…sigh.

This review is going to be short because, you know, genocide.

There’s a lot of a good in this episode: the acting by the cast showed the depth of their despair, pain, loneliness and utter depression. Emilia Clarke, who never gets enough credit for how good of an actress she is, absolutely sells everything Daenerys is going through, despite the horrifying things that Dany does this episode.

There’s also the technical aspects: the filming, costuming, makeup, sound and cgi work together to give us something truly spectacular. So many moments are just breathtaking: the close ups of character’s faces as the look into the abyss and the abyss looks back; the lead up to and taking of King’s Landing; the costuming and hair choices tell so much of the story that words aren’t even needed in some cases.

…Now. Onto the rest.

In a lot of ways the events of this episode were a long time coming. I mean, Dany has a history of straight murder that cannot be denied…

However, what takes this episode from Dany on a roaring rampage of revenge, to Dany becoming Hitler is the choices. It’s that moment, you know the one, where Dany has everything she supposedly wanted: Jon’s by her side, vengeance for Missandei and King’s Landing has surrendered. All she has to do is fly to the Red Keep and take Cersei out, and she chooses, instead to murder innocents. She listens to the literal cries of the people in the streets of King’s Landing, families…children, and chooses to kill them all anyway. There’s no reason for it. It doesn’t play into anything but hatred and evil. What’s worse? It doesn’t play into anything we’ve seen of Dany before this. Every time, in all previous seasons, when Dany is at her lowest is when she rises up higher, becoming a better version of herself. Here we see none of that. I’ll give the writers this, they’ve taken Dany to the worst place possible: within a span of days she’s lost her two best friends, another child, the trust of her council and the man she loves. Yet, in the span of those days she was given every opportunity to rise above. All she had to do was listen. The events of the previous episode wouldn’t have happened had she listened to Sansa and her council and waited.  Hell the events that led to the death of Viserion would’ve been prevented had she listened to Jon, Tyrion, Melisandre and Davos last year and stopped insisting Jon bend the knee before she would help him against the Night King. Her arrogance then was the clue to the things that are happening now and while I know that logically I hate, hate, hate how we got here. There’s a rushedness surrounding these final three episodes that show a lack of care for the characters or the viewers that is frankly insulting. It’s obvious that Dan and Dave stopped caring the minute they got that Star Wars check and that lack of care, along with the lack of women and minorities in the writer’s room, has shown with the drop in quality for the last three episodes. It’s a shame yet, at the same time, if it drives more people to read the books for a more satisfying ending? I can’t quite hate it.

The North Remembers
If the objective was to remove Cersei the best bet would’ve been to send the assassin who could’ve taken care of it without even being noticed. #JustSaying

I still want to know who’s going to beat the Glovers arses for not showing up when literally the world needed them in The Long Night.

Jon’s face when he realized Varys knew was gold. No words needed to express his bone deep tiredness with all this political bullshite.

Varys went out like a boss and I’m not mad at it.

The fact that Jaime and Cersei’s deaths aren’t even important enough to put into the main body of the review should tell you something.

Arya on a white stallion…

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So, here we are, at the end and at this point, I’m just here to complete the journey I’ve been on with these characters for the last ten years. It’s been a long road with a lot of ups and downs and now… well. We’ll see.

3 Bells Ringing out of 5