Season 8 Episode 5 “The Bells” review – A coinflip

 

Sometimes, everything comes down to a choice. Sometimes, everything comes down to the flip of a coin. As the popular saying goes, each time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin, and the world holds its breath. As Varys says, he’s quite unsure on what side Dany’s will land. From there on out, one metaphysical question, old as human deliberation itself, hovers over everything: Do we possess free will?

You might be surprised that I single out this question in an episode that could teach Roland Emmerich a lesson or two for his next disaster movie. But think about it. Varys betrays Dany, because he fears she might become paranoid and tyrannical. Betrayed, Dany becomes paranoid and tyrannical. Or was she the whole time, and all she needed was a spark, a spark that could be supplied by anyone, anytime, during a presumably long reign? We will never know, but I wouldn’t expect “Game of Thrones” to solve a question philosophers have grappled with at least since the days of Aristotle.

It’s hard not to feel with Dany. After having lost her dragon, her confidante and adopted child and very possibly her lover all in the space of 30 minutes last episode, she’s not in a good place. So when Tyrion comes to her, making true on his promise to Varys to stick with his decision (another coin flip there), she’s not surprised. “I’ve been betrayed”, she deadpans. Tyrion can’t even supply the news before she knows who did the deed. Jon Snow. Oh, not directly, of course. To use Tyrion’s words, it was all “good intentions”, amirite?

Dany is alone, and she knows it. Jon is moving away from her emotionally, not being able to kiss her anymore. All the “you’re my queen” can’t fill that comely hole. Missandei is dead. Grey Worm refuses to make an emotional connection, likely blaming Dany for bringing them here in the first place, tossing the only thing left from the love of his life into the fire. It’s a dark portent of things to come.

Varys made his own coin flip, and he knows what it brings. “With great danger comes great reward”, he tells Martha, the little bird he hid in the Winterfell crypts with, but what exactly would the reward be? He’ll never know. Jon isn’t interested in his argument, but he doesn’t do his duty to Dany either – that falls to Tyrion, with whom he shares one last, intimate, honest moment. In the end, when he is burned by Drogon coming out from the shadows like a terror in the night in the same exact spot that found Stannis burning people way back in season two, he did choose – and, as the knight guarding the Holy Grail from “The Last Crusade” would’ve said, “he chose…poorly”. Or did he? Once again, it’s hard to tell. History doesn’t allow to repeat coin flips, after all.

And so, with nothing left but a cold heart, Dany makes final preparations for attack. It’s the last time we meet her as a character. When she reframes “mercy” as the “mercy that future generations will have permanent peace”, you know the coin has landed, finally. Or did she place it? Do we even want to absolve her of all responsibility like that? Tyrion surely doesn’t, and he pleads with her. One more chance. If the bells ring, the city will have surrendered, and there’s no need for carnage. Please. Please. Please. Dany knows begging. She hasn’t been heard, and this is the result. And didn’t they just capture Jaime, proving Tyrion wrong once more? But she snaps back, one last time. The Breaker of Chains nods, curtly.

And with that, Tyrion goes off, choosing. So many vows. They make you swear and swear. Defend the queen, obey the queen, love your brother, protect the innocent, defend the weak. But what if your queen despises your brother? What if the queen massacres the innocent? It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or another. It’s a familiar place. And so Tyrion puts his life on the line for the people he once proclaimed he’d be happy to see die screaming. But he’s seen people do that since then, and his world view has shifted. Another coin, maybe. Another choice.

Jon, in the meantime, made his choices. His coin was flipped in season 1, when honor brought him back to the Wall, and has since not been called into question. He’s passively moving along in this, understanding little. The Night King is defeated. It should be over. Yet it isn’t. Surely, soon it will be, and everything will revert to normal.

And then, we stand before King’s Landing. The final battle is upon us. Scorpions are trained towards the sky. Cersei is standing in the Red Keep, watching the city from the very balcony she stood when the Great Sept of Baelor burned to the ground. It was the moment of her greatest triumph, when she became the queen. Surely, history will repeat itself. She tossed the coin when she ordered Missandei executed. Now, all she can do is wait where it lands.

However, Cersei didn’t read my last review. And so she understands too late that she’s not the big, final boss; she’s only a metaphor for the inner demons of our main characters, only as strong or weak as they are. Last episode, our heroes were in doubt, divided and weak. Now they’re unified in purpose, and for Dany, all doubt is erased. She’s become death, destroyer if not of worlds, at least cities, and a few king-sized crossbow bolts won’t stop her. Within 5 minutes of screen time, the Iron Fleet, all of King’s Landing’s defenses and the red shirts of the Golden Company are reduced to ash, and hardly a civilian dead.

