The Watch - Breaking Down the End of ‘Game of Thrones’ | The Watch

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

The end of ‘Game of Thrones’ was a tale of two finales (1:06). We parse through the ending of the show (6:59), attempt to tie up loose ends (32:30), and make predictions for what will fill the vacuum left by ‘Game of Thrones’ (59:06). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Bud Light. Bud Light is all about bringing friends together, and we're wondering which unlikely pairs will team up this season on Game of Thrones. Obviously, Game of Thrones has come to an end. But seeing so many old friends and new come together, that was quite a journey. For example, this past episode, we saw John and Danny get together one last time.

Bud Light is reminding you to enjoy responsibly 21 and up. Today's episode of the Watch is brought to you by Just Crack an Egg. you want to talk about great production value. How about a legit hot, fluffy breakfast scramble that's packed with all your favorite ingredients? It's called Just Cracken Egg, and all you have to do is add a fresh egg over their hearty ingredients,

then stir microwave and enjoy any day of the week. It takes less than two minutes to make. Find all seven varieties of Just Cracken Egg in the Egg aisle. I ain't sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm editor.

at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio, the Master of Peak TV. It's Andy Greenwald. Bradstark's got to fill that job, bro. What a journey. What a journey for all of us. We watched all of Game of Thrones. We can say that now.

And we're here to podcast about it. We've podcasted about most of it. Hey, Andy. Yeah. Happy birthday. Hey, thanks. Thanks, pal. What a way to celebrate, right?

To celebrate turning 29 again. was the series finale of Game of Thrones. What a gift. What a gift. Young Andy the Broken. What a gift. I feel like we have a lot to talk about. You've been talking about it.

I'm very excited. I do feel like we are a bunch of arias just set in sail into the unknown. Before we get into the finale, I do want to say there was one just, and that's all we're going to talk about today, I assume. Yeah, that's it. That and just really a frame-by-frame breakdown. Westworld.

Great. Great. Okay, so this is the place for me. Just to say that I don't even know if we're going to use this as a framework because we have not really interfaced on the topic. I don't know if we're going to do winners and losers here, but I think the main winner was Twitter won last night. Yeah, you think so?

The memes were so funny. Twitter is really your mistress, man. You keep trying to leave her. Then you come back and you're like, look at these tweets. It's the worst. And yet some of the things that Twitter did last night in response to that finale were so funny. So funny.

Did you like the writing meme, the Brianne writing? When Brienne added the word Also a fuckboy? Also I porked him. I loved it. God, great job, meme makers. And frankly, pretty good job by you too,

David Benioff and Dan Weiss. I have a lot of thoughts, of course, as to how this finale suited the series. how it may have changed my opinion about the series, how the series changed, as we talked about on Thursday, over the course of its run. But just trying to be a classic English major,

new critic, just look at the text for what it is. That's all you're doing, even though you spent all night looking at Twitter. I love the memes. They were so funny. Did anybody pick up on my Edmure-Diplazio riff? Did anybody start putting Edmure in DeBlasio's armada of SUVs? Not yet, although I think that both of their canes.

candidacies have been greeted with the same just low-key mockery. Yeah. That's terrific work by you. Sanzo is like all of Politico. Thumbs down. Sonso was like me. Yeah. I've seen you hit the Y, bro.

Yeah. You're good. No, just to say that just purely looking at it as the finale to the show as it was, not the show that we wished it to be or the show that we imagined we were watching for multiple seasons, I was more or less satisfied. I disagree with you on your phrasing, but I, agree with you on your sentiment. Okay.

Yeah. The phrasing is that I think that the last, that seven and eight are different than the show that we watched. A million percent. And so I thought it was a finale that that was possibly in moments the best of what seven and eight was capable of. And I had a lot of fun in the moment watching seven and eight. I think the discourse around the show started to take a few miles per hour off my fastball

over the course of the last six weeks. And it's nobody's, I think that sometimes the easy way to talk about this would be like, well, the people ruined it by not being grateful for what they were given. I thought the conversation around it has made me think more about storytelling than any Robert McKee book, any Joseph Campbell. Like the conversation about how you tell a story like this on television has been fascinating. You know, maybe not Joseph Campbell. He actually is pretty good. But, you know, I just mean it's a. allowed me to think about storytelling and narrative and character and motivation and what show don't tell means and what kind of shortcuts we as a TV watching community allow and don't allow.

And so it's been a fascinating experience. And, you know, I found myself far more sentimentally attached to some of the characters and some of the pairings of the characters. And I really thought that I was capable of at this gray and aging point in my life. but that being said I just think ultimately I couldn't help as I scrolled through a list of all the episodes of this show

and just would like randomly look at a you know like an Alan Taylor episode from season three or something and I was like god damn this show is unbelievable at one point like this show is as good as it got and we've had that before we've had that before with other shows that have ended

and other shows that have maybe drawn out their ending while also compressing their ending. This isn't the first time this has happened, but I do think it was a tale of two shows, and I think that they ended the second version of the show about as good as they could have. Yeah, especially because, you know, this has forced us to talk about things like problem solving and story and, you know, which I know you're consumed with now.

Constantly. And, you know, I'm not a big fan of the phrase sticking the landing, but if you are trying to land the plane, let's say, you have to land the plane that you are currently in the air with. Yeah. You cannot change that mid-flight, necessarily. And I thought they did when Drogon flew off with Danny. I was like, that is an incredible, beautiful image that is fitting for an ending. So let's talk about a tale of two finalies.

Sure. Because I think the first half was one thing in the second bit. I don't know if it was even a half as another thing. I do appreciate that you're talking about the value of storytelling. As a great man once said, nothing is more powerful than a story, except the story about how one man actually is legitimately the king, but we're sending him north of the wall. And that story doesn't exist anymore. That story is never getting out.

Anyway, one thing... I can't fucking believe they did that. What? You are the real king. You killed your girl for this. Go take a walk. Why don't you go live a chaste life of frostbite? Are we sure it's chased because Tormond gave him a look?

I think that you could make... Maybe it's going to be a little bit more of a progressive administration north of the wall, especially since, like, essentially it's like being on the Knights Watch is also like working in masonry now because you have to rebuild that goddamn ice wall. Also, Tormond had been standing there for what had to have been at least ballpark three months practicing the Bradley Cooper Star is Born meme. Hey! He's just waiting for that gate to open. Just waiting so we could get another look at him.

I just wanted to take another look at you. Wait, that's Drago. Is it? It's a little rocky four. We'll workshop it. We have a lot of free time on the pod coming up. We have a lot of open space to fill now. So one thing, you mentioned...

Hey! Nope. I'm not here to dog sit for you, man. You have to take your dog back. Getting better. Thanks. Boy, boy, doesn't everyone feel dumb about that? He got his dog moment.

