So if you have yet to watch the penultimate Game of Thrones episode, and you have plans to, stop reading now. Also, make better use of your time, because it’s been several days. All the spoilers are ahead. Maybe even spoilers for the 2020 election. Well… Maybe not that last one.
I personally thought The Bells was an outstanding return to form on its surface. I had a couple nitpicks about it: like how the Dothraki suddenly all respawned after the Battle of Winterfell (It’s a miracle! Is Drogo back, too?); and how pathetic and a complete nonfactor the Golden Company turned out to be (Nice work, Commander Poor Man’s Jaime). But overall, I felt it was the best episode of the season.
That said, they really missed a step in the delivery. Oh, this was absolutely the direction the show needed to go: Daenerys had to turn heel and become the mad queen. We had to witness the carnage from the perspective of the innocents being slaughtered. It was crucial for all this to occur (within the vindictive GoT narrative) to set up the true finale, and pit hero against former heroine.
Definitely the right move by the showrunners — they just forgot that little detail about justification. She had won the battle so easily, and the Lannister army was surrendering with Quasimodo ringing the bells. But nope!!! We gots to get some mad queen! While perched and staring directly at Cersei in the Red Keep for a total layup — with literally NO reason at all — Dany goes completely ape shit. We’ve known this character since episode one, and she’s had some ruthless moments, but they were always justified in some way. Dany is sensible and certainly not stupid. But with zero cause given (other than they needed it to happen), they just made her spaz out and destroy the entire city. Go out of her way for 40 minutes to incinerate every person, building, and zombie Mountain. Minus Cersei, of course. Why would she ever fly at her?
This was the correct setup for next week, but it was executed pretty poorly. Give us some minutia of a reason as to why she suddenly turns into a completely different character — our #1 villain now — when she’s already won the battle. Because she’s a Targaryen? Not good enough, Varys. We know her too well, and we needed a little rationale for that turn. Anything. Keep Missandei around for another episode and have Cersei execute her right at that moment instead. There, I fixed it with almost no effort at all.
I still approve of the outcome, but the fans deserved a little pretext beyond “the gods flip a coin” when they see one of their favorite characters go from Captain America to Thanos lickity split. It was manufactured to produce the outcome they needed — that we needed. They just forgot to fill in the blanks.
Yes, these points are obvious, but I’d add several controversial things I thought were done well.
For instance, I thought Cersei’s death was fitting for her entire character arc. She did become a merciless villain in the post “shame” era, but she was never painted as blatantly dark as a character like Joffrey or Ramsey. Her panic for her life and her unborn’s life when death was eminent was more powerful than any dagger, sword, or flame could have ever produced. She could never actually “fight” anyone. She died alone in the arms of a scorned man, who is also now paying for his sins. A man who she knows she betrayed. She died frightened and pathetically, held by her incestuous twin brother. They always swore that they came into this world together, and they’d leave it together, as well. And they did.
The inexplicable resurrection of the Dothraki and the audience expectations for Arya to continue to supergirl are things we have to swallow as fans of fiction. It’s what happens to any great series after expectations building over nine years of shows. But the most glaring error is the omission of Dany’s sudden character flip. We can still love the show, and we will. And we’ll still stare at seasons 5 and 7 as being the most harrowing writing to swallow. But this one point could have been easily fixed, and it was pivitol to how we’re going to remember the saga.