“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
Let’s face it. This last episode was disappointing. For all the platitudes praising the end, there is no getting away from this sense of anticlimactic, blasé and insipid bitter taste in your mouth.
Of course there are many other adjectives available, some unfortunately not fit to be printed but there is no denying that what we just saw being passed off as a grand finale was nothing short of a damp squib.
Perhaps we should have seen it coming; Episode 3 that of The Long Night was hint enough. What with all of the dim lighting and the fearful chasing in the shadows, not to mention the endless waves of dead men and women, that threatened to drown you by sheer force of numbers, the entire crescendo of the long dark night reduced, shattered literally into a tiny million glass pieces in just a fraction of a second. Just like that.
It was not so much the fact that it was Arya who killed the Night King, or the ease with which it was carried out, but this odd sense of dissatisfaction thereafter, now what?
Game of Thrones has been loved, or so I would like to believe, not so much because of the dragons or the battles and heart-wrenching deaths but because it showed us that this, in essence is life.
S**t happens. Almost always. All the time.
Some of us are not that lucky. Ever.
The ones you love are torn from you.
There is so much pain and grief that comes upon you that you wonder if you are going mad. Some of us do.
And then there are people who are the worst kind of evil and ugly. And guess what, you get to live with them.
What endeared and brought all of us together was exactly this though, a common thread weaving us together as we looked deep in the mirror and into our souls.
Into the deep dark recesses of what a human being is and what he or she is capable of.
Whether it is love, or lust or hate, it challenged us to rethink of what we so often tend to do, club men and women, and relationships and beliefs into pre-ordained and pre-set compartments.
Right from the first book and the first season itself, it taught us that nothing in life is predictable. The good guys do not always win. And honour and duty can only carry you so far.
And while we so desperately wished for the right men to rule over us, the right men or women to love us, it is the ones who scheme and plot, the ones that hurt and abuse, that triumph instead. Does that stop us though then from believing?
It should not and it did not.
In almost all of the characters that grew from adolescence into adulthood, there was this steady narrative. That despite the odds, there is nothing a single dogged purpose in life cannot achieve, shown no less and in great dexterity by all the women in this epic weaving of lives from one family to the next.
And yes, when we least expect it, when all hope is gone, sometimes, just sometimes, we are witness to a miracle, bringing us back from the dead, literally and figuratively.
These past nine years have seen an overarching expanse into this wondrous journey we call life. Moments of great sorrow and wide eyed wonder, mostly pain and heartache but tinged with an underlying glimmer of hope.
Perhaps the writers had this basic truth in mind for this last season, but somewhere in the rush to cram all of that in six episodes (we would not have minded a ninth season thank you very much), much of this was reduced to a shabby stringing of story lines to try and give it a cohesive ending.
As we just saw, all the bows were neatly tied together, with even a feeble attempt at comic relief in the supposed banter at the Small Council; but the entire hour long episode was just that. Too much and too little. Too blithe and a tad melodramatic.
The Mad Queen must die. Never mind the long arduous journey she took to get here.
The cripple shall be king, no matter if he’s the Three-Eyed Raven, whose apparent powers we are still scratching our heads to; I mean really what can he do?
Jon Snow is well Jon Snow again, back at the Night’s Watch, although he knows now who his mother is, was. So he does know something.
Sansa, for all her petulance and starry eyed dreams of marrying a prince and having his babies, is Queen of the North.
And Arya, the one true hero is off sailing into the sunset....
So yes, we are disappointed. Because life does not come tied up in neat little bows. Much as we want it to.
For many of us it is a lifelong struggle where we take two steps forward but thrice that many back.
Where for most of the time we do not always get what we want.
Where the wicked thrive and the innocent suffer.
And yet, we persist because we know that in spite of all of the frustration and chaos and uncertainty, that life is beautiful.
Somewhere, breath-taking cinematography notwithstanding, in a sense this final episode did get one thing right though.
"If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention."
