Game Of Thrones Season 8: 8 Criticisms Which Are Fully Unjustified
3. The Bells Sunk The Show To New Lows
Predictable? Possibly. Nonsensical cop out? Absolutely not.
The scorching of King's Landing was not a cheap-ass twist but a pre-ordained demonstration of power-corrupts-absolutely, which worked because Daenerys did the one thing she should not have done. The Bells, however you regard the outcome, was a horror story. It just happened to be told on a epic scale.
And what greater horror than when the villains become the victims and the heroes become the despised? Whether you were able to see it coming or not, the events snapped into the long running narrative of A Song of Ice and Fire so adeptly, that any other outcome would not have worked as well. And extra credit to the narrative structure that, from that point onward, the perspective was firmly shifted to that of the desperate plight of the characters involved, on both sides of the fence.
Game of Thrones showed with greater clarity than ever before that war is not glamorous. War is hell, victory is carnage and principals are more often than not a smokescreen for deplorable human behavior.
Surely this is a powerfully relevant message... Even if, in this case, it involved a dragon.