With just two episodes left until Game of Thrones wraps its eight-season run, the writers are taking bold risks and sacrificing a surprising amount of fan-favorite characters.
We’ve endured plot twists, hard-to-see showdowns, epic battles, and Tormund recounting how he once breastfed from a woman giant, but the hardest pill to swallow when it comes to this final season of Game of Thrones is how appallingly the show has treated one of its biggest draws.
We’re talking about the dragons.
Before you give in to the urge to troll the comments with excuses like, “This show was never about dragons,” let us stop you and say, “We know.” We know that George R.R. Martin’s series is an exercise in politics, a reimagining of historical events in a fantasy setting, a commentary on honor and goodness and what drives men to seek power. It’s all of those ideas packed into a story about warring houses in a fictional universe.
But it’s also about dragons, dammit and the show is doing them dirty.
The mythical beasts have been a major plot device since they were birthed at the end of the series’ first season. For Daenerys Targaryen, a young woman recently widowed, wandering the desert with a small khalasar, searching for a way to reclaim her birthright, the dragons represented power. As Dany nurtured them, she watched her empire grow. She liberated cities, freed slaves, and commanded armies, thanks in part to the threat these creatures represented. The dragons have been integral to not only Dany’s story but the overarching plot of Game of Thrones. How many characters have remarked on their influence, their history, the good or bad omens they bring?
They may just be CGI creations but they’re main players in the fight for the Seven Kingdoms and they deserve some damn respect.
Which is why watching how (and why) the writers have chosen to kill them off the show feels particularly enraging.
We lost Viserion in season seven after some poor-planning and knee-jerk heroics from Jon Snow, Dany, and the rest. The idea that a group of men led by the King in the North could just traipse north of the wall, grab a lone wight, then high-tail it back to King’s Landing to prove to an uncaring Cersei that the threat of the Night King was real was unrealistic at best, and idiotic if we’re being blunt. The audience knew that a character like Cersei wouldn’t risk her selfish interests for the betterment of her people, and some of Dany’s closest advisors, like Tyrion and Varys, should’ve known that too.
Yet we were asked to buy into this subplot that a king would risk his life to track down this useless pawn and that, when this plan predictably went awry, a queen would fly not one, not two, but all three of her dragons to his rescue. Watching Viserion fall at the hands of the Night King was a turning point for the show, giving one of its main villains equal footing in the war to come, and so even though we mourned the loss and questioned the plot holes, we could overlook the rationality because it served a larger purpose.
And then season eight happened.
Not only have we seen Viserion die again — this time in a gruesomely-prolonged fight against Jon Snow in the battle of Winterfell — but we’ve also had to watch as both Rhaegal and Drogon were used as weapons in the war against the undead by inept leaders who made multiple blunders in their battle tactics. Dany and Jon had two dragons but planned to wait out most of the fighting to lure the Night King into a trap. When they did enter the battle, they did so without a plan and at odds with each other. They spent most of the war flying aimlessly, getting stuck in a snow storm, withstanding a surprise attack by the Night King, and nearly losing their dragons to a horde of wights after landing in the middle of the battlefield to have a quick shout about who should do what.
And in “The Last of the Starks,” the plot holes became even more jarring in their obviousness.
Dany chose to ride back to Dragonstone, her family’s home, to regroup and recover from the losses sustained at Winterfell. While her Unsullied and Dothraki forces traveled by sea, she rode Drogon, carefully keeping watch over Rhaegal who was still recovering from his injuries. So carefully, it seems, that she completely missed the legion of ships Euron Greyjoy had snuck into the harbor. It was only when a giant cross bolt struck Rhaegal once, then again, then a third time, through the neck causing him to bleed out and fall to his watery death did everyone wise up to the threat he posed.
We could harp on about the realistic probability of this plot twist, how seemingly impossible it would be for Greyjoy to quietly drop anchor in Dany’s backyard and then successfully shoot down a dragon, hitting his target three times from his position in the bay, but it’s not the head-scratching logistics that make Rhaegal’s death and the loss of yet another dragon so infuriating. It’s how carelessly the show seems to be treating characters that it has idolized for seasons.
Game of Thrones has always played up the fantastical element of its dragon subplot. It’s fed into their mythology, made a point of revisiting their storylines, spent what we’re sure is an obscene amount of money bringing them to life on screen, and entertained fans by injecting them into every scene that they reasonably could. And now, with two episodes left and the odds feeling just a bit stacked against the show’s remaining villain, the writers — maybe in a fit of panic because they’ve just realized two dragons is an unfair advantage — are delivering death blows that feel unearned, but also, like pure shock value.
Using the death of Rhaegal as a scapegoat for poor writing is terrible enough, using the aftermath of his death to fuel an unearned subplot that compromises your female lead is even worse, but haphazardly shooting some arrows through a dragon, so you can horrify your audience and get people talking on Twitter, is just gross. And let’s be honest, the death of a dragon, whether it’s just teased or actually carried out, is a conversation-starter that this show has relied upon for far too long now.
We’re not naïve enough to think our favorite fire-breathers are going to make it out of this war alive. If anything, season eight of Game of Thrones has been a lesson in how to not treat your pets (pour one out for good boy Ghost). But it would be nice to give the animals you spent years building your show around a fitting send-off, one that felt earned at least.
In other words, if Euron Greyjoy kills Drogon before this is all said and done, we riot.
