How Game of Thrones Should Have Ended
This post contains spoilers for the television show Game of Thrones and the book series it is based on, A Song of Ice and Fire.
The ending to the television show Game of Thrones was poorly received and rightfully so. The decisions made and their respective justifications by the showrunners were often questionable at best, and the execution felt rushed. The show needed at least another season to properly wrap things up, yet we were only given six episodes, which indicated the showrunners' desire to move on.
Of course, the showrunners were given a difficult hand since the author of the original book series, George R. R. Martin, still has not finished writing the final books of A Song of Ice and Fire at this point in time, four years after the show ended. Since the book series has yet to be concluded, I remain hopeful that things can be corrected to deliver a more powerful and satisfying ending. There are more intricate details and plots that I would love to see fleshed out and wrapped up more tightly in the books, but my thoughts extend to the final season of the show and will not dive too deeply into correcting the significant number of issues with how quickly things occurred.
Background
Starting before the final season of the TV show, Westeros had spent years fighting among itself over power and claims for the throne while ignoring the White Walkers despite being frequently made aware of their existence. The overall importance of the White Walkers is established when they are immediately introduced in the prologues for both the show as well as the first book, "A Game of Thrones". The running theme throughout the series is conveyed by the words (aka motto) of House Stark, "Winter is coming", which allude to a warning of the impending arrival of the White Walkers. The primary plot of the story is the existential threat of the White Walkers, yet they are not taken seriously until their threat is too great to ignore. After they breached the Wall and appeared at the doorstep of the North, people finally began to shift focus from quarreling over increasingly trivial matters to the greater issue at hand.
The New Ending
The television show should have ended after the episode titled "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms", which should have been moved to the final episode after other episodes wrapped up the remaining plot lines. "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" spends its 57-minute runtime following the numerous characters that we have come to intimately know over more than 20 years as they gather together to prepare for their fight when the White Walkers reach Winterfell the following day. The episode exhibits some of the strongest writing in the entirety of the TV show and perfectly encapsulates the aurora of uncertainty looming over the upcoming conflict. By design, the episode is written so that we can have final goodbyes with all of the characters who have survived up to this point but may not survive the battle in the next episode. As the night draws to an end, the episode fades to black. There is still hope that humanity can conquer the threat it willfully put off now that the greatest fighters and heroes are focused on facing the issue head-on. The end of this episode provides the perfect ending to the main story in my version.
Epilogue
After an amount of time displaying a black screen where most people would begin to reach for the remote to change the program, an empty cobblestone street is displayed. Frost covers a faded sign for a noticeably aged pub with dirty windows. Snow blankets the ground. The camera pans out to reveal a dilapidated King's Landing. No humans or animals are anywhere to be seen. Nor any White Walkers. The camera cuts to outside King's Landing where a patch of grass is thawing. A single flower is beginning to bloom as rays of sun shine upon it.
Explanation of the New Ending
The White Walkers are a metaphor for climate change and our current lackluster response to such an obviously significant issue. When asked for his thoughts on this interpretation, Martin responded1:
It’s kind of ironic because I started writing “Game of Thrones” all the way back in 1991, long before anybody was talking about climate change. But there is — in a very broad sense — there’s a certain parallel there. And the people in Westeros are fighting their individual battles over power and status and wealth. And those are so distracting them that they’re ignoring the threat of “winter is coming,” which has the potential to destroy all of them and to destroy their world. And there is a great parallel there to, I think, what I see this planet doing here, where we’re fighting our own battles. We’re fighting over issues, important issues, mind you — foreign policy, domestic policy, civil rights, social responsibility, social justice. All of these things are important. But while we’re tearing ourselves apart over this and expending so much energy, there exists this threat of climate change, which, to my mind, is conclusively proved by most of the data and 99.9 percent of the scientific community. And it really has the potential to destroy our world. And we’re ignoring that while we worry about the next election and issues that people are concerned about, like jobs. Jobs are a very important issue, of course. All of these things are important issues. But none of them are important if, like, we’re dead and our cities are under the ocean. So really, climate change should be the number one priority for any politician who is capable of looking past the next election. But unfortunately, there are only a handful of those. We spend 10 times as much energy and thought and debate in the media discussing whether or not N.F.L. players should stand for the national anthem than this threat that’s going to destroy our world.
While Earth's climate continues to get hotter, the metaphor of the White Walkers becomes more relevant. By the time we agree that climate change has become an issue too great to ignore, it will probably be too late to solve. The White Walkers provide a lesson of how what we argue over day-to-day will ultimately be meaningless if we do not take action to mitigate climate change right now. It also serves as inspiration that we do not have to be condemned to the same fate.
This ending may seem bleak, but that's right in line with A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. Ultimately, the story serves as a warning. Many issues seem incredibly important to us in the moment (and they are), but sometimes there are bigger issues that we have to collectively focus on. The sooner we put forth the best and brightest to tackle climate change (rather than serving more ads), and everyone else makes reductions in their personal consumption patterns, the better prepared we will be. With ideal preparation (and perhaps a scientific miracle discovering technology that does not currently exist), many will comment that we did too much, naive of how bad things could have been. This new ending would serve to safely warn them of the alternative. Game of Thrones deserved a better ending, and so do we. Fortunately, there is still time to change ours.