Final Episode of Game of Thrones was kinda good, in a way

Please put down the tomatoes and hear me out for a sec. :)

Season 8 was, I believe we all agree, even worse than anyone had anticipated (and I had anticipated something pretty bad). But if you can overlook everything that was built up before in the series and then shat on, the last episode was pretty good.

I know that is a lot of sin to overlook. One doesn't build up something this beautiful and then murder it (in the artistic sense) and get off without a lot of anger. And I realize that if it was evaluated purely on its own merits without that series-murder for context, the final episode is still bad. Anyone who hadn't watched any other GoT would just see idiot characters making stupid choices to drive a bad narrative. Characters who contradict themselves and make nonsensical arguments, which no one else seems to notice.

But when you take it all together--the amazing series, the precipitous decline, and the absolute travesty of Season Eight... it final episode comes through as a good mood piece. This episode was the final death rattle of a show we once loved. It was a funeral for vision and beauty. Everything was dark and dreary and awful, and even the sunny day at the end was basically a spiteful sun-god laughing at all men's follies; rather than cheerful.

In form and structure, it followed what we've been conditioned to accept from Season Eight. Failure and despair at something once-great reduced to ash by inhuman callousness. The audience is feeling this emotion one level up, despairing for a show they used to love, reduced to crap by writers who just don't care anymore.

So it didn't matter that characters acted idiotically and contradicted themselves. This episode was about us as modern viewers, being sad about a show destroyed... rather than us as vicarious participants being sad that a family/city was destroyed. The contradictions and nonsense arguments are par for the course at this point. That only drives in the point that all is lost.

But it's not just that I was sad because the series had died. Many series have done the same. Phantom Menace did it to a cultural institution. Why don't I say those things were "good" in their way? Well... the final GoT episode was, itself, all about the aesthetic of despair. We were sad for different reasons, yes. Nonetheless, this episode gave us all the visuals, music, pacing, and depressed acting to revel in that emotion. I wouldn't have said it was a good final episode if it had been like ep 5, with all the explosions and fights-to-the-death, or the frantic idiocy of ep 3. Those were also bad episodes that nailed this coffin shut. But only this episode had the proper aesthetic of loss and despair. I liked that.

Good bye, show that I used to know. All is mourning.