Let’s face it. This last episode was disappointing. For all the platitudes praising the end, there is no getting away from this sense of anticlimactic, blasé and insipid bitter taste in your mouth.
Of course there are many other adjectives available, some unfortunately not fit to be printed but there is no denying that what we just saw being passed off as a grand finale was nothing short of a damp squib.
Perhaps we should have seen it coming; Episode 3 that of The Long Night was hint enough. What with all of the dim lighting and the fearful chasing in the shadows, not to mention the endless waves of dead men and women, that threatened to drown you by sheer force of numbers, the entire crescendo of the long dark night reduced, shattered literally into a tiny million glass pieces in just a fraction of a second. Just like that.
It was not so much the fact that it was Arya who killed the Night King, or the ease with which it was carried out, but this odd sense of dissatisfaction thereafter, now what?
Game of Thrones has been loved, or so I would like to believe, not so much because of the dragons or the battles and heart-wrenching deaths but because it showed us that this, in essence is life.
S**t happens. Almost always. All the time.
Some of us are not that lucky. Ever.
The ones you love are torn from you.
There is so much pain and grief that comes upon you that you wonder if you are going mad. Some of us do.
And then there are people who are the worst kind of evil and ugly. And guess what, you get to live with them.
What endeared and brought all of us together was exactly this though, a common thread weaving us together as we looked deep in the mirror and into our souls.
Into the deep dark recesses of what a human being is and what he or she is capable of.
Whether it is love, or lust or hate, it challenged us to rethink of what we so often tend to do, club men and women, and relationships and beliefs into pre-ordained and pre-set compartments.
Right from the first book and the first season itself, it taught us that nothing in life is predictable. The good guys do not always win. And honour and duty can only carry you so far.
And while we so desperately wished for the right men to rule over us, the right men or women to love us, it is the ones who scheme and plot, the ones that hurt and abuse, that triumph instead. Does that stop us though then from believing?
It should not and it did not.
In almost all of the characters that grew from adolescence into adulthood, there was this steady narrative. That despite the odds, there is nothing a single dogged purpose in life cannot achieve, shown no less and in great dexterity by all the women in this epic weaving of lives from one family to the next.
And yes, when we least expect it, when all hope is gone, sometimes, just sometimes, we are witness to a miracle, bringing us back from the dead, literally and figuratively.
These past nine years have seen an overarching expanse into this wondrous journey we call life. Moments of great sorrow and wide eyed wonder, mostly pain and heartache but tinged with an underlying glimmer of hope.
Perhaps the writers had this basic truth in mind for this last season, but somewhere in the rush to cram all of that in six episodes (we would not have minded a ninth season thank you very much), much of this was reduced to a shabby stringing of story lines to try and give it a cohesive ending.
As we just saw, all the bows were neatly tied together, with even a feeble attempt at comic relief in the supposed banter at the Small Council; but the entire hour long episode was just that. Too much and too little. Too blithe and a tad melodramatic.
The Mad Queen must die. Never mind the long arduous journey she took to get here.
The cripple shall be king, no matter if he’s the Three-Eyed Raven, whose apparent powers we are still scratching our heads to; I mean really what can he do?
Jon Snow is well Jon Snow again, back at the Night’s Watch, although he knows now who his mother is, was. So he does know something.
Sansa, for all her petulance and starry eyed dreams of marrying a prince and having his babies, is Queen of the North.
And Arya, the one true hero is off sailing into the sunset....
So yes, we are disappointed. Because life does not come tied up in neat little bows. Much as we want it to.
For many of us it is a lifelong struggle where we take two steps forward but thrice that many back.
Where for most of the time we do not always get what we want.
Where the wicked thrive and the innocent suffer.
And yet, we persist because we know that in spite of all of the frustration and chaos and uncertainty, that life is beautiful.
Somewhere, breath-taking cinematography notwithstanding, in a sense this final episode did get one thing right though.
"If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention."
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