We're not going to do that - we're going to leave the world better than we found it." Apparently not. They left the world worse than they found it. Back in Season 6's " Battle of the Bastards," after Tyrion told her exactly why Jaime killed the "Mad King" (for threatening to do exactly what Daenerys ended up doing in this episode, funnily enough), Daenerys made a rousing declaration: "Our fathers were evil men, all of us here.
This doesn't feel like the Daenerys we've watched suffer and evolve and struggle over the past eight years - someone who has lived in fear of becoming the kind of ruler her father was who has been treated like a pawn in a larger game and had her agency stripped away by people in positions of power for most of her life.
It feels like someone just randomly fell over and knocked into the big red " Mad Queen" button, turning Dany into an irrational psychopath in the last half of the penultimate episode just because the plot necessitated it for the final showdown.Ĭheck out our predictions for the Game of Thrones series finale below: And although there's something poetic about that trajectory on paper, in execution, it feels like a betrayal - not because it's impossible to imagine that Daenerys would lose her mind or any sense of perspective after suffering the immense loss and betrayal she's endured this season ( the show has foreshadowed the possibility that she might follow in her father's footsteps since the beginning, so it's certainly not out of character for her), but because the writers have rushed that progression so clumsily over the past four episodes.
Knowing that is going to be a lasting flavor in someone’s mouth of what Daenerys is…" We still don't know how the show will choose to end her story in next week's finale, but it seems unlikely that there's any way of redeeming her now she has become exactly the kind of monster she saw Cersei as. There was a point around midway through "The Bells" - when Daenerys heard the innocent people of King's Landing crying out in surrender and inexplicably chose to burn them all anyway - when I thought to myself, "do I hate Game of Thrones now?" (The short answer is no, but we'll get to that.) But the decision seemed so unearned, so out of left-field, that I completely understand why Emilia Clarke said that Daenerys' final scenes of the series "f-ed me up.