In the latest episode of BLAH, Stefan and I discuss the Barristan sample chapter(s) from The Winds of Winter. Available at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

The Winds of Winter keep blowing as Stefan Sasse and I tackle the Arianne II sample chapter—available here or wherever you find your podcasts!

You’ve got time on your hands—why not spend it by listening to Stefan Sasse and I discuss the “Arianne I” sample chapter from The Winds of Winter in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour—available here and wherever fine podcasts are sold!

I’m back on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast to talk to my co-host Stefan Sasse about the “Alayne” sample chapter from The Winds of Winter! Intrigue abounds! Find it here or wherever fine podcasts are sold!

Nine years. One hundred episodes. My illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse and I celebrate the Boiled Leather Audio Hour’s big milestone by reflecting on why A Song of Ice and Fire resonates with us in the first place. Click here to listen or find it wherever you find your podcasts!

Me and Stefan Sasse vs. the “Mercy” sample chapter from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter—it’s all going down in the latest episode of our podcast, available at our Patreon or anyplace podcasts can be listened to!

Stefan and I are starting a series of Boiled Leather Audio Hour episodes going in-depth on each of the available sample chapters from The Winds of Winter, starting with a look at Theon I!

I’m back on BLAH this week with a look at the role and symbolism of water in A Song of Ice and Fire—including water-based magic, houses that derive their strength and identity from water, the use of bodies of water by characters in the story, and more!

When I picture the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, the first word that comes to mind is obscene.

The dragons are technical filmmaking achievements of a scale and quality never before seen on television. They are emblems of high-fantasy spectacle with real awe and real bite, in a field now dominated by literally and figuratively bloodless blockbusters. Most guttingly, they are symbols of the wonders of the natural world, pointlessly destroyed by merchants of death. For all these reasons, their killings made me want to look away … which is exactly why I felt the need to look closer. And the survival of the third, greatest, and last dragon in the Game of Thrones finale made that need impossible to resist.

Surviving the deaths of his siblings, Drogon leveled King’s Landing at the behest of his master and mother, killing countless thousands. Yet after her death, freed from human control for the first time in his life, he appears to decide against further devastation in favor of escape. He flies away and his future is unknown.

But while the minds of these dragons remain a mystery, what they symbolize can be sussed out more readily. With two of the creatures killed by two very different enemies and the third taking off on its own, the departures of the dragons track with the trajectory of the show’s final season. As such, they serve as legends on a map of the future. Two paths say, “Here be dragons.” The third is wide open.

I wrote about the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons and what they symbolize for Vulture. Many people have called this the best writing I’ve ever done on the show, and I tend to agree.

Bran, Arya, Sansa, Jon: In their final destinies, the heirs of House Stark all defy their house words, “Winter Is Coming.” After showing us a nightmare for eight seasons, Game of Thrones finally dares to dream of spring.

I reviewed the series finale of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. I loved this show, and I owe it so much.

1. “The Bells” (Season 8, Episode 5)

Sansa Stark: How long do I have to look?
Joffrey Baratheon: As long as it pleases me.

Miguel Sapochnik, the man behind “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” and “The Long Night,” succeeded Neil Marshall as the show’s master of war. Returning to the director’s chair one last time for the series’s penultimate episode, he turns off the dark that confounded many viewers during the Battle of Winterfell. But does he therefore dial down the carnage that occurs any time large numbers of people decide to murder one another for a cause? Oh, no. Oh, not at all.

“The Bells” ratchets up the queasy terror of the last battle episode set at King’s Landing, “Blackwater,” by making its narrowly averted nightmare come true. This time, instead of stalling at the city walls, the invaders make it inside—with the help of Daenerys Targaryen and the last dragon she has. And before the episode is over, there’s barely a city left to sack. The Breaker of Chains breaks bad at last, unleashing dragon fire on tens of thousands of innocent civilians and reducing King’s Landing to rubble and ash.

This war crime was a long time coming, and the seeds had been planted since the start. No, I’m not talking about the innumerable people whose execution by Dany went excused because they were nominally “bad guys.” I’m talking about Bran falling from the tower. Viserys Targaryen and Robert Baratheon and Khal Drogo failing to survive a single season. Ned Stark losing his head. Jaime Lannister losing his hand. The Red Wedding. The Purple Wedding. The Red Viper. The death of the dragons.

