Here’s What Game of Thrones Was Really About

Unsplash image by @mparzuchowski.

By Darren Katz, Founding Partner of Amplia Group

As I was watching the disappointing final season of Game of Thrones, a number of thoughts flew through my head. First, the story telling got very sloppy.  There were a lot of unearned plot twists, some characters developed a severe case of plot armor, and the narrative became not just compressed, but rushed.

Putting those substantial gripes aside, I began to process a more existential question; namely what the show was actually about. Initially, I assumed that the overarching message of the show was that the foibles of humans were insignificant compared with a global threat like the Army of the Dead. The various thought pieces comparing the Night King and his minions to global warming seemed both prescient and compelling. The fact that the first scene of the first episode was about the threat of the White Walkers seemed to bear that out. However, as the Night King was quickly and easily killed off halfway through the season, that premise faded to black.

The second contender for theme of the show was that realpolitik always wins. As the forces of the North headed towards King’s Landing, they were going to face off against the real big bad, Cersei Lannister. Cersei had outsmarted every one of her opponents for seven seasons. Yet as the final battle took place, Cersei all of a sudden didn’t have a plan and basically ran away and died. This lazy plotting was emblematic of the late season writing on the show.

This left the new big bad as Daenerys Targaryen, who represented the triumph of pure power over the weak. Her Leni Riefenstahl Triumph of the Will speech made that point abundantly clear. But with her subsequent death, that theory too went by the wayside.

As the show concluded, the only narrative left was that Game of Thrones was essentially a Stark family saga. By closing with the fates of the remaining Starks, the showrunners were basically saying that it was all just about them in the end. This disappointing theme unfortunately fit well with the disappointing end of the series.