I have a lot of thoughts about Game of Thrones. They’re mostly good, most of them expanding long on the well-developed characters and plot-lines. It’s a great show, deserving of the praise it has received. I’m currently rewatching the series with my parents, and it’s enjoyable as hell.
WARNING: There be spoilers here, so proceed at your own risk.
That is until season 8 rolled around. I’m sure you’ve at least heard of some of the criticisms it received. Rushed storytelling, dramatic changes in characters, and the almost anticlimactic finale are some of the bigger issues. The creators wanted to shock people, and they definitely achieved that, in perhaps the worst way possible. A lot of people were angry about the show’s bigger characters (Dany, Jon, Bran), but I’d like to focus on my favorite character, Jaime Lannister.
It’s funny thinking about Jaime as my favorite character. Don’t get me wrong, I love broken, antihero types, but Jaime started as the cocky, annoying villain that pushed a kid out of a window to protect his secret affair with his twin sister. Yeah it doesn’t get much lower than that. Even his walk is irritating. But he has one of the best character arcs I’ve ever seen. Even Zuko from Avatar the Last Avatar’s arc isn’t as shocking.
Jaime continues the arrogant golden son act for the rest of season one. It isn’t until the end of season two, after his capture by the Starks, and Cat giving him to Brienne of Tarth to be taken to King’s Landing that things start to change. Jaime has been imprisoned for roughly a year, and during that time he no longer looks like the Jaime Lannister of old, and I think that’s important. Physical change is a clever tool in storytelling, especially visual storytelling and that’s obvious here. So, when he teases Brienne, it’s no longer seen as the obnoxious villain but a more playful side seems to have emerged and you find yourself laughing with him.
Brienne is not only my favorite female character in the show, but also an important crux for the emotional turning point in Jaime. They start to develop a camaraderie of sorts, and Jaime is more than a little impressed with Brienne’s fighting and strength. She is the polar opposite of Cersei and it’s fun to see Jaime taken aback more than once by Brienne. Their fun sword fight where Brienne proves she’s a match for him is more than a little satisfying.
We see the most obvious change in Jaime in the third episode of season three. Brienne and Jaime are captured by soldiers of House Bolton and Jaime tries to convince Brienne futilely that being raped is better than being killed. Later that night, when Brienne is dragged away by the soldiers, Jaime lies to save Brienne, and bargains to make sure she is unharmed. This is the same guy that pushed a kid out of a window.
He falls into an ease with Locke and he loses his sword hand because of it. Not only is that a huge turning point for Jaime, but it’s insanely metaphorical. He loses a part of himself, the part that killed a king, the part that betrayed friends and did horrible things in the name of “love”.
Brienne sees this and starts to care. Then the bath scene happened, which I think is the best scene of the entire series. In it, Jaime reveals what he has revealed to no one: that he killed the king to save the city of King’s Landing, and that his act of dishonor and betrayal was actually quite the opposite. He then faints but not before asking Brienne to call him by his name and not the undeserved title of Kingslayer.
Brienne becomes one of the only people that treats him with respect, not because of his father or name, but because of what he has earned in her eyes. You can see this when she starts calling him Sir Jaime instead of Kingslayer. And that’s a big deal, and Jaime returns to someone he used to be before he became Hand of the King.
He is sent away without Brienne after that. Then, of course, he returns to save her from a bear and marches proudly away with her to King’s Landing. Jaime makes several poor decisions after that, most of them to do with Cersei. She is a spider after all, pulling him constantly to her web. But when Joffrey dies and Cersei tells Jaime to kill Tyrion and Sansa, he decides to send Brienne to find Sansa (and Arya) and also bargains (sacrificing his entire life basically), then helps free Tyrion.
These are not the actions or choices made by the same man. It’s an emotionally charged and rather painful change but it is amazing.
A lot happens after this, that I won’t go into here (I could fill a book with my thoughts on the scores of scenes with him), but suffice it to say that Jaime makes a lot of decisions, not all of them good, but they do make a steady climb towards what is right and just. He loses his last two children, reunites a couple of times with Brienne but never for very long, becomes a somewhat lap dog of Cersei’s for a while, and then finally, in season seven, he leaves Cersei to go north and fight against the White Walkers.
And that’s when things start going downhill for the character, not in any way that makes sense but in terms of bad storytelling. Up until now, while I didn’t agree with everything the writers chose for the story (mostly when they diverged from G.R.R. Martin’s books), I understood their choices and wasn’t too bothered. This is equally true for Jaime, except for season eight.
Season eight started relatively okay. It just slowly started going downhill as the episodes went on. Of course, we now know that the creators of the show wanted to end things to work on Star Wars (that they’ve been removed from, yay for just desserts) even though HBO offered more money and more seasons. And so, because of this, the White Walkers were destroyed in one episode, Dany destroyed King’s Landing and Jaime finally ignites his budding romance with Brienne before leaving her in the same episode.