He got his dog back, okay? His dog was a very good boy and waited for him. Mallory is outside with like a SWAT team. I'm saying he got his dog back. I don't understand why people are still salty. Look. Tale of two finale. You mentioned that this is something I've been consumed with, and it's true.

And one thing that I've been thinking a lot about in my own writer's room is sometimes I don't know what the episode is going to be about necessarily. I don't know the plot. I don't know the- You're talking about my show. The dialogue of every scene. What I feel very strongly about is how the episode should feel. And that is a very sort of ephemeral idea and very challenging to communicate, both in the writer's room and then in production meetings, then into directors and to all the other people who actually make things that are beginners ideas into reality. or at least filmed reality.

I say that because David Benioff and Dan Weiss have been doing this for 10 years, working on the show in some form or another. This is the finale. They wrote it, they directed it, and what I felt very strongly in the first hour of the finale was that they knew how they wanted this to feel and they executed it. Oh yeah, I think that there were images in that finale that they must have had in their minds for almost the entire show.

And just sort of the way the silence would weigh, the looks that would be passed between people, the way the air should, the air quality, you know, I thought it was snow, but then all of a sudden it was sunny in the dragon pits. Well, that was six weeks later, so the cold front had moved out. No, I mean, it was ash.

Winter doesn't last very long. But you know what I'm saying. And because of that, when you're being, and this is honestly sometimes what I think movies do better, cinema does, is it's communicating an emotion, a vibe, a tone. And it's communicating it with all the different tools visual storytelling has in its arsenal.

And when it's working, when it's clicking, when you can feel what they are beaming into your head and into your heart, things like, how did Greyworm go from the street to already being up the stairs? Yeah. Don't matter. Right. I bring that up not to pick that knit, but because it doesn't matter. It feels dreamlike and effective in a way. I think stuff on that level does not matter.

Greyworm getting from one thing to another doesn't bother me. But what I'm saying is more of the logical stuff. Oh, I agree. And we can get into that. But what I mean is when the episode becomes kind of a tone poem like it did for the first 40 minutes, I was all the way in. I really enjoyed it. I thought it felt appropriate. I thought it felt respectful.

I thought it felt interesting. I thought it felt just very emotionally engaging and respectful of the fictional, incomprehensible carnage of the week before. Yeah. Reckoned with consequences. I mean, that was ultimately what I think was so. great about it, was that it didn't yada yada the most important thing. For all the things that kind of got brushed aside, I think it really was a nice antidote, an alternative to some of the really like catastrophic violence that we like regularly witness in movies these days where it's

like, and then a planet blew up. Oh, like the man of steel problem. Or even the Death Star problem, or even the Socovia problem of like just kind of like, there is like, you know, they They'd play lip service to ever since New York, man. You know, or there's lip service paid to the destructive power of the empire or whatever. But not in the way that I felt like they reckoned with what would it be like if somebody destroyed a city. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I also appreciated the fact that, you know, this is a show that introduced the concept of dragons as basically nuclear weapons. Whoever controls them is going to win.

And then the dragons sort of have personalities and they're the children of a character whom, We are positioned to root for or even love. And they're actually terrifying and horrible, you know, and capable of this kind of destruction. Yeah. And I appreciate that they didn't make it cute. We were joking about this last night on the show on Talk the Thrones, but like it's all this like Mad Queen stuff.

And then as soon as Drogon comes out from his little like snow nap, like everybody in the room is like, oh, gochoochoooo! Who's a good boy? Who's taking a nap? Do they still feel that that dragon is a cute pet now that the dragon, like everyone in 2019, is also a political pundit? You know what I mean? The dragon is like, thanks for having me on, Chuck Todd.

The dragon got a job at the intercept? Here's how I feel about metaphor and analogy. You know? So all of that worked for me. Mm-hmm. What I struggled with in the first half is probably what a lot of people did, which is just simply the DeNaris storyline to me

is a failure. Yeah. It's just fundamentally a failure. And it's disappointing. So we talked about this last night. She's a presence in this season. She's got lines, she's got scenes dedicated to her,

but they abandoned her as a point of view character. Mm-hmm. And it makes some sense, you know, it makes some sense that the fewer people she has to have intimate conversations with as Miss Andy and Jora and her dragons and Dario and, you know, like all people who have been traditionally around her talking to her as they maybe recede from her or die or go elsewhere,

that maybe she would have a little bit less opportunity to express her interiority or talk about her thoughts and kind of like chart her own dissent maybe. But it was a conscious decision to kind of isolate that character. And the last two episodes have been incredibly Tyrion heavy. They've been incredibly almost repetitive in their Tyrion scenes,

where it's just kind of like having the same conversation over and over and over again. And saying the same goodbyes react to them. Saying the same goodbyes. And I thought that, you know, the abandonment of Danny as a POV character worked in so much as it made her easy to villainize. Yes.

But it didn't stand up to the Game of Thrones test in that every character is interesting. And that was always the thing that I think I was so impressed with by this show is that from the person passing by in a brothel or a random member of the Kingsguard or a guy who's like slopping crap out of a sewer all the way up to Tywin and out into the magical kind of realms of Knight Kings and Brand and Three-Eard Ravens and all that stuff, I just always found them to be really thoughtful portrayals and you got to see a three-dimensional character and to get to the end and have possibly one of the two or three most interesting characters in the entire show become Mussolini. It just kind of doesn't,

it didn't feel like they did the character justice, ironically, because that's what a lot of this episode was about. Yeah, and I do think, well, I think two things. I think Jim Panozik is the great TV critic for The New York Times had a good run of tweets, and he's a book reader and big fan of the world, which is just that fundamentally, the show never explained what happened to us. Did she systematically identify Lannister loyalist troops on each street and target them? Was she trying to destroy, as she said, the troops loyal to Cersie Lannister?

or had she gone mad and wanted to destroy the city? Did she want to punish the city for, or the people? Did you want to show that she was strongest? So he was like, was this like targeted bombing or not? It's basically, if we don't fundamentally understand the intention of the character in the most consequential decision of the character's fictional life, what are we to do with the aftermath? You know, that affects every decision everyone else made because what was she doing?

Well, there's even a moment where... I can't remember of Dava. I mean, like, he says something to Trian, or he's just like... John says something like, has anyone talked to her yet? Yeah. And it's like, well, that's ridiculous. Some...

It doesn't have to be John or Dava, so Tiri, he talks to her. We used to see Danny talk to all sorts of people. Also, we didn't used to call her Danny. That was my biggest... I think that's his name. It's Dineris. Yeah, I mean, I think that's there.

Yeah, but then Tyrion called her that, too. Did he? Yeah, and I was like, okay, bloggers. We know we don't want to spell it. That's how that caught on originally? Is it? Yeah, by the way, never felt afraid to it. Isn't that, it's not in the books, they don't ever call her Danny?

