WARNING: Massive spoilers ahead for the ending of Game of Thrones.  Stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled on how the series ends.

Like most of you, I am alternately in denial, wistful, or despondent at the end of one of the most entertaining pieces of popular culture of all-time.  No previous television show matched the ambition of Game of Thrones in terms of scope, settings, and budget.  It also managed to bring fantasy—traditionally the purview of dorks, dweebs, and geeks (of which I proudly consider myself one) who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons on Friday nights rather than going to the parties with the cool kids—solidly into the mainstream and out of your parents’ basement.  And because of this Herculean feat, no show captured the public imagination in the same way, with dragons, wights, and carnage filling out screens and fueling our watercooler debates.  Who would land on the Iron Throne?  Were we alright with our leaders burning people alive?  And is incest really all that bad?

The last two seasons, however, have stirred uneasy feelings in many of us, evident by the virulent online backlash to the last couple seasons as well as the more nuanced, complex reservations that the majority of us have with its conclusion.  Don’t get me wrong, I still loved the spectacle and experienced the thrill of watching the show every week with no less enthusiasm.  But it was harder to enjoy after the episode once the cracks in the show became apparent.  As numerous writers and podcasters have opined, Game of Thrones (henceforth GOT) has suffered from an accelerated timeline that has done a disservice to years of careful character development and methodical plotting and storytelling, most evident in the seasons when the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, no longer had George R.R. Martin’s wonderful, painstakingly-detailed books upon which to rely.  The two GOT podcasts that I primarily listen to, “A Cast of Kings” (featuring David Chen and Joanna Robinson) and “Binge Mode” (featuring The Ringer’s Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion) both do a much better job breaking down the shortcomings of the two most recent seasons than I could, so go to iTunes or Soundcloud and listen to the back episodes—they’re well worth it.[1]

The biggest problem I have with the hasty conclusion of the show is not the decisions based on character arcs or plotlines more generally but the poor execution and shoddy explanation of characters’ motivations and decisions.  Why was the Night King compelling or even truly necessary?  Why was the Bran storyline so vague and unsatisfying?  Why did Dany become a mass murderer overnight when her whole story arc was built around being a different kind of ruler?  All of these developments, or lack thereof, left me feeling a bit empty.  Again, I had no problem with the decision to have Dany devolve into the Mad Queen.  When people asked me how I thought GOT would end years back, that was my usual prediction.  But Dany’s breaking bad turn ultimately felt unearned.  Granted, she lost most everyone who was close to her, but how does that make one pivot in a matter of episodes from the savior of the realm in the Battle of Winterfell to the scourge of King’s Landing only two episodes later.  Given another season in which her slow descent into madness was fully realized, we might have understood this development more completely and gone along with the showrunners more willingly.  As it is, we’re left feeling hollow about a turn that should have been deeply tragic for what we long believed was one of the story’s great heroes.  At the very least, it should have pulled at the heartstrings and elicited more sympathy or emotional ambivalence.

Another reason I suspect that most of us were rooting for the show to end strongly is that we all want to be witness to greatness.  As much as we love an underdog story, for the Cubs to win the World Series or for George Mason or Loyola Chicago to make the Final Four, we also love a dynasty.  We love to watch Lebron make eight consecutive finals or for the Warriors to win three in a row.  We want to be able to say we were there.  We were watching.  And in some small way, therefore, we were a part of that greatness.  Hell, I root for Duke and Manchester United, two of the great overdogs of the last 30 years.[2]  I have no problem rooting for the Empire, from time to time, when the situation calls for it.  And you probably don’t either.  We all want to be able to say we witnessed one of the truly great TV shows of all time in real time.  Increasingly though, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

GOT is certainly not the only beloved show to botch the landing.  How I Met Your Mother, one of my personal favorite shows of all time, screwed up the ending so terribly that it continues to affect how I and many others perceive the show.  Even though I still love watching old episodes (“The Pineapple Incident”, “The Bracket”, “The Perfect Week”, and “The Playbook” are all hysterical), I can’t help but have that truly wretched, retconning last episode in the back of my mind.  In the world of literature, both The Hunger Games and the Divergent trilogy started off in promising fashion, only to end in ruinous final books.  Even my beloved Star Wars Trilogy petered out a bit with the milquetoast Return of the Jedi (ugh, Ewoks).  So screwing up the ending has been known to happen, even with great art.  But many of our most cherished pieces of popular culture, the most transcendent ones, were able to stick the landing.  Many of you might cite Breaking Bad, which I for one didn’t care for, but many people adored.  I’m actually thinking primarily of the Harry Potter series.  J.K. Rowling did such as phenomenal, cohesive job wrapping up the series in an imaginative yet consistent way that it has catapulted the series to another level of greatness and fan appreciation.  As if we needed a reminder, it’s damn hard to stick the landing, but when you do, you can achieve greatness.

GOT will probably stay in our collective consciousness forever.  It’s the most seminal TV show of our lifetimes (if not the best—that’s The Wire).  It’s been so important to many of us.  I can remember watching certain seasons with my brothers, another with my buddy Chris over pizza and Operations Research homework during my PhD program, and the last two in Colombia and Ecuador to equally enraptured international audiences.  We were deeply invested in the show and even more so in the characters.  And we wanted the showrunners to stick the landing.  It’s become clear that we didn’t get that, and it pains us to have a brilliant but ultimately flawed masterpiece.

I completely understand the showrunners’ desire to move on to other projects and challenges and to tell different stories.  They are storytellers at the end of the day.[3]  But this show is undoubtedly their life’s seminal work.  It’s their legacy and what they’ll be remembered by.  To give the ending short shrift because they ran out of patience and will is not only unfortunate but tragic.  The show clearly needed another season to fully flesh out the many complicated plot lines and afford the characters organic, fully-formed resolutions.  The fact that Game of Thrones, probably the most important TV show of my lifetime, is ending with a whimper rather than a bang is deeply disappointing, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t cherish the ride and all the countless hours of entertainment and bonding it provided.  I just wish the legacy was more clearly one of greatness and less one of uneasy ambiguity.  But I suppose I can hold in my mind these clashing, warring thoughts: that the show was a truly transcendent one that brought enormous joy to our lives while at the same time being ultimately unable to live up to the truly high standards that it set for itself.  That, more than anything else, is the enduring legacy of Game of Thrones.

[1] Additionally, if you, like me, are a huge Harry Potter nerd, go check out the extensive podcasts that “Binge Mode” did on all seven books in the iconic series.  I re-read the books along with the podcasts, and it gave me a whole new appreciation for a series I had already read twice.

[2] Fear not, I still have my beloved, bumbling Washington Wizards and my ever-inept Washington professional football team for whom I am obliged to root.

[3] David Benioff has actually written a highly-successful historical fiction novel, among other works.