Spoiler alert: Bigger and bloodier than The Sopranos, Games of Thrones’ finale for season four was breathtaking television, writes JIM SHELLEY
Many of the show's key characters were ruthlessly killed off, including Tywin, pictured
The fantastic, thrilling, season finale of Game Of Thrones served as a brutal reminder that from the beginning, its fourth series had been predicated on the tagline making the unswerving, almost proud, proclamation: ‘all men must die.’
Ten episodes later, we can now add: ‘and women, and children. And animals...’
The sight of the giant woolly mammoth’s fur aflame last week confirmed that from direwolves to dragons, nothing is safe. Even the un-dead – like the supremely eerie White Walkers or the zombie ice skeletons called Wights – can be done in again. Violently.
No other show has killed off so many of its prime characters with such relish..
Series four had already dispensed with such significant names as Ygritte, Prince Oberyn, Lysa Arryn, Dontos Hollard, Locke, Karl Tanner, Grenn, Pypar, the entire village of Mole’s Town, the Thenn leader Styr, the White Walker, the Wildlings’ giant chieftain Mag Mar Tun Doh Weg, and most dramatically of all, the magnificently vile King Joffrey.
And of course, it has chopped off the heads and slit the throats of hundreds of extras during endless sword fights across the country and in battles at The Wall and beyond.
Nonetheless, undaunted, its 66-minute finale saw Game Of Thrones surpass itself, ticking off the thrilling killing of Brandon Stark’s young ally Jojen Reed and the shocking sight of Tyrion murdering both his beloved Shae and previously imperious father Tywin - a scene blessed by two terrific performances from Peter Dinklage and Charles Dance.
As the head of the Lannister dynasty that ultimately controlled King’s Landing, Tywin’s demise – combined with that of the loathsome young Joffrey - essentially represented a scorched earth policy to much of what occurred before, and means that for the power games in Series Five of GoT everything will be up for grabs from scratch.
One of GoT’s largest, most popular, personalities, ‘The Hound’ (Sandor Clegane) was also apparently left for dead, and even the fate of two of Khaleesi’s precious but increasingly uncontrollable and savage dragons remains uncertain.
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It looked as if one of GoT's best pairings - between Sandor Clegane and young Arya Stark - had come to a bitter, bloody end. But the fact that we did not see The Hound die from his wounds could yet mean he will live to fight another day
'Mother Of Dragons' and 'Breaker Of Chains', Daenerys 'Khaleesi' Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) finds she has one monicker too many as she takes the distressing decision to tie up two of her dragons down in the catacombs
The irony as Rhaegal and Viserion were imprisoned in the city’s catacombs after their sibling Drogon had torched one of her subjects’ three year-old daughters, reducing her to a blackened corpse, was obvious: to her slave people, Khaleesi is meant to be ‘the breaker of chains.’ Now 'the Mother Of Dragons' was enslaving her 'children' in iron collars as she found that her all-powerful weapons of war were more problematic in peace-time (much like the nuclear weapons the dragons represent).
The finale's uncharacteristically blunt title, ‘The Children’, proved deceptive. Written by GoT creators/producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, ostensibly, it referred to the Children Of The Forest encountered by Bran. On another level though it linked the desperate decision by ‘the Mother Of Dragons’ to lock the creatures away, Tyrion’s tortured relationship with his father Tywin, and Cersei’s obsession with avenging both her son's murder and her mother's death by having Tyrion (unjustly) executed.
The show started with Jon Snow who, as heroic as he may be, has become the show's most one-dimensional, weakest link
It was another remarkable, uniquely imaginative, piece of television and storytelling, capping off Game Of Thrones' latest achievement in becoming HBO’s biggest programme of all time. Its total of 18.4million viewers per episode finally topped the ratings held by the 2002 season of The Sopranos.
It started with Jon Snow and the few surviving men of the Night’s Watch were saved from the impending onslaught of Wildlings by the incongruous intervention of Stannis Baratheon and his sidekick Davos Seaworth.They turned out to be not just the ‘Master of Ships’ and smuggler they had always been presented as, but expert horsemen leading a huge army of (CGI) soldiers.
Some people are on the pitch. They think it's all over. It is now... Wrong channel, same result: the mass ranks of Stannis Baratheon's (CGI) army saves Jon Snow and the Night's Watch
Stannis Baratheon (right), regarded as 'the true king of the seven kingdoms', mostly by himself and Davos Seaworth who endlessly repeated this phrase in what sounded, incongruously, as a Geordie accent
Their arrival in the snowy wilds of the North was a surprise but a relief. The show’s most handsome hunk, Jon Snow, has long become its most one-dimensional, weakest, link.