Well, I'm sure they do. I'm sure the fans do. But I just noticed that they suddenly started doing that on the show as well this season. I feel like in 2019 we've got DeNaris covered. We can nail it. One of the most popular baby names in America or it was until it came to a screeching halt a week ago. Yeah, though, there, the... Can you imagine all the people who are going to be like, no, that's a family name?

Yeah, that's right. We did a long time ago. Yeah, we're from SOS originally. But we got sick of the winters, so we came out here. We definitely cut away from the kind of conversations that, to your point, it's not just the conversation, those aren't the conversations, it's not just that those are the conversations that we would have seen in prior seasons. Those were the conversations that defined the show before it became primarily about spectacle. Consequential characters went up being DeNaris and Brand. And those are the two characters I feel like I knew the least at the end of the season, at the end of the series.

Yeah, 100%. And so when you don't fully understand what she was. doing in these actions. You end up with this kind of messianic George W. Bush speech about how we know we're good because we're good and we will liberate everyone altogether. And then you end up with Turing being like, well, I thought she was doing well. But now that I look back on it, she was murdering a lot of people and I had reservations and I've made mistakes. That doesn't necessarily track. That is a soft landing pad for a naughty situation that you wrote a naughty situation that you wrote yourself into. But it's just simply not borne out by the show that we've been watching or the show

that we were encouraged to watch. Now that said, everything that happened in the last two weeks, you give three more episodes as cushion. Now, I'm ready to be done. I'm not saying I want there to be more Game of Thrones at this moment. This has been, I feel like I'm repeating myself, but it makes seven and eight, ten episode seasons and we're fine. To go from what she did to two scenes left for her alive for her galactic empire death star speech

and then the death scene and then the death scene was bizarre it was bizarre and sort of disappointing and just you know

and then rushed and left me feeling like I think I did about the show in general which was emotionally uninvolved interested admiring

but not particularly affected one way or another. I don't know. I'm trying to think of another way to come at this. It's a pretty interesting way of putting it. I would ask you whether or not, if there was not this sort of outcry about the logical problems, I think that inevitably, here's what happened.

And there's actually some justice to this. This show started, I came to it a little bit late, I think maybe in somewhere or towards the middle or end of the first season, maybe the second season. I can't remember it. I remember,

I don't know if you mirrored my experience, but the show premiered before Grantland Stark in April. And I watched the premiere, maybe the second episode and felt like it was something maybe I would revisit, but I wasn't that into.

Then Baylor happened. Yeah. Ned Stark happened. And shouts to Elaine Brown, our culture editor at Granlin, asked me to write about that episode, which caused me to go back and, you know, get into it.

And that was the first piece I wrote about the show. From then on, you know, when it laid down its marker of what kind of show was going to be, I was on and then the rest of the Internet was on too. Yeah, right. I remember the reaction videos to Ned. But when the show started, I think the beautiful thing about it for both the people who had read the books and the people who hadn't was that it was an expression of people's imaginations that they had while they were reading. right? So if you were reading these books, you were like, wow, these things that had only ever happened in my head, this world that I'd only ever seen in my head, is actually coming to life in a way that is up to the standards that I had. You know, like they've found Winterfeld. They've found King's Landing. They've found who Ned Stark looks like or who Rob Stark looks like or whatever. And even

though you can criss-cross and say, like, well, this person's slightly more deformed or this person's taller or younger or any of that stuff. It was essentially this incredible expression of imagination on the part of the book readers. And for TV watchers, if you were separate from it, you got basically television with this incredible undergirding of story and this depth and this history and motivation and interlocking relationships. And that went on for a while. And then I don't look at what they did as a crime.

I think that those guys were like, I talked to Mallory a couple days ago, I think I've said this before. I talked to Mallory like last week and I was like, well, what do you think they needed to put in there? Because there was a thread on the Reddit for the books about how there's this whole other,

the young Griff plot that essentially would have like explained all of this, you know? But as we were talking back and forth about, well, then this needs to happen and then this needs to happen and this needs to happen. And we were kind of talking and it was like, this would be five more years. Yeah.

You know, this would be five more years. Kent Harrington's not going to play John Snow for five more years. Amelia Clark's not going to play DeNarris for five more years. It just felt like it was like, oh, this is why. They can't possibly do this. They can't. And so when they moved past the books, the show they made is essentially the story that will be told, but it became much more like what happens when any show comes on.

And you're just like, well, there's stuff that happens in this TV show because TV is a completely different storytelling mechanism than novels. there's you left, basically you were betraying people's imagination. These people who had been like, well, the book ends, but I know that this kind of stuff has to happen, but that's not in my head how it happens. That's not how George would have told the story. And in a weird way, we have ended up full circle where now the books will fill in the imagination part for the people who are watching the shows and for the people reading the books.

The books will actually have a purpose now to tell the story in a way that actually satisfies the people who fell in love with it in the first place. So I think in a strange way, we actually ended up in an okay place. I really agree with everything you're saying, and I like that quite a bit. I think it's interesting that we ended up with the version of the show that I think book readers were afraid we were going to get when it was going to be a movie, which is how can they possibly do justice to the span and scope of the story? The unadaptable story. Intentionally unadaptable. And I think that it's, for me, it is a question of scope and scale and intention. And we talked on Thursday about how

the nature of the show, the scope of the show, the possibility of the show contracted enormously in the last two seasons. And I think it's honestly reflected even in the opening credits, where we went from this expansive, exciting, where are we going to go next? Or we're crossing a sea, and there's cities here, to an opening in a season that only went to two places. You think about how almost a historical the last two seasons have been. You know, like he mentions Amon

the duty and love quote. They didn't mention history that much in this show. I mean, they make mention of like Targaryians. Oh, well, they dropped, I mean, there was no more prophecy. There was no more lineage. Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about all the Nican stuff and John stuff. But here's the larger thought that this puts me into, though, that I was thinking about this this morning. We live in a time, pop culturally anyway, of almost unlimited possibility where television gives people a canvas to tell incredibly ambitious and incredible.

long-running stories in a way that wasn't previously possible. Serialized stories. There's also so much money, frankly, both on the big screen and on a little screen and so many advances in technology that we can show people things. People can, you know, that we're beyond the ken of our imagination, right, previously. And I just wanted to say that that might still not always be a good thing. For real. Because if you think about... To say it's your name bring terriers back. Well, I'm always, always, always saying that. But the show feels fundamentally like a broken promise to people now, I think, because they wrote a huge, an exciting check in the first few seasons of this enormous globe with characters and how could they possibly all connect and intersect.

