How Game of Thrones’ Penultimate Episode Could Have Been Fixed

The final season of Game of Thrones has been controversial, to say the least. Some people love it, but a whole lot of people are horribly disappointed in the obvious rush to wrap things up, which can feel like a betrayal of all the love and money fans have given to the series for the past eight seasons. After last week’s penultimate episode, “The Bells”, it seems like most people are scratching their heads and wondering what the hell happened to our beloved series. As an amateur Thrones Maester myself, I’ve put way too much thought into a few ways I would have liked to see the story resolve. Inspired by YouTubers Nando v Movies and Hello Future Me, I did a little experiment with reworking a few moments in the episode to fix some of my biggest disappointments. Assuming the end result has to be the same—that the same characters die in the same locations, but the motivations for their decisions can change—here’s what I would have found more fitting for some of our major characters. Spoilers below…obviously.

Jamie Lannister

Where he starts the episode:
Prisoner of Daenerys Targaryen, likely awaiting execution via “dracarys”.

Where he ends the episode:
Killed by falling debris beneath the Red Keep during the destruction of King’s Landing.

How he gets there in the show:
Jamie’s journey has been one of Thrones’ best with rich character development motivating his decisions, all fueled by an outstanding performance from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. This season featured the best Jamie moment since the third season’s “Kissed by Fire” when he knighted Brienne of Tarth in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and then realized his feelings for her went deeper than just a shared respect in “The Last of the Starks”. We were on the verge of a redemption arc that everyone was rooting for, but this is Thrones, and as Ramsay Bolton once said, “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Jamie’s story was always one that would end in tragedy, that much could be assumed, but the way he completely reverted to his season one characterization was the single most disappointing part of the episode for many fans, myself included. When he parted ways with Brienne because he claimed he still loved Cersei, most of us assumed it was a ruse to make sure she didn’t try to stop him or follow after him as he embarked on a mission to kill Cersei. But nope. He really did do a complete, unmotivated turn and want to go back to the city to be with his sister/lover. I think I shook my head so hard I strained my neck.

How he should get there:
If the story must end with Jamie and Cersei dying together among the dragon skulls in the Red Keep, we can still get there in a way that makes sense for the character. Rather than Tyrion risking almost certain execution to free Jamie so he could help Cersei escape, I propose that Tyrion could release Jamie with a different plan: that he must kill Cersei to end the war. Jamie has killed a king to save the city before and Tyrion knows Dany is coming unglued and will probably do something atrocious, so killing Cersei and scoring the win for Team Dany would spare the lives of all those innocent civilians, just as stabbing the Mad King did. Plus, Cersei tried to have both her brothers killed by Bronn just one episode previous, so it makes sense that her assassination would be within reason for the Lannister Bros.

Jamie could make it to the Red Keep on the mission, knowing he’s probably the only person who could get close to Cersei without being killed by a guard, but see her breaking down as the city burns and lose the heart to follow through on the plan. Then we could go one of two ways: The first is that he makes it to Cersei, they have a tearful moment and he decides try to help her escape, but they’re killed anyway in the rubble. The second, which seems more fitting for both the Lannister twins, is that Jamie decides to try to smuggle his sister out of the city and start a new life across the Narrow Sea, only to discover that she’s downed a bottle of the same poison he used to kill Olenna Tyrell and it’s too late to save her. You could even include a cinematic moment of him hugging her as she drops the vial and it shatters on the floor, alerting him to what she’s done. They have their tearful goodbye, Jamie either kills himself in grief or dies in the destruction holding Cersei, we get the Romeo and Juliet ending and that’s the last we see of the Lannister twins. It’s fair to assume Cersei, one of the strongest and most stubborn people in the series, wouldn’t necessarily be reduced to a sobbing mess in the end, and we’ve seen her nearly kill herself and Tommen during Stannis’s siege on King’s Landing way back in the second season, so her drinking poison fits with her character, just as too-little-too-late heroics fit with Jamie’s seasons-long arc toward being an honorable man. In the end, his honor doesn’t save anyone, his sister dies and the city is destroyed anyway.

