‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 Episode 5 Review: Long Live The Mad Queen

There has been some suggestion among some Game Of Thrones viewers that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were putting their thumbs on the scales last week in order to make Daenerys Targaryan a villain, and to position Jon “Aegon VI Targaryan” Snow as the just leader the Seven Kingdoms needed. Critics used this as evidence of the showrunners’ sloppy and chauvinistic attempt at dramatic stakes–that they had sold Daenerys out. After all, she was a good person with a good heart before season seven. She was a just and noble ruler. Only upon arriving in Westeros did her tyranny emerge, so the discourse last week told us.

That is blatantly incorrect. From the moment she ate the stallion’s heart and looked on smugly at the death of her brother way back in Season 1, Daenerys has been possessed of a monomaniacal belief in her own destiny, and that she must achieve her goals by any means necessary. That is why Xaro Xhoan Daxos was sealed inside his own vault. That is why the slave masters of Yunkai and Meereen were crucified. That is why the khals of Vaes Dothrak were burned alive, and she emerged from the pyre, smiling like a god delivering pleasant justice. It is why Randyl and Dickon Tarly were engulfed by Drogon’s flame for refusing to kneel. That is why King’s Landing is a pile of ashes and rubble, thousands of innocent civilians lying lifeless beneath it.

Not until “The Bells” did I doubt that Benioff and Weiss had their hands firmly on the tiller, slowly and organically building up Daenerys’s moral corruption. That unwavering sense of self-belief is her tragic flaw. She has never known home. She has been raised to understand that something precious had been taken from her. She is the Unburnt, the Mother of Dragons, and the Breaker of Chains. She is marked for destiny and for reclamation by conquest. No part of Daenerys’s adult life has been about anything else.

She could sense that she was alone in “Last of the Starks,” after both Jon and Sansa backed her into a corner. There was fear written in every word, cast in every look. She was so close to her goal, and it was about to be snatched from her, either by Jon or by Cersei. One couldn’t have been surprised if she were to follow through and become queen of the ashes.

Her conversation with Jon in the map room at Dragonstone seems to confirm this. “Far more people in Westeros love you than love me,” she quaveringly tells Jon. “I don’t have love here. I only have fear.” Jon rebuffs her advances once more, and that settles it. “Alright then…let it be fear.” Jon was the last person alive with whom she had a deep, personal relationship. It is a cold and cruel scene to watch them hurt each other like this. Jon can’t be honest about his feelings, which is understandable, given the fact that she is his aunt. It doesn’t make his coldness any less bitter for her. He loves her, but not in the way she wants, not anymore. If her heart is broken, then what is the point of trying to inspire love? The obsession with the Iron Throne is all that is left.

That brings us to Game of Thrones‘s Rubicon: the destruction of King’s Landing. The first section of the battle is fairly straightforward. Now that Daenerys knows the Scorpion bolts are coming, she is prepared for them. She outmaneuvers their shots and then puts them to the torch. There isn’t much left to do after that except wait for surrender. It comes. The bells chime out, and the gates are raised. She suddenly turns her eyes to the Red Keep and her face is flooded with desperate determination. The rest will live in infamy centuries after Daenerys and everyone else have gone.

Why did she make that decision? My first reaction was one of rage at Benioff and Weiss for writing it. It seemed too easy a device to complete Daenerys’s transformation into the Mad Queen. A much more honest move would have been to eliminate that moment of surrender and have the Lannister army fight on despite insurmountable odds. Daenerys’s desperation would have been brutal, but it would have been consistent with the situation with which she was faced. No matter how far gone she was, Daenerys wouldn’t kill soldiers and civilians alike after those soldiers had laid down their swords, would she? Benioff and Weiss got cheap, and threw a once complex character under the bus with a cartoonish heel turn.