And the truth is they can't. That check was not cashable in the actual practical world of making the show, of keeping actors under budget and happy of, you know, the creators who want to maybe do other things with their lives. And I was thinking about also what it does when you can show the carnage of Kings Landing. And you and I began this podcast by talking about how I thought they handled it relatively well. But I also think that it changes again your perception of the scope of these characters. So we see citywide carnage, an entire city destroyed by a fucking dragon, right? So then when you're operating under story on that scale, two small actors, great talent, small people, in a throne room set kissing and stabbing, feels imbalanced.

That doesn't feel like the correct resolution to both the eight years of show, but also the absolute global scale devastation we just saw. Whereas something like Star Wars, which is actually where Benny Off and Weiss are headed now. Star Wars original trilogy Star Wars. We never saw the Galactic Senate. We never saw what an empire meant. We saw two or three planets, four planets, five planets, I don't know. And until George Lucas started messing with them, we never saw like scenes of celebration across the universe.

That was all CGI added later. What we had was a handful of characters who we grew to care about emotionally, who told us, oh, I'm the prince that was promised, basically, who told us I'm, this guy's the emperor. He's in control of a billion lives. We never saw them.

We believed it because what we actually cared about was the emotional stakes of the characters and all the other stuff just added ballast to it. It made me think about how that other great, long-running serialized fabulous, William Shakespeare. In his plays... Can Shakespeare stick the landing?

Henry VIII works better on stage than in a movie because it's about the speech and it's about the spectacle and the scale coming from an emotional character place telling you, making you imagine, right? Once Henry VIII is a CGI bloodbath, what does Agincourt even mean? I don't know.

And so what am I saying right now? You might be shaking your head saying, I don't know either. But what I'm trying to get at is the last two seasons of Game of Thrones for me felt perched kind of uncomfortably between those two realities. Just because they could show us this entire world and teased us by showing us the entire world,

once you start to do the thing that TV has to do and you start contracting the frame, there's no way you're not going to feel cheated. There's no way it's not going to feel like Brand Stark is king of Tiny Town. Because the only people who decided his quote-unquote election are the eight characters surviving on the show. And the only people in his government

are the four people surviving on the show who stayed in the South. Yeah, right. Now, that's TV logic. At the end of all long-running shows, like when Gray's anatomy finally ends in season 35. And McDreamy comes back? Well, it's going to be Meredith Gray

and whoever's been around for the last 11 years, and she'll be like, boy, we shared some times. Yeah. That's what TV shows do, because you love the characters and you've spent all this time with them, but when you've also shown us fucking Dorn, and then you introduce a mute...

D.D. Depends from Dorn, yeah. He's just like, hmm, boy, I should have been more vocal in all of this. This shit's wild. it's going to feel discordant and weird. It is a, as much as Game of Thrones as an advertisement for what TV can do, there are aspects of what it did

that remain, and I say this, with love, respect, and affectionary tale for storytelling in this medium. All right, I want to talk a little bit about that election and a couple of other loose ends, hanging threads, and questions about the series itself.

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with an extended 30-day trial using the code watch. All right, we're back. Let's talk a little bit about the second half of that finale. So Danny gets carried off by Drogan into the east. So dragons have thumbs? They can cup. They can scoop. They're really good wrist action.

You know, they're kind of like a highlight player. What I'm saying is, if Drogon misjudged that, that gets really gross. He's got big talons. It's not going to hurt her one way or the other. No, but I just mean, like, thank God he got like the whatever. Maybe the ground was a little bit pliant because he got underneath her. They basically do without actually cutting to a six weeks later or three months later or however long. They do it in beard time.

They do it in beard time. Quick question. So John came out of that throne room and was like, okay, funny story. Grey Worm I know two people walked into this room unattended one's coming out

but let me tell you my reasons why was he still alive That's a great question I mean that is the thing That they stopped showing Yeah They stopped showing The great great thing about this

Was when About the show Is when they were like We have to take a castle We have to attack this thing Okay how Okay how and show me What's it like

To try to escape a place that you've broken into. What's it like to sneak into this and then get caught somewhere else? What happens when Aria is serving as Tywin's... For an entire season. For, you know, the kinds of...

We were in Marine for, I believe, three years. But there was a point to that. It was to establish Danny's bona fides. It all had a point. Even the dumb fucking mission to bring Circea White, I was like, I get it. I kind of get it.

Yeah. But you abandon all the little things like, how does Gendry run from the attack by the whites all the way back to the wall and then make, get Danny that message. Like all that stuff that was like, it looks, it's cool in a Fast and Furious movie. You know, it's cool. It's okay in John Wick, but it's not okay when it's also this drama that you're,

you've kind of like been taught how to understand for seven years. you change the way you tell it. It's also, you can't, you can't open yourself up to picking nets on both sides of it. You know what I mean? You can choose your side that you're going to take shortcuts on, which is fine. That's what drama is. And forget whether or not Greyworm gave John his Miranda rights, right? Like, I don't even, it's not about that.

They also pretty much turn their back on the point of John Snow. The whole thing. Wait, before you get to John Snow, let's stay just one note on Greyworm which is to say in the context of the argument you're making Greyworm a slave who rose to be a very short-lived master

of war of an entire continent due to his unswerving and unfailing devotion to one woman the Dothraki also only follow her. And just two minutes ago was out slicing people's throats because she said so. Because she said so.

The next time we see him, he is complying with all the Hague treaty for international war criminals and just standing around waiting for someone else to become his king? Why? I'll tell you why.

Because that's what needed to happen to give the characters an ending that was more important than asking questions like this or answering questions like this. I get it. The version of the show where Grey Worm walks into that room goes, what the fuck? And kills John Snow? That is not a satisfying end to Game of Thrones

for anyone. No one is arguing that. But it's important to acknowledge why things start to feel funny, which is to serve a larger purpose. Yes. And then it's a shortcut and a shortcut and an okay and an okay and a yada yada and that adds up. Yep.

So, I mean, I don't, we can talk about John and we can talk about Bram, but we can talk about the second half of this episode. Let's start, since you already started talking about John, what you just said about the point of the character. Well, this is where I can't tell whether or not I was reading the story or reading the story about the story. Okay.