Cersei Lannister

Where she starts the episode:
On the balcony of the Red Keep with Qyburn and The Mountain, assuming the combo of the Greyjoy fleet, the Lannister army, the Golden Company and a shitload of scorpions will quickly take out Daenerys’ forces.

Where she ends the episode:
Killed by falling debris beneath the Red Keep with Jamie while trying to escape the city.

How she gets there in the show:
Cersei watches as Daenerys goes full Targaryen, burning the Lannister army, the Golden Company and the civilians of King’s Landing in a massively destructive event that’s basically a Westerosi apocalypse. Not that Cersei hasn’t inflicted her own horrors on the people of the capital before, after all, she blew up high-born and commoner alike when she destroyed the Sept of Baelor. But this time, Cersei knows she’s about to lose, that everything she’s lied, killed and tortured for is about to be taken from her, so she rushes through those stages of grief pretty quickly and ends up sobbing in her brother’s arms and begging fate to spare her unborn child before her and Jamie are unceremoniously crushed by rocks as the Red Keep crumbles around them. The moment between Headey and Coster-Waldau is beautiful, no question, but it’s so sad to see two of television’s best characters killed in such an anticlimactic way after all the exquisite buildup to their inevitably tragic end.

How she should get there:
First of all, let me just say right now that I have always loved Cersei Lannister. She’s one of the best villains in TV history and one of the most three-dimensional characters on Thrones—at least she was before they started stripping away her layers to position her as the Big Bad. We feel simultaneously sympathetic toward her (“Mother’s Mercy”) and terrified of her (“The Winds of Winter”) largely because Lena Headey is the goddamn G.O.A.T. of this show. Cersei was the one who uttered those famous words that the series has lived by since season one: when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. And nobody has outplayed Cersei thus far.

My main issue comes from how little we got to see of her in the penultimate episode. Headey did an amazing job of giving us a huge range of emotions with little to no dialogue because she’s just that good, but wouldn’t it have been better to see more of how Cersei was reacting and feeling about everything instead of, say, a seven-minute Michael Bay sequence of Arya dodging explosions and falling buildings? Instead, I propose that when Qyburn comes to tell Cersei that all her forces have been destroyed, she asks him for a bottle of poison, having no plans to face the humiliation of admitting defeat and surrendering to the dragon queen. She also gives the order to execute the nuclear option by blowing up all the wildfire in the city. If she’s going to lose, she’s taking everyone down with her. She then sends Qyburn and The Mountain away, thus negating the need to have her awkwardly sashaying away from Cleganebowl later, and drinks the poison. Just a few moments later, Jamie arrives to kill her/try to reason with her, but it’s too late. Our lioness dies in Jamie’s arms as wildfire explosions go off in the city around them. This way, Cersei stays stubborn to the very end and leaves a trail of destruction in her wake by killing a bunch of innocent people herself, something she never had any qualms about before. She also gets a tearful goodbye with Jamie—which might be a little bit of fan service, but nobody could object to seeing Headey and Coster-Waldau share one last scene together.

Arya Stark

Where she starts the episode:
Riding to King’s Landing on a mission to kill Cersei.

Where she ends the episode:
Riding out of the rubble of King’s Landing on the back of a white horse.

How she gets there in the show:
After killing the Night King, Arya was mostly missing from the show, showing up here or there to quietly nod or shoot down Gendry’s enthusiastic marriage proposal. The last time we see her before “The Bells”, she’s joined The Hound on a road trip to King’s Landing where she hopes to close those green eyes Melissandre was talking about. Cersei was always at the top of Arya’s list, so it makes sense that the world’s best assassin would plan to take her out, resolving a personal vendetta and simultaneously ending the last big war in the way she ended this season’s previous big battle. It also makes sense that she would be accompanied by The Hound. Not only are they very close (in the way that characters can be emotionally close in the brutal world of Westeros) but they’re both fueled by vengeance. Once they arrive, they make it past all checkpoints and infiltrate the city to settle their final scores. As it stands in the episode, Sandor gives her a quick “you don’t want no part of this shit” speech before she can complete her mission, and she suddenly decides that being a world-class killer isn’t actually the path she wants to be on. She flees the Red Keep, only to be trapped in a way-too-long action sequence with a bunch of fake-out deaths before trying to save a peasant woman and child, failing, and then getting the hell out of there on a mysterious white horse that shows up out of nowhere.

