the rubble of the Red Keep (presumably, Ellaria Sand — who was being held captive in the dungeon bowels when we last saw her — is dead too). The Hound and the Mountain are goners. So is Varys, the Master of Whispers, torched by Drogon after he betrayed his queen.

By any standard of judgment, “The Bells,” the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, was a complete clusterfuck. While there was a lot to praise in terms of the lush cinematography and excellent direction, pacing, and suspense from start to finish, much of what viewers of the show have loved about it for eight long seasons is now in utter shambles.

By that, we don’t mean that the storyline has built to an organic point of narrative collapse or anything; we mean that several characters made eleventh-hour choices that seemed to many fans largely inexplicable, or like a repudiation of their previous arcs. Plot points that could have unfolded with grace and finesse seem to have been shoehorned in for the sake of providing a big dramatic ending, but entirely at the expense of logical character development. All of this has left many fans feeling discombobulated and/or enraged. As of this writing, “The Bells” currently has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes critical score of the series so far, with an approval rating of just 49 percent.

At the start of Game of Thrones’ penultimate episode, “The Bells,” Daenerys Targaryen sits high above the streets of King’s Landing, on the back of her beloved dragon Drogon. She hears the tolling of the bells — the sound she’s been told, over and over again, means surrender, acquiescence to her rule.

The camera holds on her face for a long, anguished moment, as actress Emilia Clarke rolls through everything from triumph to gutted despair. She is near tears, exhausted and overwhelmed. She looks upon the Red Keep, the castle her family built, which she was smuggled out of in her mother’s womb, the building she believes to be her birthright.

This is it: The end of Game of Thrones is upon us.

As we head into this weekend’s series finale — at the end of a polarizing final season, and in the aftermath of a King’s Landing siege that left many characters dead and many fans at each other’s throats — here are the Vox staff’s predictions as to who will end up on the Iron Throne ... if the Iron Throne itself survives at all.

More than half a million Game of Thrones fans are demanding that HBO “remake Game of Thrones season eight with competent writers,” just days before the season — and series — finale. While the online petition has rapidly racked up signatures since it went viral just one day ago, the number represents a small fraction of the series’ immense fan base. But what it does provide is a stark glimpse at just how fierce the larger fandom-wide backlash over the final season has grown.

A Game of Thrones fan created the petition on Change.org on May 9 — several days before the cataclysmically divisive, penultimate episode of the series, “The Bells,” aired on May 12. But the petition didn’t pick up traction until it garnered media attention on May 15. At that point, it was gaining momentum and had almost reached an earlier target of 15,000 signatures. As of this writing, on May 16, that number has leaped to nearly 500,000 signatures.

Game of Thrones’ battle for King’s Landing turned out to be not a battle but a slaughter perpetrated by the once-heroic Daenerys Targaryen — and “The Bells” has been an intensely controversial episode as a result.

But as a statement about what the series has been about all along, “The Bells” was a stunning success.

The fifth episode of Game of Thrones eighth and final season, “The Bells,” showed us the true horror of a dragon unleashed on a city. Daenerys Targaryen, riding her last remaining dragon, systematically laid waste to King’s Landing — seemingly going block by block to ensure that no one and nothing remained of the city she wanted to conquer. It was an arresting and disturbing sequence, an excellent dramatization of Game of Thrones’ fundamental theme that war is hell.

At the same time, though, it made absolutely no narrative sense.

The last episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will air on May 19. For the show’s obsessive fans, the end of the series will be bittersweet, and also, let’s be honest, a relief. But hopefully we can all finally admit the following: Sansa Stark has been the most underestimated character of the show.

Sansa, played by Sophie Turner, has had the most interesting, if quiet and subtle, character development of anyone in the series. Ned Stark’s older daughter has gone from an innocent but shallow teen with delusions of royalty to a quiet, resolute leader who has survived more horrific things than you can imagine. Through it all, she’s worn her allegiances and defiance quite literally on her sleeves.