So obviously over the last four or five years, John's lineage, John's purpose, John's greater destiny has been, I would say the number one storyline of Game of Thrones is R plus L equals J is what happens in Winds of Winter, what you find out about the Tower of Joy. Sam crosses a continent to tell John, you're a Targaryen

that's your aunt you are the rightful heir to the throne it spreads in the funniest least best keep kept secret in the world shout out to John for not forgiving Sonsa by the way

she's like forgive me and he's like you're going to do a great why am I doing him as an Irish guy he's like you're going to do great that was weird it's been it is the story is this guy

who thought he was a bastard who thought he was going to spend his life on the night's watch, never taking a wife, never having a family, only knowing that brotherhood rises up to become king, right? And it doesn't have to end with him becoming king, but they need to reckon with the fact that Sam, Tyrion, John, and presumably lots of other people by this point, and the Starks all know that John is Agon Targaryen. And that when he killed DeNaris, he did it as the shield of the realm, as the shield of

men, and is the rightful... They didn't even talk about it. They're just like, Grey War made a great argument, you know? The Dothraki will be pissed if he hangs around more. They weren't pissed when John walked by him. There's a bunch of Dothraki hanging out by the docks, and he just like, scoots by them,

and they're like, oh, yeah, that's the guy who stabbed the queen that we crossed the ocean for, and was supposed to be our god. That was wild. They all seemed to really, really respect the rule of law in a way that wild-ass horse riders who eat men's hearts tend not to. So, I mean, what's next for the Dothraki is just a great, great question. I mean, they're just in Westeros now.

That is a wildcard, guys. That is, wow. You know what I mean? Like, the time I went to Hawaii and at the airport, my wife tried to bring back an avocado and, like, it was an international incident. And they were like, do you know what could happen if this avocado crosses the ocean? Imagine if that avocado was 20,000 murdering. horse lords.

So I don't care that he isn't the prince who was promised. I don't care if he isn't the great, the last hero. I don't care if he's not even going to sit on what was once a throne. But I do care that no one reckoned with it. And I do care that

that moment of the unsullied will not allow him to just go free. It's like so what? That has nothing to with the way Game of Thrones has ever worked before.

Yes, I agree. And I think... Cat Stark freed Jamie. Like, you know what I mean? Like, the shit happens all the time. This is like... Tyrion freed his brother last week. Tyrion freed himself. Terrian was like, I'm the one who... Like, I literally, like, was accused of treason by Danny.

And even though, like, that treason ultimately was a humanitarian act, I guess, show me the lie and what John did. You know what I mean? And so I think that that was sort of representative for me of the only time where I was like well then what the fuck were we doing here? Well sure I mean you could

take it all the way back to he is a Targaryen so the dragon let him in but then was a little bit pissed but then didn't kill him I guess that's part of it then the dragon as I said became a political pundit and burned a metaphor and left so really one wonders what the dragon thought was going on

the whole time because there was a middle season period where they're like these big dumb dragons just wanted to flew off to take his place and then York Times op-ed board. That's what I'm saying. It's like, Drogon changes his name to Brett Stevens, and he's like, this, listen, Twitter is this hellhole. What I'm saying is there were a couple seasons where the dragons are like big, large, dumb adult

sons just eating goats all the time. And then all of a sudden, the dragon is like stroking his chin like Joe Nassara in his op-ed photo being like, you know what the Iron Throne shouldn't have? A throne. So that's a whole thing. But I agree with you that I, the part of John Snow that won out for me. and why I think the ending was certainly suitable. I think Mallory predicted it.

I think it makes a lot of sense. Mal like hit for the cycle yesterday. It was nuts. The idea of him choosing duty over love again and again and again and him being a bastard who didn't receive the right amount of love or in his own family, and yet constantly, constantly did the right thing even to a fault. That is the character arc.

However, him saying three times I don't want it doesn't give us the story closure that I think we need on the character. Yeah, you know who else said he didn't want it? Brand. Yeah. Well, listen, brand scheming. What I wanted to say, though. Schemean ass brand.

Yeah. This fucking never turn your back on him. Just that if John Snow wasn't going to be king, I think it needed to be an active choice. That's what Mallory said last night. And she was upset about it. She was like, that doesn't do justice to the character. I just don't think it did justice

to the storytelling that we'd become that they had set up as when something like this happens, it's discussed. It wouldn't be Tyrion telling John, yeah, Sanzah was pretty pissed off, but you got to go to the wall. Also, it was just a wild flex for Tyrion to be like stories are unstoppable

except the most salacious rumor that's actually true in the history of the Seven Kingdoms that stops now, even though 100 people know it. What do we see? We see gray worm on a boat sailing off while John's still in King's Landing. They couldn't just be like, okay, well, we got him. Like, we don't have to go up to the wall now.

It's strange. Now, him also, yeah, him choosing not to take the throne and choosing to go lead the people that he always belonged with. Would have been interesting. Is more accurate. We're like, I gave what I had to this world, and now I'm going to go just wander. And I think that that was a little bit reflected in Kit Harrington's performance and in the direction of the episode.

I think that was intent there. Yeah, his smile as he's wandering off towards the woods, suggests a pretty, a person at peace. Which is another reason why I feel that, though I did in fact pay attention and blogged and recapped and after-showed and podcasted about Game of Thrones for eight years, it did have a happy ending, which was curious and interesting to me. The three interesting Starks, Sansa, Aria, and John, heading off into essentially the unknown, all three of them, independent and free of their own wheels broken, basically,

was moving and stirring and appropriate. And that was a line from the beginning of this family and their place in the world and where these characters who survived it belonged. I thought that was really well done. But right, the machinations of getting John into the throne room and out and then up to the north, I mean, this was probably the least bad option. But I do think it robbed the character and the story of things that made it important. But why not bring Kit Harrington, if Tyrion's in the dragon pit, why not bring Kit Harrington as a dragon pit too?

And have them say, hey, so just so everybody knows, as Sam has figured out, as I know, as Sansa and Ari know, that's the last Targaryen over there. And we're never going to have another one. We're never going to have another one. But it just feels like we can't have a new king who is also a queenslayer. We can't keep that idea that you can murder your way to power in this country. So what's the least bad option here? Now, I'm still trying to wrap my head. It would have literally people would have just started throwing their computers into their bathtubs.

But I honestly do think that there is a world in which, like, Edmere makes more sense than brand to me. Yeah. Well, because at least Edmier was sticking to some sort of character. brand all of a sudden was like, I got this sly little smirk on my face. I was going to be king the whole time. I was like, I always knew it. I just had to see a million people die first

before I got to be king. Also, you know, look. And they're like, well, he can never have kids again. It's like, I don't, what's the upside here? Here's my argument. Retail politics matter. This is why, you know, I never really liked my neighbor, Mayor de Blasio,

because he's not nice to people in the neighborhood. What I'm saying is, do you really want, you want a leader you can grab a flag in a veil with, is what I'm saying. Well, you don't know, because the second this show ends, maybe brands on Periscope getting a haircut like Beto. You think?

Yeah, it's just like, hey, what's up guys? Big Brand, like and subscribe, brand the broken. But brand the haircut, am I right? Hey, you guys have been wondering about that clean water. We're working on that. I got the best people on it. If you can catch me at my new town hall over in Flea Bottom. Love you guys.

