Where did winter go?

It seems apt enough to see the back of winter in July, up here in the Northern hemisphere. Especially in Spain, where the temperatures are now regularly in the thirties (no, no, in real money, none of that Fahrenheit stuff). So it was perhaps a good place to watch the end of Game of Thrones, and with it the end of that glorious, sonorous threat that became synonymous with the series, “winter is coming”.

And I should warn anyone who hasn’t seen season 8 that there are spoilers ahead.

Ironically, it was that early catchphrase, “winter is coming” that kept coming back to my mind as I watched the last few episodes. Not because winter was coming, but because I kept wondering “where’s winter gone?” There was snow in the North, but hardly the deep drifts I was expecting. Little more than a powdering on the ground. Elsewhere, any skiing would have been the water kind rather than downhill.

The Queen on her dragon: perhaps not as nice as we thought

This happens in long series. They lose the plot, metaphorically and literally. The first season got some dread going through its vision of the far North with its strange, fierce inhabitants, the Wildings. And there were worse: there were reports, disbelieved by many, that White Walkers were abroad, though they’d not been seen for centuries. It seemed that the coming winter would bring with it not just terrible, freezing weather but fearsome invaders, storming across the Wall built to keep them out and invading the southern lands beyond.

That was all the worse because the implication was that seasons were far longer in that world than in our own. Rather like Ursula le Guinn’s Planet of Exile, where the planet took sixty Earth years to go around its sun, the implication seemed to be that in Game of Thrones land, winter would last years or even perhaps decades. Truly something to fear.

The problem is that the unknown is far more fearful than the familiar. White Walkers were far more chilling while they just shadowy figures we knew little about. But Game of Thrones is TV and eventually its makers felt we had to see what these hideous figures poised to cross the wall looked like. And what were they? Well, walking dead. One of the oldest, tiredest tropes in fantasy writing.

What’s worse, they turned out to be pathetically easy to defeat. All it needed was to take out the chief and his tens of thousands of followers simply broke apart and vanished. All that dread built up from season 1 simply evaporated in anti-climax.

Indeed, the danger from the far north turned not even to be the principal peril facing the main characters towards the end. That’s why the battle against the forces of winter wasn’t the climax of the series, but one battle on the way to a far more devastating one against an enemy in the deep south.

And here’s where the series broke a key rule in this kind of fantasy writing. That’s the rule that you have to be consistent in the way you present characters and their powers. Sure, you’re inventing creatures, but once invented they have to stay the way you invented them.

We’d been told repeatedly that dragons were an irresistible force that would burn up all foes. And yet, after defeating the army of the dead, their Queen flying way high above the boats taking part of her forces south, somehow fails to spot the fleet waiting to ambush them. That’s though the weather is clear and pleasant (“winter has been delayed”). The enemy has massive deck-mounted crossbows known as ‘scorpions’ to shoot down dragons with super-sized arrows, and successfully downs one of them.

What do the Queen and the other dragon do? Well, they look dejected. Especially when most of her boats are also destroyed and one of her closest friends is taken hostage (and, yes, this being Game of Thrones, the chances of survival of someone taken hostage by an enemy are negligible to non-existent). I understand their depression. I find their failure to take any action harder to grasp. Hardly consistent with my view of what a dragon represents in the Game of Thrones universe.

It made me wonder whether dragons were perhaps no good over seawater.

Well, no. Because it wouldn’t be long before the same dragon successfully destroyed the same fleet at anchor, even though by then there were far more of the scorpions ready to defend against dragon attack, both on ship and on land. Indeed, the dragon systematically burns every one of the huge devices to ashes, before going on to burn the entire city.

It could do nothing about the fleet when it had fewer of the weapons but proved invincible when there were far more?

That same lack of consistency governed the character of Arya Stark, who had turned over several seasons from a proud, strong-willed, gutsy girl into a young woman of ruthless determination, the ability to look like anyone she chose, and all the skills of a supremely effective assassin. By season 8, she’s just a brave and resilient warrior, but all those extraordinary abilities have apparently vanished. Arya’s still an interesting character but hardly the redoubtable one she’d become earlier.

To give the series credit, it does subvert the simple good and evil dichotomy which it seemed to be building towards. Indeed, the dragon Queen, leader of the forces of good, ends up doing far more evil than the evil Queen, in the battle to overthrow her. In the end, she too has to die, and at the hands of her lover. That sets up an ending which has the realism of being grounded on compromise. No one gets quite what they wanted, and the sense is not of the launch, Tolkien-like, of a new golden age, but the start of a time to adjust to terrible loss and to set out to rebuild what was grievously damaged.

Still. It feels a little anodyne, a little twee. For once, prisoners are not murdered but are released unharmed, if not to their rightful place. And it all happens under blue skies in pleasant weather. Winter’s gone.

So I ask myself, where did it go?

Oh well. It was a long and entertaining ride while it lasted. Good on surprise, to the point of shock. Good on retaining interest. But a little weak on plot.

Four out of five for fun. On the other hand, three out of five would be generous when it comes to structure. And two out of five for development. 

But hey, that’s a small price to pay for fun.