Cersei Lannister, engaged in fantasies like Hitler in his bunker, has to reckon with the hard reality of her defenses destroyed, her gates smashed, her soldiers surrendering. Swords are dropping to the floor, and after an agonizingly long moment, the bells start to toll, signaling surrender. Tyrion allows himself to think he chose wisely, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Jon also looks around. We won? That was quick. Jaime still tries to get into the Red Keep, as do Arya and Sandor.

Of course, the story isn’t over. In the last shot we get of Daenerys, Breaker of Chains, we can see all the emotion, all the rage, all the grief, all the loneliness, as she sits upon her dragon, watching the city get off so easily after causing so much grief, getting ready to cheer Jon, getting off so easily, so very, very easily.

And something snaps. These people don’t love her. Heck, her own people might not even love her anymore. Jon doesn’t love her. No one loves her. If she’s ever going to take the throne – and what would it be worth if she didn’t now, after all these sacrifices? – she will need to hold it by fear, and fear alone. They left her no other choice. And you can’t rule by fear if you only flew over the city walls once or twice. Let me be the queen of ashes. Let me the queen of cooked bones and charred meat. You either die and become the hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Another coin. Another decision. Has everything led to this point? Should she have stayed in Meereen, or Vaes Dothrak, or Winterfell, or Pentos? Could she have? Wasn’t it her destiny to rule Westeros, by any means necessary? Her right, and best for the continent? Stannis is turning in his grave, asking those same questions, getting the same silence of the cemetery as an answer.

And with that, Dracarys. Undiscriminatingly, Dany unleashes fire on the city, burning soldiers, men, women, children and animals with absolute abandon. The madness is contagious. Led by the once innocent Grey Worm, whose rage has been boiling behind his eyes and barely kept in check by his queen’s restraint, the Unsullied and Dothraki pillage through the city and murder everyone in their path, starting off with a few score of soldiers who just surrendered. Jon, still passive, half partakes out of self-defense, half tries to stop it, powerless to do anything and finally withdrawing his army out of the path of the monstrosity that has been unleashed.

As Cersei watches the chaos unfold, everything speeds up to a close.

Jaime meets with Euron on the beach. The pirate is still lost in visions of grandeur. Jaime couldn’t give less of a fuck if he kills the man or not, but Euron wants to go down as the king who fucked the queen and killed Jaime Lannister. While he does indeed mortally wound Jaime, no one will ever know. Nor will anyone remember him after this. An oversized ego ends on a sad beach, doused in blood and seawater.

He then manages to find Cersei, in the exact same spot where he left her: the room on which’s floor the map of Westeros is painted. They parted over the question of whether or not to rescue the continent, and it’s only fitting that they come together as their old world is crashing down. In the cellars, with no route of escape, Cersei, finally, belatedly, has the realization that she doesn’t want to die, that she wants her child to live, that she wants to live. But she made a choice, and now, she needs to live with the consequences of that choice. Jaime gives her comfort in their final moments: “Look at me. There’s only us. Nothing else matters.” Those words were menacing, once. Now, they arise only pity. And so end the twins, in the bowls of the dying Red Keep.

Meanwhile, Sandor forces a choice on Arya. “Do you want to become like me?” he asks, giving her a choice with the consequences clear. Arya has been flirting with death for a long while now. This is what death looks like, burning out with revenge, not a Night King you can stab with a blade. You can’t stab the demons inside you, that’s what makes them so dangerous, so poignant. That’s why cancelling the apocalypse was the easy part. And Arya, wide-eyed, realizes this for the first time, and chooses accordingly.

While Sandor walks away to his doom, giving up on life and watching Qyburn getting destroyed, fittingly, by his own creature, before the raging fires and crumbling of the old order consume both him and his brother, Arya tumbles through the nightmare on the streets, trying to survive, getting knocked out and experiencing the fiery hell Drogon unleashed first hand. In frenzied heartbeats and a state of continuous shock, she goes from killer to carer, trying to save people instead of just killing them – but she’s just one person, and she ultimately fails.

In the end, she sees the burned horse statue the little girl she was trying to rescue clutches in death, caught in her mother’s embrace, and moments later, the literal white horse. She captures it, symbolically reclaiming life after the carnage she just witnessed, riding out of the city.

And thus ends the battle of King’s Landing. Dany is unrivalled master of Westeros, for a few instants. But what foundation can fear be? How can such carnage ever be worth the throne she just blew up? The answer is of course that it can’t. But will Dany realize this as well? And if so, what choice will she make?