How she should get there:
A lot of people had a problem with Arya killing the Night King instead of someone more tied to the Azor Ahai prophecy being the one to do it. I didn’t mind it, though, because Arya is a far cry from the archetypal Mary Sue so many salty fanboys like to whine about. She’s been perfecting her skills in the murder arts for years and she’s basically a super assassin at this point, so yes, it does make sense that she would be able to kill the leader of the ice zombies. And because of all her training, it would also make sense that she’d be emotionally distant and not want to hang around Winterfell—or Storm’s End, for that matter—once the White Walker threat was solved, so it’s totally understandable that she’d head to King’s Landing to cross one last big name off her list. The Hound is the person she’s closest to, and he’s also headed to the city, so the two of them traveling there together also completely makes sense.

Once they get there and Dany starts her Fire and Blood rampage, though, I would change a couple things. Instead of having Arya and The Hound say their goodbyes on their way to their separate destinies, I’d have both of them head to Cersei, knowing both their targets are likely in the same room, since The Mountain is Cersei’s number one bodyguard. On the way, they run into a fleeing Qyburn and The Mountain—remember, in this reimagining, Cersei has her own story and never ends up awkwardly standing there on that staircase. Arya helps The Hound kill the remaining guards who attack them and maybe she even kills Qyburn—it was Robb’s wife Talisa Stark who saved his life in the first place—but when The Mountain starts to slowly lumber toward them, The Hound gives her the speech and tells her she’s got to go. She reluctantly agrees, knowing both of them will surely die trying to defeat a zombie Gregor Clegane, so she says her goodbye to him and flees just as Cleganebowl starts to kick off behind her. When she makes it out of the city, it’s total chaos (Littlefinger would be impressed) but we could cut all the action by half and have her find the horse and flee without relying so heavily on pyrotechnics instead of plot.

The Hound (Sandor Clegane)

Where he starts the episode:
Riding to King’s Landing on a mission to kill his brother, The Mountain.

Where he ends the episode:
Killing his brother and himself by plummeting from the crumbling staircase of the Red Keep into the flames.

How he gets there in the show:
This one has been a long time coming for Sandor Clegane, so he’s fully accepts that this will be his final fight and that it’s very likely he’ll lose. He’s been very fond of Arya Stark and seems genuinely glad to have her around as they make their way to King’s Landing, but in the end, he cares for her too much to see her march into certain doom, so he sends her away and goes off to face his destiny alone. Once he sees his brother, it’s on and the two Cleganes have a battle royale on a crumbling staircase. The Hound can’t win because The Mountain can’t die thanks to Westeros’ own Dr. Frankenstein, Qyburn, so our boy Sandor sacrifices himself to kill his brother, facing his greatest fear and shoving his brother through a wall and into a giant fireball below.

How he should get there:
This one actually works pretty well, though a few elements of the fight referenced Star Wars a little too closely. My only minor beef with this was that it seemed like The Hound’s words to Arya worked way too quickly. “You don’t want to be like me.” “Okay, guess I’ll go home.” It should have been harder for him to convince her that this wasn’t the road she wanted to go down, since he’s remarked how stubborn she is before. It would have been more impactful if seeing The Mountain made him afraid that Arya would be killed by his brutal brother, and he put himself between the giant zombie and his little Stark friend. With the slow-speed approach from The Mountain that we got in the show, there’s more than enough time for Sandor to tell Arya to get the hell out of there so he could make the sacrifice play a la Beric Dondarrion. He’s not a tearful goodbye kind of dude, so his dialogue could largely stay the same, but little tweaks to when and where it’s said could increase the impact and make Arya’s decision feel less rushed.

Daenerys Targaryen

Where she starts the episode:
Heartbroken after Jorah and Missandei’s deaths, she’s slipped into major paranoia, knowing that her allies are conspiring against her to try to put Jon Snow on the Iron Throne now that they know the secret of his parentage. She’s depressed, she’s enraged, she’s isolated and as we know, “a Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing.”

