How Game of Thrones did Daenerys wrong
The problem isn’t that Daenerys went mad. It’s how the show got there.
The fifth episode of Game of Thrones eighth and final season, “The Bells,” showed us the true horror of a dragon unleashed on a city. Daenerys Targaryen, riding her last remaining dragon, systematically laid waste to King’s Landing — seemingly going block by block to ensure that no one and nothing remained of the city she wanted to conquer. It was an arresting and disturbing sequence, an excellent dramatization of Game of Thrones’ fundamental theme that war is hell.
At the same time, though, it made absolutely no narrative sense.
There was no reason for Daenerys to burn the city so systematically, to so deliberately target civilians who posed no threat to her. She’s been callous and even cruel before, but never murderous for the sake of being murderous. It felt as if Daenerys had become a monster simply because the show needed her to become a monster, not because it was paying off a thoughtfully developed character turn.
I get that the show has been building toward Daenerys becoming the Mad Queen for seasons now — really, I do. In theory, her turn toward villainy really could have worked. But in practice, its execution was sloppy and rushed, a microcosm of what’s felt wrong with much of this final season.
The many, many problems with Daenerys’s heel turn
In the past, Daenerys’s cruelties have had a sort of logic to them.
She has either killed helpless people who refused to submit to her rule, like Samwell Tarly’s father and brother, or who she felt had committed crimes deserving of punishment, like the slave masters of Yunkai and Meereen. Her confidence in her righteousness and a deep belief that evil needs to punished led her to exceed the bounds of morality, convinced that her noble ends justified her evil means.
This kind of excess made sense for her. As my colleague Alex Abad-Santos notes, Daenerys has always seen herself as being on a moral mission — be it abolishing slavery, restoring her rightful position as queen, or “breaking the wheel” of competition over the Iron Throne that has hurt so many people. In the real world, this deep sense of moral rightness can allow people to justify committing atrocities to themselves.
Comparisons between Daenerys and someone like George W. Bush, who authorized torture and launched a war on flimsy pretexts in the name of fighting evil, are pretty natural. Bush felt like the war on terrorism justified extreme measures; Dany seems to think the same about her crusade against slavery and the “tyrant” Cersei.
But it’s one thing for Daenerys to act like Bush, and another for her to act like Hitler.
At no point has she demonstrated a kind of genocidal insanity, a need to kill civilians indiscriminately. Yet that’s exactly what happens in “The Bells.” Her decision to burn King’s Landing in its entirety wasn’t a misbegotten kind of retribution for Cersei’s killing of Rhaegal and execution of Missandei. If it were about revenge, as it had been in the past, she would have flown straight to the Red Keep and burned it to the ground rather than destroying the entire city first.
Daenerys’s rampage was something new for her: the intentional mass murder of civilians and destruction of an entire city, the Westerosi equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on a civilian population after the war was already won.
We see this from the macro view, the view from the Red Keep that follows Daenerys as she burns each city block, one by one. We see this from the micro view, when Daenerys nearly kills Arya by unleashing dragonfire on a street filled largely with civilians. Game of Thrones leaves no doubt that this is murder of the most horrible kind.
Yet we never see it from Daenerys’s point of view, or get any sense of just what causes her to snap so decisively in the moment. Once Daenerys decides to ignore the message of the ringing bells and begin her massacre, Game of Thrones barely (if it all) trains its cameras on her face, or hints at her motivation.
In the “Inside the Episode” segment that aired after “The Bells,” Game of Thrones’ creators explained that obscuring Daenerys’s motivation was a deliberate choice, an attempt to depict what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a massacre rather than to depict the killer’s perspective. I understand the thinking, but the result is that it’s quite difficult to grasp just why this character who only killed deliberately in the past has decided to kill indiscriminately now.
Game of Thrones ham-handedly tried to justify this shift in the “Previously on...” segment that preceded “The Bells,” by playing old audio of people discussing the risk of Targaryens going mad over the footage of Daenerys’s incensed reaction to Missandei’s murder. It reeked of trying too hard, of using a gimmick to explain a plot development that the show didn’t really earn. It’s as if the show’s creators knew that this felt out of left field, and kicked off the episode by assuaging their own insecurities about their writing.
Even if Daenerys was destined to become Game of Thrones’ villain, it didn’t have to be like this
The problem with “The Bells” is not that Daenerys became a villain, per se. I agree with my colleague Andrew Prokop that it makes perfect sense, in the long view, for Dany to break bad. The problem was in the execution, as it’s easy to imagine how this turn could have made a lot more sense.
In the previous episode, “The Last of the Starks,” Game of Thrones made clear that Cersei’s ultimate plan was to use the population of King’s Landing as human shields. She intended to crowd civilians around the Red Keep to discourage Dany from simply burning her stronghold and ending the war in one fell swoop.
It’s easy enough to imagine a climax to “The Bells” where Dany flew to the Red Keep, saw Cersei surrounded by innocents, and decided to burn them all anyway. Game of Thrones could even have had characters that viewers are attached to, like Jaime, die in the fire to amp up the pathos and cruelty of the moment. That would have felt true to her character while simultaneously signaling that her self-righteousness had hardened into something much more dangerous.
That’s just one example of an alternative that I came up with this morning. I’m not a screenwriter; I’m sure there are other ways Game of Thrones could have stuck the landing. But the show seemed more intent on delivering on its “war is hell” theme in the biggest way possible than on crafting a narrative arc that aligned with what we already know about its world and characters.
And I think that’s what bugs me about this season in general. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners, clearly have a few beats they want to hit before Game of Thrones ends — Daenerys turns evil, the pursuit of power is itself dangerous — and are doing their best to dramatize them in as “big” a way as possible. But bigger is not always better: In this case, turning the entirety of King’s Landing into a charnel house undermined the narrative coherence of the series’ penultimate episode, distracting from the main thematic point of the story by making the rest of it seem less believable.
The most powerful and disturbing moments in “The Bells” aren’t the big spectacle ones, the grand shots of an entire city in flame. They are the ground-level depictions of war: a dead child’s hand holding a wooden toy, or Jon having to kill one of his own soldiers to stop him from raping a woman. Daenerys didn’t need to go completely mad for those moments to take place or to resonate with the audience.
In fact, it detracted from them.