Every single swerve that upended what the story seemed to be about was building to this moment: A self-styled liberator perpetrating a massacre on a previously unimaginable scale, both as an in-story act of violence and an on-screen work of filmmaking. This is the show, and it always has been. Game of Thrones forces you to look. Long may it burn.

I ranked every episode of Game of Thrones from worst to best for Vulture. I stand by this.

“I think that if you’re gonna write about war and violence, show the cost. Show how ugly it is. Show both sides of it. On the other side—which sometimes gets me in trouble from the other side of the political spectrum—is the glory of war, which those of us who are opposed to war and would rather not have war tend to forget about, or try to pretend it doesn’t exist. But if you read the ancient historical sources, people are always talking about the glory of war, the banners that stirred the heart, the banners in the wind.” —George R.R. Martin

“I have come … But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!”

Frodo Baggins broke bad. After a journey spanning thousands of miles, hundreds of pages, and a trilogy of books, the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings did the one thing he’d aimed to prevent anyone from doing ever again: He claimed the One Ring, the ultimate weapon of the evil Sauron, as his own.

This betrayed everything he and his friends had fought and suffered for, but, fortunately for the hobbit, no mere mortal could hope to harness and wield the Ring’s power. All Frodo really succeeded in doing was alerting Sauron to the jewelry of mass destruction’s presence in the one place it could be destroyed, the volcano where it was originally forged.

Of course, this too would spell disaster if the Dark Lord were to reach Frodo in time to reclaim the Ring and turn it on the good guys amassed at the gates of his wasteland kingdom. Only dumb luck and Frodo’s own prior kindness saved him in the end. The mutated hobbit called Gollum, whose centuries of solitude with only the object’s dark magic for company had turned him into a hopeless Ring junkie, bit off Frodo’s finger to take the Ring back. He then promptly fell into the lava, destroying himself, the Ring, Sauron, his minions, his castle, and his impregnable kingdom all in one go. If Frodo had killed the vicious but ultimately pathetic creature during his many earlier opportunities to do so, all would have been lost.

But still: Tolkien chose to bring his magnum opus — the fountainhead from which the entire epic-fantasy genre has flowed — to a climax by corrupting his virtuous protagonist and giving him no agency in his own redemption. I first read The Lord of the Rings 33 years ago, and to this day I can’t hit that part of the book or watch that part of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation without gasping, “No, goddammit, no!” The character whose pure heart and noble intentions made him the ideal vehicle for bringing the most dangerous weapon in existence to its appointed place of destruction was, in the end, neither pure nor noble enough to resist trying to use the loaded gun he’d been carrying all that time. In the parlance of our era, you simply hate to see it.

Unfortunately for Daenerys Targaryen, there’s no Gollum present in Game of Thrones to knock her off her dragon’s back and then, I dunno, fly the thing directly into the side of a mountain at full speed. Her hero’s journey ends in villainy that no one — at least, perhaps, until Sunday’s series finale — has the power to stop.

I tried to contextualize Daenerys Targaryen’s actions in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones for Vulture. I’m proud of this piece.

So ends the most daring episode of Game of Thrones ever. It’s the Red Wedding writ large, a masterpiece that murders all hope of neat closure, and reduces any lingering belief in the redemptive power of violence to ashes in our mouths.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, the series’ best, for Rolling Stone.

1. The Fall of King’s Landing, “The Bells” (Season 8, Episode 5)

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” A sick humorist like Ramsay Bolton would probably appreciate the poetry of losing his place atop the list of Game of Thrones’ best battles to a conflagration that adhered to one of his own maxims. When the battle of “The Bells” begins, it first appears to be an absolute onslaught of wish-fulfillment fantasy violence. First, Daenerys and her last dragon effortlessly torch a fleet, an army, the walls of King’s Landing, and every last dragon-killing scorpion on land and sea. (Unlike the Night King and Euron Greyjoy’s sneak attacks, Dany and Drogon were coming prepared this time.) Then Jon Snow and Grey Worm lead thousands of screaming Northmen, Dothraki, and Unsullied into the city, making good on promises Khal Drogo and King Robb made way back in season one.