Where she ends the episode:
Dany wins the city in a matter of minutes, but it’s not enough. She hasn’t come to win a political victory, she’s come to take what is hers with fire and blood as she promised so many times before, so she decides to burn everything down in the biggest massacre Westeros has ever seen.

How she gets there in the show:
Despite criticism of Dany’s abrupt turn, the show has been hinting at Mad Queen Danerys for quite a while now, so it’s not a huge leap to think she’d go batshit and do all sorts of damage in the final episodes of the series. Let’s take a look at what has happened for the Mother of Dragons since she landed at Dragonstone:

• She lost the Greyjoys and Dorne in Euron’s surprise attack
• Tyrion’s crappy plan to take Casterly Rock caused her to lose the Tyrells
• Jon’s crappy plan to capture a White Walker caused her to lose Viserion
• Tyrion told her to negotiate with Cersei and got totally played by his sister
• She agreed to put her goal on hold and help Jon fight the White Walkers at Winterfell first
• The people of The North greeted her with scorn and treated Grey Worm and Missandei like shit
• She found out Jon was her nephew and he had a better claim to the throne than her
• Her closest friend, protector and advisor, Jorah Mormont died
• Jon was praised as the savior of the North even though everybody in Winterfell would have died immediately without Dany’s army and dragons
• Sansa spread the word about Jon’s secret to Tyrion and Varys
• Varys planned to put Jon on the throne instead of Dany and was trying to get a little kid to poison her
• Euron killed Rhaegal (so many problems with this, but that’s for another rant)
• Another round of negotiations went horribly and Cersei executed Missandei
• Jon rejected her entirely
• Jamie appeared to be betraying her to go help Cersei
• Tyrion pushed for her to spare Cersei even though Cersei has been a total monster this season

With all that, it’s not surprising that she wasn’t calm and collected at the end. It has less to do with “Targaryen madness” and more to do with a person trying to be a hero, being pushed to a breaking point, and becoming a villain.

How she should get there:
Dany has certainly had a weird few years in the series. Lately, we’ve seen her Targaryen brutality peek its head out more (executing the Tarleys in last season’s “Eastwatch”) but we’ve also seen tremendous capacity for heroics and compassion (rescuing Jon and the magnificent seven from the Night King in “Beyond the Wall”). Still, her going full Mad Queen and opting to kill all the citizens of King’s Landing seemed like a very abrupt turn—and it leaves Cersei somehow blameless in the destruction of the capital.

I propose that Dany can still snap, but that a little of the blood is on Cersei’s hands, too. Rather than have Dany go right for soldiers and civilians after hearing the bells, it would make more sense to have her go directly to the Red Keep to make good on her vow to rip Cersei out root and stem. As she’s blowing up the castle, she ignites wildfire Cersei has hidden as a burn-them-all option in the event of her defeat, and that wildfire is what destroys the city. That destruction could be the last straw for Dany. Seeing the city she hoped to rule destroyed by a queen who would rather wipe everything out than let someone else rule could make her lose her last shred of sanity and start going after the surviving Lannister soldiers, who have now started to flee with the commoners. That starts a free for all and it’s utter chaos, leading Team Dany to realize that they could be trading one tyrant for another. This will ultimately lead to Jon deciding he has to kill Dany and walk away from the throne himself to truly break the wheel.

So there you have it, a few ways “The Bells” would have felt stronger for me. I feel that it’s important to note that, while I may have been disappointed with the last couple episodes, Game of Thrones will always be one of my all-time favorite shows, and a big part of that is the writing. While David Benioff and D.B. Weiss might slip with storytelling from time to time, particularly after running out of great material from George R. R. Martin’s books, the enormous outpouring of hate they’re getting these days is isn’t entirely fair. Thrones has always had a much higher percentage of great scenes than lame ones, so even though the ending is turning out to be less than we’d hoped for, we’d be hard pressed to find a single TV show that gave us this many powerful, moving, culturally impactful moments in so few episodes.

As we prepare to close out the song of ice and fire and welcome in a new area of spinoffs, l hope we all remember Game of Thrones for the strong characters, phenomenal performances, gorgeous music, stunning cinematography, top-shelf production design and epic cultural impact, even if they don’t quite stick the landing with storytelling as the final credits roll.