I watched the scene a few more times, in tandem with that conversation with Jon in the map room. Ambivalence crept into my interpretation of those moments. Those in power without friends and loved ones can become impervious to the needs of others. Power, after all, is all they have left. Jorah is gone. Missandei is gone. Jon is gone. She did not free slaves or use her magic for anything but violence on the shores of Westeros. Arya Stark ended the Great War. She can claim no obvious glory in this country, no blatant reason for the population to love her. The Iron Throne is all Daenerys has left. “Let it be fear.” She is truly lost. She has become Cersei.

It’s also easier to contextualize Daenerys’s earlier brutality. The rulers of Qarth and the slave cities are such obvious villains that they descend into caricature. You can practically see the wise masters of Yunkai twirling their proverbial mustaches whenever they are onscreen. Who wants anything but death for a slave master, anyway? The same goes for the khals, and even for Randyl Tarly. These were all brutal men whose deaths, at the very least, did not make the world a worse place.

They were still acts of savagery that undermined Daenerys’s claims of breaking the wheel. Power through violence and fear is the norm, not the exception, on both sides of the Narrow Sea. It is why Jorah, Tyrion, and Jon all counseled restraint at various times through Daenerys’s tenure as the Dragon Queen. Whenever she experienced a setback after exercising restraint, she decided that violence was the only corrective. Benioff and Weiss are aware of how troubling this is. If Daenerys were pushed all the way, then that savagery would eventually find a less evil target. The civilians of King’s Landing became that target. Her isolation, her desperation, her obsession, and her opportunity all built toward disaster.

Can we give Benioff and Weiss the benefit of the doubt? After all, they decided that Daenerys should be raped by Khal Drogo, and then fall in love with him. They also presided over the filming and editing of a scene where Jaime raped Cersei, and the writers genuinely believed that it was consensual. These are the two most glaring mistakes Benioff and Weiss have made in adapting George R.R. Martin’s words. They are chilling mistakes because both men believed they were depicting brutality, not endorsing it. To be in love with your rapist is an expression of trauma, not of love. Benioff and Weiss don’t understand that, not in these two instances.

Those two moments can’t help but color this latest moment. They make Daenerys’s final act of horror feel like another example of misguided storytelling. On the other hand, such has been the history of Daenerys that it also feels like the culmination of a woman whose messiah complex found its most extreme form. That debate may not be settled until we see what lies in store for Jon next week. If all of this work was in preparation for a new form of government upon Daenerys’s downfall, then perhaps the story can remain a thoughtful examination of the poison of power. If Jon becomes king of Westeros, then it will just feel like a cheap ploy to make it easy to hate Daenerys. That moment of reckoning is less than seven days away.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• Tyrion once said to Jaime, “You know how much I love my family.” He said that all the way back in Season 1. Time and again, it has proven to be his Achilles’ heel. We may not always think of Tyrion this way–given his relationship with his sister, father, and eldest nephew–but his actions always bore themselves out. He could have escaped them all with Shae back in season four, but chose to remain and eventually be framed for Joffrey’s murder. He was blinded by his unspoken love for Cersei, and his belief in her humanity. That may help explain why she outfoxed him throughout the last 11 episodes. Even his murder of Tywin could only be carried out after he discovered that Shae had slept with the old man. His release of Jaime demonstrates it one last time. You can’t choose your family, but maybe you should. Otherwise, they may be the noose that tightens the more you resist it.  
• Jaime and Cersei got what they deserved in the end: each other. Their solipsism was always their crutch, and perhaps some measure of peace was achieved by dying in each other’s arms.
• Cersei Lannister is one of the greatest villains in the history of television, and Lena Headey’s performance has been glorious. I am extremely disappointed that she barely spoke or did anything this season after the premiere. Thankfully, that doesn’t detract from a 61-episode performance that deserves its own book-length analysis.
• R.I.P. Sandor “The Hound” Clegane. Your laugh as you are choked by your own brother says more about you than words ever could.  
• There are 20 significant, named characters in the series pilot. Only six remain alive. Time will tell which of those six will still be standing at 10:30pm ET next Sunday.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports

Stream Game Of Thrones Season 8 Episode 5 ("The Bells") on HBO Go