Game Of Thrones Season 8 Breakdown: What The Ending REALLY Means

4. Sam The Historian (And The Council Of Outsiders)

There was some concern a good few episodes back that the show was going to end with Sam putting his quill down and closing a book to reveal the title "A Song Of Ice And Fire" like Bilbo Baggins writing The Hobbit. They just about captured the right balance by alluding to that but also not completely delivering on it. Instead, Sam only contributed the title while the Arch Maester completed it and we finally got the expected but somewhat cheesy confirmation of the relevance of the title of the book series.

Each of the Small Council gets a fitting end too, which is a strange, wonderful revelation for this show. Ser Bronn becoming Master Of The Coin is hysterical on top of Ser Davos being the Master of Ships, Tyrion the Hand, Brienne Lord Commander and Sam the Grand Maester. Had you said that all of them would survive and all would flourish in powerful positions at the start of this episode, you would have been laughed off the Internet.

But it all fits: all of them are somehow "broken" or ostracised in traditional terms. It is a small council of outsiders and underdogs and that's exactly as you'd think George RR Martin would have wanted it.

The idea of Tyrion not being mentioned in A Song Of Ice And Fire is a nice little gag too considering how much of a key character he is in Martin's text.