Also, since when do kings have, like, do kings have to have a nickname? No, it was like a tar, that somebody wrote about that on the side. I think it was Zach Riley. But basically, like, it had stopped with Robert and Searcy and Joffrey. But prior to that, it was like, Brand the Builder. Yeah, or it was like Agon the good or Agan the bad or Darren the, Darren the 3-D stopper. Was Agan always bad?

Like, Agan's like, hey, guys, New King. Aris the Kobe stopper. First thing you need to know about me, I'm bad. My nickname is Agon the Bad. A lot of changes coming around here. Change number one, gonna murder most of you with wildfire. Didn't see it coming, I know. But that's me.

Should have paid attention to the nickname game. The brand thing is wild. And again, if you pull out of the frame and you squint, you see the way the pieces of the structure fit together. You sort of see that the story began. The story was apparently really only about the Starks in a way. And, you know, the youngest, most fearful, went on the biggest journey or whatever, fine.

This idea of story and memory and, you know, it can never happen again. You can sort of see all that, except the fundamental thing that nobody questioned and nobody even brought up in that meeting is that Brand sucks. He just sucks. I was half expecting him once they were like, brand the, all hell brand the broken, for him to like stand up, go jump over a keel like Blake Griffin and dunk it and then start hitting everybody with like, I voted for brand fucking buttons to put on their capes and be like, gotcha.

You burnt. All I had to do was sit in this chair for eight years. Not even. And pretend like I was a bird. Nobody ever asked me what I could do. That's the other thing. He's like, so you guys got the government, right? I'm going to go look for a dragon.

Is that executive time? That's what that is, right? That's cheating at golf. That is like, we've had enough of leaders who are like, you guys got this, I'm going to go look at things in the sky. Like fucking eclipses. Okay? It's the other side of the John coin. What mattered about him being the three-eyed raven?

What did he always know was going to happen? If he always knew something was going to happen, if everybody was where they needed to be for everything to happen, wouldn't anybody say, couldn't you have stopped it? Couldn't you have told us what was going to happen? Couldn't we have killed Danny before she even got on a boat? Well, this is why, and I mean this again, sincerely, why Beniof and Weiss likely steered away from a lot of the fantasy magical prophecy elements, because nothing kills drama than all-knowingness. Nothing kills drama like fate.

Yeah, well, we've been talking about this with like the reason why the last two seasons went the way they did is because Danny was too powerful. The idea of having to level out DeNaris. But like we saw, I mean, it was great. It was a great and classic and appropriate Game of Thrones moment, one that really reminded me anyway that the people making the show do know the show they're making and have a lot of love for it, that we had that scene of Tyrion preparing for the first small council meeting and organizing the chairs.

I mean, that was the show, was the small council. And to go back to that, and not only to go back to it, but to go back to it with that table stocked with the people who we truly cared about. Our favorite secondary characters made sense. However, why are they even having a debate about whether they can refund the Navy when your fucking omniscient Charles Xavier-ass king can just be like, we don't have enough money to fund the Navy and be like, cool, okay, will we ever? No, great.

I guess we have a land army now. I can warg into the dude who runs the Iron Bank and CTC. Cut the check. Word. That's right. Why not? I don't know. Can he?

I have no idea. Can he do that? Could he have warged into Drogon and told him don't do this? Isn't he legitimately more powerful than DeNaris with a dragon since he knows everything and can control people? Because when he was like, I have to go away now. All he did was go into a raven and watch other people get slaughtered. Right, exactly. So it's like we're going to put our entire existence.

Hot take. Is brand more evil than DeNaris? Because he just sat in an armchair and was like, wow, people are getting rocked. Even in the last few minutes. He couldn't have been like, can't wait to be king. He couldn't have been like, listen, Theon, you've had a rough go of it. Why don't you just hang back for 20 seconds before your adopted sister comes just roaring out of the backfield? Couldn't do it.

Couldn't even do it. Guys, Brand's an asshole. It's just really coming to me now. And don't be making that smirk now that you got your velvet jerkin on. And you've upgraded your fucking wheelchair, which, by the way, remains the single greatest scientific advancement in the history of seven-case. Kingdoms? But respect to your on. I think mask marketing, the scorpion, is more impressive than a chair with wheels on it, but

that's just me. I have a couple of like sort of forwards-looking questions. Is there anything else from the episode that you wanted to hit? You know, the tiny town thing is a thing. You know, that is actually a phrase that gets used a lot in writer's rooms to combat the idea that we are in a show set in a major metropolis, but when, an event happens, your characters all happen to be around for it. It's not saying that all shows are tiny town.

There are only so many people in the cast, but you want to fight the impression of it. You want to make it seem like there's a reason why people are there. And that said, when shows end, they are about the people you love as an audience coming together. And I think the lost finale has been brought up fairly and unfairly a lot recently, but the lost finale was about giving the characters we love and spend time with closure together. Because we spent time with them together.

and that's an aspect of it that I will always appreciate and admire. And so that's where we were here, you know, with all of our friends being the ones making the decisions. And I don't know if we, I don't know if one Davos joke about, I don't even know why I'm here and I don't get a vote, but I'll vote for him. I don't know if that really balances out the equation. But it's also something worth remembering that. Also, shout out to Robin Aaron. Dude, Robin. I can't believe they gave him a line. There was a, when I was a kid, there was this dude, Eric B.

Mm-hmm. I should, Kai, maybe I should say his full name. There's a, a dude name Eric. Back when I was a kid, I used to play Little League Baseball, Fairmount Sports Association. Shout out. I was like a really decent 11, 12-year-old baseball player. Useful. You know, line drives, multipositional.

Five tools? A little catcher, a little up the middle infield. Eric. One summer. looked like what you would imagine 12 year old Chris looks like. You know, just like kind of a little wet behind the years.

Sure. Summer of 13, when we were turned 13, whatever year that was, he came back looking like Patrick Swayze and the outsiders with like a mustache, like a full Steve bedrock bedrogy and mustache and was throwing high 70s

and a crazy curveball. Wow. That's Robin Aaron. or the last time I saw you, you were drinking from your mom's breast like it was an Evian bottle on a hot day. You were like missing the archery target by six and a half feet left.

And you come back through looking like Harry Stiles' cousin? Yeah, he got a second look for me. Respect. Respect. Yeah. I don't know why he doesn't have a claim. Look what he's been through.

I'm hot. What do you do, Brian? This idea that the idea that Brian got the story because he has the best backstory, What show were y'all watching? Literally everyone else on the stage. None of them took a season off. To hang out with Max Von Siddow?

None of them. They had to work to be on that stage. We're back to this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the nature of it. Just to say that it's cool for a show to say

if you think this has a happy ending, you're not paying attention. But if you're a long-running show, you're going to have a happy ending because what does happy mean? Does it mean every character gets like a dream and gets to relax and gets to move to Maui? No, but it means that every character gives the audience some level of satisfaction

as to their final fate. And it's just going back to a core thing about the show, which is you cannot read wedding in season eight. You cannot do it. There was no way that dragon was going to eat John last night because you can't do that in season eight. Now, can you do that in book seven or whatever if that book ever comes out?