It’s the latter one that really made me mad. The entire series showed an arc of Jaime disentangling from his sister and the web of the Lannisters and becoming a heroic character. His relationship with Brienne highlights that. And then in the fourth episode of season eight, everything changes!
It’s quite obvious the creators wanted to wrap up Jaime’s story as quickly as possible, which resulted in this out of character decision and end. So, in the episode, Jaime gets word that Cersei needs help so he quite literally leaves the side of Brienne to find his sister again.
Here’s the final conversation Jaime has with Brienne before he rides away:
Brienne: You’re not like your sister. You’re not. You’re better than she is. You’re a good man and you can’t save her. You don’t need to die with her. Stay here. Stay with me. Please. Stay.
Jaime: You think I’m a good man? I pushed a boy out of a tower window, crippled him for life for Cersei. I strangled my cousin with my own hands just to get back to Cersei. I would have murdered every man, woman and child in Riverrun for Cersei. She’s hateful, and so am I.
This is just blatantly untrue. It’s as if the writers forgot everything that happened after his last “I’m a terrible person” confession. which was roughly four seasons of different actions and choices. Yes, he was most certainly hateful, but he is not that man anymore. He has slowly yet surely pulled away from Cersei and her poison has seeped from his many wounds. But, apparently for the sake of a faster or more succinct end, the writers decided to reverse all of that. And it’s maddening.
I was half-hoping that he was intending on going to King’s Landing to kill her, because she is still family and deserves a more peaceful end. That was, in my opinion, the only thing that would explain why he would just up and leave like that. Just a reminder that in the book, Jaime gets a letter from Cersei asking him to come back and he burns it. Writing Jaime off that way is, on paper, a nice way of not having to work the character into the script much and put a concise ending to his story. That’s the opposite of how it reads or is viewed.
It’s bizarre. It’s almost as if the show brought in new writers who had never watched the show, got a cursory summary of the character and wrote from that. Which isn’t true, of course, since it was the series creators who wrote this hellish mess. It was just a few episodes before when Jaime was downright disgusted by Cersei and her actions and left her, and now, after stopping the White Walkers and turning, in many ways, domestic with Brienne, he changes his mind?
Now if the writers had given him a bit more time to think through this, or maybe explained his thought process more, it might’ve worked. I hear you saying, it’s a show, unless you have a voiceover you can’t reveal their thoughts. But Nikolai Coster-Waldau is a brilliant actor, capable of showing thoughts, reactions and deliberations. He’s proven that time and time again throughout the series, and could have done so here.
Granted he worked well with what little they gave him, but it wasn’t much and you can tell in interviews that he isn’t happy with his ending.
To further prove this weird storytelling by writers that apparently never paid attention to their own story, in episode 5 Jaime tells Tyrion “To be honest, I never really much cared for [the people of King’s Landing]. Innocent or otherwise”, which is, honestly a downright laughable statement coming from the man that killed his king for them. If you’re wondering, yes, I did angry laugh at that part.
I assumed before going into season eight that a lot of characters would die and there’d be a lot of tears. But there wasn’t. Instead, there was anger and heartbreak. I thought Jaime might die, but I expected he’d die saving someone, or die with Brienne, not at the Red Keep with his sister; not back at the same place he started. Not back with the same person he killed for at the beginning.
In season five he tells Bronn that he wants to “die in the arms of the woman he loves,” and, while he most certainly meant Cersei at the time, I am certain that is no longer the case by the time season eight rolls around. I, and quite a few others, firmly believed he would die in Brienne’s arms fighting against the White Walkers (basically the way Jorah Mormont went out). Frankly, I would have given up the consummating of their romance for that.
Imagine, Jaime and Brienne, fighting with the two swords forged from Ned Stark’s, against the endless sea of the dead and Jaime gets injured, whether by saving Brienne or some other way, and then dies in the arms of the woman he has grown to love over so many years. It would have been a noble and fitting end, but the writers wanted to be “clever,” I suppose.
So, while most people are mad about the dramatic changes in Daenerys, I believe what they did to Jaime was worse. At least they gave Dany a few episodes to show some of her reasoning behind her actions. It wasn’t entirely out of the blue (even though it was a huge leap, with some developing it might have made sense), it wasn’t a complete 180° turn in character.
Rewatching this show is reminding me of how low Jaime started and how he rose up, despite all odds and became honorable and good. He was an Oathbreaker and became an Oathkeeper.
And it also reminds me how badly they treated him in the end. Whether for money or being tired of the story, the creators wanted to do exactly what Jaime once did: push him from the window in the name of love. It’s the highest form of betrayal and disrespect.
Jaime Lannister is a great leader, and a good man, kind to his brother Tyrion (who everyone else hated), someone who made a lot of mistakes but repented, who treated his enemies with respect, and saved so many lives. He was not like the other Lannisters who wanted power, but rather wished to be a soldier. He should have died like one.
G.R.R. Martin still has two more books to write. He has said that his ending will be different. One hopes that will include the bravest and most honorable of the Lannisters, and, if a violent end and not old age is his destiny, a death more fitting.