It has been a few days since the end of Game of Thrones and as I've pondered it I think I've settled into my conclusions that the resolution of the Jon/Dany storyline made sense from a structural perspective, even if it might not have been executed perfectly, but the resolution of the White Walker storyline was poorly done.
There's a lot of parallelism happening in the climax of the final episode
The big moment in the series finale comes when Jon Snow stabs Daenerys. This has parallels to two other events that have previously been factors in the story: Jaime Lannister killed the Mad King rather than letting him “burn them all”, and the Night's Watch conspirators stabbed Jon Snow for allowing wildlings through The Wall. In fact the parallels might be too apt. With both Daenerys and Aerys the issue of King's Landing being burned is central. Jon Snow figures in two of them, once as the stabber and once as the one being stabbed. In all of them questions of duty and loyalty are central. With that much parallelism going on we might wonder if there's supposed to be some resonance happening with the seemingly unpaired player, Jaime Lannister.
Parallels to Jaime's “redemption arc”
One of the achievements of George R.R. Martin's writing of the first few books in the series is how he's able to achieve a perspective shift with the character of Jaime Lannister. In the early part of the story he mostly looks like a villain, engaging in cruel and selfish acts. But later Jaime becomes a POV character and we become privy to how he sees the world. We see how he romanticizes his own actions as being in support of his forbidden true love. We see how the epithet “Kingslayer” rankles as it ties shame to him for what is, from a Utilitarian perspective, the greatest act of good that he ever engaged in. We eventually see that, under his surface layer of cynicism, being a knight matters to him. He is humanized, we are able to empathize with him and understand how his choices made sense to him from the situation he was in.
A lot of people seem to read his storyline as an arc: he started bad and became good. But I think GRRM's point was that both the good and bad were inside and could be seen at different times and from different perspectives. One of my favorite elements of A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones is the backstory of Ser Davos's relationship to Stannis. Davos was a smuggler, and smuggled food to Dragonstone when Stannis was besieged there, so Stannis knighted him for the rescue but also chopped off the tips of Davos's fingers as punishment for being a smuggler. “A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.”
One of the areas of controversy with fan reactions to the final season was confusion over what was going on with Dany's character at the end of the series. I don't think the show was trying to say Daenerys “turned” or “went mad”. I think the point is that the grandiosity and the imperiousness were inside Dany all along, but when we were “on her side” we were inclined to cheer for her grand deeds rather than gasp at them (as Tyrion pointed out in his speech). There's a kind of seductiveness that comes from being highly competent at violence, and we should be wary of it – and the Khaleesi had it in abundance.
Like both Jaime and King Robert (another able conqueror but questionable monarch), Dany also had a lot of dubious romanticism into the story she was telling herself. She was reclaiming her birthright! Really? She wanted to be queen even though someone else had a better birthright claim. Removing the Targaryans from the throne invited all the chaos in the first place! Really? The last Targaryan king was terrible, he betrayed his vassals and paid the price. Dany's ruthlessness was necessary to achieve her good ends! Really? They could have laid siege to King's Landing and Cersei would have surrendered eventually, Cersei had no supply lines and nothing except Dany's impatience put her forces under any time pressure. My read on Dany's decision to burn the surrendering city in reaction to hearing the bells was that she was angry: her enemy was robbing her of the justification for the violence she wanted to inflict, they had the audacity to not be as terrible as she needed them to be. Their true crime was not playing the role they had been assigned in the story in Dany's head.
Structurally it makes sense, but I'm not sure it had the emotional resonance
A big part of the problem with the Jon/Dany story was that they supposedly fell in love, but they seemed to have little if any chemistry on screen. Because there was little emotional resonance to the supposed relationship it was hard to keep in mind as a legitimate factor influencing character decisions. Also, lots of breakneck zipping around a previously vast continent made virtually everything that happened on the show in later seasons seem less weighty. Maybe the love story could have worked if we had felt the passage of time as the relationship built, but as actually featured on the show the fact that Jon and Dany were in love was something you had to keep in mind intellectually, the same way you'd treat arbitrary factors like lines of succession. My assumption here is that it all makes thematic sense because Benioff and Weiss got the scoop for how it was supposed to end from GRRM, but had to cobble together the finer details of the implementation on their own and couldn't quite make it all work. (We'll have to see if GRRM himself can pull it off, if and when he ever finishes the final books.)
The battle of Winterfell was a mess from a storytelling perspective
A key part of making a multi-character story feel meaningful is to have the various characters engage in actions that matter. But aside from Arya's final kill-shot against the Night King I am hard pressed to figure out why anything that happened during the battle mattered at all. It was apparently the Night King's plan from the beginning to personally confront and attack Bran, and the army of the living knew this thanks to intel from Bran. During the battle the army of the living engaged in a variety of maneuvers that ranged from outright failures to temporary impediments to their foes. Yes, The Hound saved Arya, but Arya only needed to be saved because she waded into battle against zombies instead of hanging around the weirwood where the final confrontation would be. Sure, Melisandre was able to get various fires lit, but in the end the relentless “quantity has a quality all its own” tactics of the dead could overcome any barrier, so why all the fuss? The only part of the battle that really mattered was that, like in a video game boss fight, Arya was able to successfully land her attack at the precise moment when the main villain provided a brief window of vulnerability. And thanks to arbitrary magical rule “if you kill the main bad guy the entire force is defeated” this managed to tie up the plot that had been animating a huge chunk of the story from the beginning. It was weightless and therefore unsatisfying.
Crafting a story where the characters take specific character-appropriate action that are all essential to achieving the final victory isn't easy! I sympathize that Benioff and Weiss had a difficult task on their hands. Nevertheless they didn't deliver. The battle was long on spectacle but short on emotional resonance, so I think it failed from a storytelling perspective. And I think it's this hollowness at the center of the final season that is the real problem.
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