Then it all goes to shit. Snapping under a lifetime of paranoia, pressure, and rage, Daenerys burns the city to the ground. The soldiers run amok. The Hound and Jaime Lannister earn nothing but pyrrhic “victories” over the Mountain and Euron. Arya, who saved all of humanity a couple weeks ago, can’t even save one mother and her child. Cersei Lannister dies in the arms of her brother beneath the Red Keep, literally buried by the trappings of power.

Eight seasons of build-up result in a horrorshow that, in terms of both amassing bodies and punching the audience in the face, makes the Red Wedding look like flag football. Director Miguel Saphochnik (yes, him again) shoots it all in broad daylight, a gobsmackingly bold act of filmmaking that forces you to bear witness to every awful detail of the carnage. If you thought this had a happy ending, if you thought mass violence could be harnessed and tamed and aimed only at those who deserve it—well, you’re paying attention now, aren’t you?

I ranked all the major battles in Game of Thrones for Vulture.

“We may have defeated them, but we still have us to contend with.”

So says Tyrion Lannister regarding the plight that faces the people of Westeros — and the show that chronicles them. Yes, the dead are no more. But will the living choose to exist together as one? Or will they return to killing each other as they always have?

These questions haunt this week’s episode, titled “The Last of the Starks.” Written by co-creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss and directed by series mainstay David Nutter, it starts of in a celebratory mood, as the survivors of the Battle of Winterfell bid farewell to their fallen comrades and then drink and screw themselves into a stupor. But it ends with the gloomy, gut-wrenching prospect of even worse horrors to come — because this time, the killers will be humans.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

For the final stretch of the episode, the ambient sound is muted and a piano melody kicks in. It immediately felt like a callback to “Light of the Seven,” one of your best-known pieces—so, you know, I got worried.

That was 100 percent intentional. When I talked to Miguel [Sapochnik], the director, and when David and Dan came to my studio and we started working on this episode, we all agreed that it had to be a piano piece again, just like “Light of the Seven.”

That was the first time we’d used piano in the show; it really meant something different. You realize Cersei’s up to something and it all blows up. By using it again, we wanted to have the reverse effect. The piano comes in and people go, “Uh-oh, here comes the piano again. Something’s unraveling!” There was little hope throughout the episode. They’ve fought and fought, but the Night King is just unstoppable. Then he comes walking in, and the piano itself represents, like, “This is really it! It’s over!” Then there’s that big twist in the end. It definitely misled the audience because of what they knew from “Light of the Seven,” back in season six. We always treated the music as another character in the show.

I interviewed Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi about his work on “The Long Night” and elsewhere for Vulture.

The whole show tapped into my personal fear of death. That has always been a big theme in this show. Everyone’s trying to run from it, and as the Hound actually says, nobody can. That primal fear, I have nightmares like that. It felt like I was watching one of my nightmares. Whoever you are, whether you’re a fucking prince or a king or a peasant or whatever, no one can escape. That makes us all the same. It connects us all. Sorry if this sounds a bit sentimental, but that’s really how I experienced this episode. To see someone who tried to save us all from that finally have a rest from that journey, it’s emotional.

That’s why you can’t put this show away as some sort of fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with the word fantasy, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a much more fundamental thing. It’s a message: We can fucking fight our own little fights, but when it comes down to it in the end, we fucking need each other, you know?

I interviewed Carice Van Houten about Melisandre and Game of Thrones for Vulture.

What do we say to the god of death? Eat this.

It wasn’t the once and future king Jon Snow who took down the Night King and ended the years-in-the-making assault of the dead against the living. It wasn’t the Queen of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen or the Three-Eyed Raven Bran Stark or “the Imp” Tyrion Lannister. With a last-ditch jump and a dagger to the gut, Arya Stark reached the moment she’s been training for practically her whole young life and did exactly what needed to be done, instantly destroying the show’s otherworldly big bad and his army. A woman who spent her girlhood becoming a perfect killing machine saved every human being alive. For a shocking number of our heroes and anti-heroes, tonight’s — “The Long Night” — had a happy ending.

Is that something to be celebrated, or mourned?

I reviewed this week’s epic episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.