Very curious if you can. It would be really interesting. But it's simply something that can't happen. So, again, I actually like the feeling of closure on the characters that we've come to care about that we got in the finale. And I think that there's a calculation made by the people making the show that what's most valuable to them? And I think that where it netted out, they're happy with. And frankly, I'm happy with too. They played all the notes.

They just played them too fast. I think they probably play them too fast and maybe not in the right order which is a really difficult argument to make about something so fucking massive and challenging to do. There were more, so just briefly,

I wanted to talk a little bit about Game of Thrones industries and what happens now. Just last point. Oh yeah. It was interesting and kind of Vettel that the people in making the show understood that the audience

would want a dog moment and let John have ghosts back. Boy, you fucking... He said, what is he? That's what he is. I'm sorry, he's a magic. dog, forgive me. He's a wolf. Dude, people love him

because people love people's relationships with their dogs. Dude, you don't have to tell me, man. I'm just saying. But they were able to predict that. I have a dog take that you like, Kaya would cut the mics. I like dogs. Yeah. I don't want to do this.

Nothing else has ever said. I can't. It's just like people take them too seriously. What they did, let's go back. Kaya, keep that. People were able, they were able to predict successfully or understand on an intuitive level that the audience would want a John and Ghost reunion. They were not able to understand

that Brienne's last moment live journaling about her crush isn't the appropriate finale for that character. Did you see some of the Carrie Bradshaw memes? All the memes about her are great. They're all great. Also the memes about... I couldn't help but wonder.

Also the meme of Veris in heaven when Tyrion says he was right. And it's... Anyway. So I think that was a tell also. I mean, like I said... What would you have done if the last shot of Game of Thrones was Tyrion

paying for like a big pun-style Varus mural on the walls of Kings Landing? I love it. That makes... That fills me with great joy. Also, when Tyrion's like, my oldest and best friend, I'm like, relax. You guys, you guys were work colleagues. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. You sold them out. Own it.

Anyway, the thing about finale is that is always interesting is when we see what the people thought of the characters as opposed to what we thought of them. And there were some mismatches there. That's all. Okay, so Game of Thrones industry. Yeah, just briefly, obviously the quote unquote, the long night, whatever the Naomi Watts show

set 5,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones is supposed to be, I think it's in production currently in Ireland. There was a British tabloids piece about it. it's apparently being produced under the code name Blood Moon. That's cool. So if you're in Belfast and you just see a lot of signs for Blood Moon, I don't know. That's what's happening.

I was surprised by how many, there were three, I think, two of which would actually be possible. How many, like, allowances they made for the possibility that they could return to this story. Yes. Specifically, there's a dragon. And that's just a cool note to go out on, like, just the idea that this, you know, that that's still happening. But Brand saying, like, I can maybe go find that dragon and also like what happens to this weapon of mass destruction flying around the world.

Aria going west. And since it was essentially a, you know, a open and closed case. Did you see the tweet about the spinoff of Aria founding the first settlement in Virginios? Good job How about Ariah be like, I'm going to cut your throat to Yara And that was Yara's last moment Well That was like Oz

Shut the fuck up It was It's like King Schillinger Yeah Yeah Are you going west And then I think that there is an element The thing that I was like

So interested in I never cared about quote unquote His motivations But I found the Night King to be like a really really effective bogeyman for this whole story and never really

they never really interrogated all of that after they killed him. No, it was super, super weird when someone up on that podium was just like, well, he was very useful in defeating the army of the living dead. And everyone's like, well, good point. Yeah.

Yo, that happened. Yeah. And so, again, when you steered the show away from prophecy... More than once. He fought them more than once. But there should be some acknowledgement that the world is full of

is dark and full of terror. And this shit is going to happen again, and maybe there's some larger reasons about that. And again, the show, you know, we loved the show for its faints towards religion or monetary policy or all the things that actually make our world dark and full of terrors at times.

And in the end, this was a show about these characters, which is what TV shows always are. So they shot a lot of endings, apparently. They shot multiple sort of last moments. Do you think one of the last moments is a shot of Craster's baby with like tons of Russian jail tats hanging out behind a tree

hanging out with the dude from Pine Barrens and it's all the Night Baby Oh my God, Night Baby The merch alone would be incredible Night Baby wearing a onesie that says Yolo But then it says underneath it Not actually true Yodo

Oh man You only die Anyway. So anyway Yeah look Are you still invested? Do you want more? I think I appreciated the honesty of that that this world was expansive and ever growing, and even with a nod to George Martin

and the book within the book and the importance of secondary characters, whether Tyrion is written out of the official story, but the other story is always more interesting. I appreciated that there was no attempt at finality here because everybody knows the score. It's not just beautiful and artistic sentiment that this world is enormous

and will live in the hearts of the fans forever, it's that this world on our television screens on HBO, as we said, is going to live for the next decade plus. And though, Beniof and Wise didn't, I'm sure, did not think this. They weren't getting notes about this. The finale we got does

nod to the IP future we are already living in. Well, maybe that's why they didn't address the Night King because the Night King is going to be explained in the prequel. But not just that. What I mean is the IP future we are living in where movie stars and movie characters will go to streaming services for miniseries.

So is it completely out of the ordinary that within the next five to eight years, HBO throws Maisie Williams, how much money? I mean, $50 million to go do an ARIA eight episode miniseries? I mean, I don't people are like, oh, Kit really doesn't want to do this anymore. Daniel Craig was on the press tour for Spector

being like, I'd rather be dead than play James Bond again. Yeah. Daniel Craig's into James Bond movie. Actors want to work. Yeah. And actors also, with good reason, want to get paid. and when you can do work, do work that you like,

with people you like, and get paid, and be under a one-year contract? I mean, that's... But you speak to an interesting... This kind of takes us back to your point about...

It's what JJ Redick does every year. Whether or not TV can tell a story like this. Is the specialness of this story was watching Masey Williams go from being a child to an adult. The specialness was seeing John Snow in the first few episodes and being like, this kind of background pauper

who becomes the most important character to see DeNaris's journey through all these different trials and tribulations and traumas

through all these different lands and worlds to arrive at the point that she always wanted to get to only did I

it's the time spent and the investment that really matters there so I don't know what happens to Game of Thrones

if you start chopping it up and telling six episode, 15 episodes, Duncan N's stories. We said this the other week. You cannot do this again. This cannot happen again. Look at the Star Wars movies. Someone in AT&T is like, challenge, except it. Well, you can do the other things, which is probably more cost effective and profitable.

