The 2019 Emmy Award nominations are out — and “Game of Thrones” is leading the pack with a whopping 32 nods. Since the final season was controversial, some of the choices within these categories are already igniting fires online.
“Emmy folks nominate the series finale of Game of Thrones, possibly the worst episode in the whole series, for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series,” one fan said on Twitter.
Another said, “LMFAOOOO THE GAME OF THRONES SERIES FINALE GOT AN EMMY NOMINATION FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING. The #Emmys are a F–ING JOKE”
And it’s true. It’s debatable whether or not the series finale, “The Iron Throne,” was the worst episode of the entire series — Season 5’s “Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken” is also a low point.
But the final episode certainly wasn’t the best that Season 8 had to offer. That’s its second episode, “A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms.” It’s the season’s only episode to focus on character development, as each character grapples with past misdeeds (Jaime), reunites old friends who’ve been through hell together (Sansa and Theon, Arya and Gendry), and lets one fan-favorite character get an unexpected moment of grace (Brienne).
It grapples with who these people are, how far they’ve come, and how they’ve changed — you know, like a good TV show should. It’s one of the only episodes in Season 8 to show awareness of what this story has been in the past, as opposed to isolated moments where characters forget their own histories and personalities.
“The Iron Throne,” in contrast, is filled with an excruciatingly long sequence of Tyrion arranging chairs, more long silent shots of Tyrion walking in silence for a staggering amount of screen time, and odd tonal shifts between Jon’s assassination of Daenerys and the sudden ascension of King Bran, the dullest possible choice to rule Westeros. There’s no rhythm to the episode, no logical progression of story. It’s a mess of events crammed into a bloated hour and a half.
Interestingly, it was written and directed by series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, while the more deserving “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” was written by Bryan Cogman. So, the answer for why this particular episode was chosen is that they nominated themselves. And as a cap to a needlessly rushed season — plagued by their hubris of thinking that was the right way to go — that seems about right.