When “Game of Thrones” began its final season, fans were skeptical. How would the creators of the series find a way to wrap up all of those storylines in a matter of six episodes? Well, the answer, for many at least, was that they couldn’t. The final season of ‘Thrones’ thoroughly disappointed many people by the time the finale aired. This led to a lot of ridiculous fan reactions on social media, with an infamous petition started trying to get HBO to redo the entire final season. But according to ‘Thrones’ star Peter Dinklage, the final season is exactly when the show should have ended, and he sees no storytelling reason for fans to be upset.
Speaking in an interview with the New York Times, while promoting his new awards-contending feature, “Cyrano,” Peter Dinklage talked about the controversy surrounding the final season of “Game of Thrones.” And he has some blunt thoughts about why fans reacted in such a poor manner.
“They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together,” Dinklage said. “By the way, it’s fiction. There’s dragons in it. Move on. [Laughs.] No, but the show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it. Yeah, it was called ‘Game of Thrones,’ but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, ‘Who’s going to be on the throne?’ I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that.”
He added, “One of my favorite moments was when the dragon burned the throne because it sort of just killed that whole conversation, which is really irreverent and kind of brilliant on behalf of the show’s creators: ‘Shut up, it’s not about that. They constantly did that, where you thought one thing and they delivered another. Everybody had their own stories going on while watching that show, but nobody’s was as good as what the show delivered, I think.”
Fans aren’t the only people seemingly upset with the way ‘Thrones’ ended. The author of the source material, George R.R. Martin, has spoken out about his desire to have the series run for a couple of more seasons to help flesh out the final act of the story a bit more. Of course, HBO would have wanted more too, but it appears series creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, were pushing to end the show a little sooner than the network wanted.
Obviously, the fan reaction didn’t change anything. The show ends how the show ends. But perhaps HBO will handle things different with the various ‘Thrones’ spinoffs, including next year’s “House of the Dragon.”