What I mean is you can't introduce something. You only fall in love the first time once. You know what I mean? This type of storytelling, this gambit, this gamble with all the uncertainty. And I went back and I was reading Joanna Robinson at a piece. I think it was from two years ago even about what a disaster the pilot originally was before they saved it. I mean, the improbability of all this is still staggering to get to where we ended up. But Star Wars is showing us.

You can't just reboot and say, well, it's the new Luke. It doesn't really work. But maybe what you can do is do stories on the margins and do side stories and just continue to service the people who love this world and build and build it and grow it. We are watching mass media learn how to continue stories in real time right now. What I would say is the other thing that we can never get back again is not just the experience of watching Macy Williams grow up over eight years, but the experience that we all had, not just as podcasters and recapers or whatever else we are, but just the country and the world experiencing this show together at the same time. Not to say that there won't be another, I mean, I actually have my doubts, but there will be other popular shows. I'm not sure if anything will be as monoculturally dominant as this. No, in some ways this show was the wall.

In some ways, this show was this last sort of monument, and you could even see the wall breaking at the end. I mean, the number one Twitter trending topic yesterday going pretty much all day. I was sitting around watching golf, and I was like, looking at Twitter, and it was like number one all day was the plot details of the finale of leaked.

And I think that they had been up in various forms for weeks and weeks, but most of the season leaked before it aired the day of, because it would get, corrupted on its way to whatever the third party was that was going to be airing because HBO isn't Netflix. It's sending its programming out to direct TV or to spectrum or Amazon or whatever. So the intensity of expectation to get this prized content actually was starting to crumble a little bit because not only did you have the intense scrutiny it was under in the week between episode to

episode, but you had actual breaches of process in terms of whether or not you wanted to have it spoiled or not. To say nothing affected amusingly for the ringers universe, it was another double overtime goddamn playoff game yesterday. And everybody in our NBA slack is like, please, nobody's spoil a Game of Thrones. I'm going to start it after this game. And it's funny. It was like it started in a world and created a world in a lot of ways of fandom and scholarship and community that almost ate itself at the end. Yeah. And in a way, because it was this sort of at the beginning pure vessel that was the communal experience of Game of Thrones was incredibly fun and still is pretty fun. But you're right. It has corrupted and corroded our experience in some ways with all culture

and our expectations for it and our expectations of a community around it. I don't really know what happens on the other side of the wall. And I think it's probably worth ending the conversation about it because we, to say that you and I have not talked about, I mean, other than vintage contemporary novels from the 80s, I don't know if there's a topic that we have talked about more, certainly publicly, and microphones than the show over the last eight years. It was truly, I mean, first of all, a pleasure and a privilege and an honor to talk to you about it, but also to be a small part in the larger conversation about something that was about story and was about storytelling and was about, um, could be, well, you know what, let's not say what it was about. Let's just say that it could be about almost anything and served as, you know, an avatar for almost all the conversations and arguments that we culturally and politically and socially have had for the last almost decade. Yeah. There are moments when it was a not ideal avatar for it, and there are moments when it really rose to the moment. But regardless, the fact that this show became so central to all

of our conversations, whether it's through metaphor or whether it's, you know, realizing the conversations we were having about the treatment of women on this show predated a national conversation about the treatment of women in real life. It shouldn't have gone that way, honestly, but there were things that were said when the Me Too movement started that were part of the Game of Thrones conversation the season before, you know, it's kind of remarkable. And it was ultimately, for me, I mean, obviously, it was professionally transforming for all of us and a great joy and a great opportunity.

But it really was fun because all of this stuff is only fun if people care about something. And even the people who are howling the loudest at the end of the series, they're only howling because they care. To do something so right to get people to care so much that they're so disappointed is an amazing magical act that shouldn't be overlooked. I don't think I've ever experienced something where my attitude about it was I just wanted to keep going. And I don't know that it could have kept going in this environment,

with this level of feedback. I mean, in some ways, you know, you have to wonder what the people who made the show feel about how it's been received this year. I'm sure they'll eventually weigh in on that. But I do think that the reason why people are various degrees of annoyed to upset to confused and also why they feel anything at all

is because of this deep deep, deep attachment to the story and to the characters and that's a fucking huge achievement man like you and I talk about shows 48 weeks of the other weeks of the year that we talk about stuff like a fraction of the people are going to care about what we're talking about compared to what we talked about for the last six weeks

you know and and we'll talk about stranger things in July People will watch that in eight hours, or they'll watch it three months later. There's never going to be something like this where we all gather around the campfire like this. And I kind of wanted that experience to keep going, and I also felt like it was such an interesting story,

and it made me think about so many interesting things, and I found the characters and performances so compelling, and it was visually so sumptuous that I was like, I'd be happy to talk about this for another three years, or four years, or five years, in some capacity. So I think that's the disappointment that people feel ultimately is that it's not necessarily where it ended or who sat on the Iron Throne or not the Iron Throne and what happened to the characters. They all kind of made sense in some ways.

Even Brann, if he's as powerful as he sort of is alluded to be, makes sense for him to be the king. It's just, I think the reason why people are reacting the way they are is because nobody would do this if they didn't love it. Absolutely. And the thing that is essential about the visual storytelling that we love is that on a fundamental, level, whether you're talking about the office and friends or you're talking about lost or or Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, it's a world we are desperate to live in. That's why people rewatch these things. You just want to go back to the world where there are people that you fall in love with,

there are people that you love to hate, and it's real to you. It is emotionally vibrant and present and real to you. And it's not escape. It's escapism, right? Because you wouldn't actually want to vacation in Westeros. but it engages you in a different way than your actual life does, and it, in its best cases, elevates you and transports you and gives you a different perspective on everything.

And it's a testament to the people who made the show that they were able to execute this on really the highest level possible with the highest degree of difficulty for the amount of time that they did. What you said a moment ago about book readers saying, oh, look, there's King's Landing. it's not just that they did that to the point where I think it's a real place. It just feels like you watch the show

and you're like, well, of course, that's where they are now. Without thinking about the production difficulties or moving from continent to continent, it's that here's this real place that has been incinerated by a dragon. I mean, just the spectacle and the scale of that

was really powerful and moving. And to take a story like that and to take the viewers along with them on a journey not just through the time of the show but through the time of their own lives is, I don't know, it's why we do it. Yeah, absolutely.

And it's really, just on a personal level, it's so fun and gratifying knowing, and I loved writing the recaps for the first five seasons, and I love doing the podcast. It's really fun to watch something with people and to talk about or write about something that you know people want to read or talk about or listen to.

Yeah, we don't have a lot of that anymore. We don't have a lot of that. No. Fleabag season two? I'll see you Thursday. Great, great job, Baranski. Great job, Westeros. You really, you pulled it out.

You beat death. You did it. Thank you.