Even though Ygritte (the Wildling’s version of Bianca from EastEnders) had died last week, their uncharacteristically soppy romance was still dragging on as he gave her a proper burial and quizzed Tormund about whether she had really loved him.
As heroic as Jon may be, it was hard to see how, or why, he would suddenly start negotiating with the ‘King Beyond The Wall’, Mance Rayder (Ciaran Hinds doing an impressive impression of a dishevelled Bryan Ferry) when the Wildlings’ masses have always been treated (by Snow and the writers) as such a devastating, decisive, threat. But Mance still afforded Snow the chance of fulfilling his plan to kill him.
There was something comical about the two men bonding over a drink especially as, like Ygritte, Mance insisted on inserting his rival’s name into every sentence.
No other show has ever killed off so many of its characters so regularly or ruthlessly
‘Are you capable, Jon Snow, of killing a man in his own tent, Jon Snow? When he’s just offered you peace Jon Snow?’
What two Yorkshiremen were doing in t’Game Of Thrones’ most barren kingdom wasn’t clear. Then again Davos Seaworth appears to be a Geordie.
His endless references to Stannis as ‘the true king of the seven kingdom’ also remained irksome, but otherwise the arrival of their vast cavalcade of horsemen in a stunning CGI saved us as well as ‘Jon Snow’ from a repeat of the previous week’s (less-than-special) Wall-themed special.
Snow’s reprieve represented the kind of twist that exemplified the greatest of all Game Of Thrones’ considerable dramatic gifts: the totally unpredictable shifts in characterisation of its vast cast and their inter-weaving, internecine fortunes.
Another came later on. After the Night’s Watch had spent last week’s episode precariously defending The Wall, fans were left regarding a second battle as inevitable this week, as even Jon Snow did.
But in fact the series four finale was dominated by three showdowns elsewhere, with each bringing a major sub-plot to a conclusion few viewers could have foreseen.
Just when we thought we'd seen everything in Games of Thrones, Brandon, Hodor, Jojen and Meera were attacked by Wights - zombie ice skeletons, giving GoT a unique mix of apocalyptic Walking Dead horror and futuristic folklore
Hodor relies on Bran's powers to see off two Wights that were frankly over-eager to kill the loveable giant
The episode’s fight-scene extravaganza came not at The Wall with the Wildlings but as Brandon Stark and his loyal troupe (Hodor, Jojen and Meera) reached the weirwood tree of his visions.
Viewers might have thought that after a Wildlings’ army that included a woolly mammoth, a 14-foot giant and a bunch of shaven-headed Mad Max-style cannibals into scarification, they had seen it all.
But Bran’s gang were attacked by relentless skeletal zombie warriors emerging from the ground, a scene that gave Game Of Thrones a new mix of apocalyptic Walking Dead-type horror with futuristic folklore.
Events covering four series and several decades came to a close when Tyrion killed his father in the last of several powerful scenes between actors Peter Dinklage (left) and Charles Dance as Tywin
Having been rescued by one of the Children of the Forest (played by a twee young girl who resembled a posh Peter Pan in a school panto), when Bran found the ‘three-eyed raven’ he’d been searching for had taken the shape of an elderly sage with a long white beard, we were straight back into GoT’s more familiar format of Wizards & Warlocks: like a twisted variation of Tolkien territory.
‘I have been many things,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you, all of you, all of your lives, with a thousand eyes and one.’
Jojen, he said, ‘died so that you can find what you have lost’ but anyone who assumed this meant Bran regaining the use of his legs immediately had their hopes dashed, like Bran himself.
‘You will never walk again...But you will fly,’ the old man declared cryptically.
Bran was saved by one of the mythical 'Children of the Forest' who was portrayed by a twee posh girl who could have been in a school production of Peter Pan
The weirwood tree of Brandon Stark's vision where he found 'the three-eyed raven' was in fact now an elderly sage with a long white beard. (It's a long story...)
Cersei was invariably the bearer of bad news. Here, she tells her brother Jaime that she has told their father that the rumours of their incestuous relationship are true. Thanks sis !
Cersei and her brother Jaime cheer themselves up from the terrifying thought of their father Tywin knowing about their affair, in the usual manner
The most foreboding frisson of tension had started earlier, with the potentially explosive sight of Cersei forcing her father Tywin Lannister to confront the reality of her incestuous relationship with her brother Jaime. The ruthless ferocity of them both was unmistakeable as she refused to be married off and sent away to Highgarden, or allow Margaery Tyrell to wed her child, King Tommen.
She raged: ‘Margaery will dig her claws in, you will dig your claws in and you will tear Tommen apart. I will burn our house to the ground before that happens’
‘And how will you do that?’ Tywin purred, before his calm was shaken as she stated coldly ‘everything they say about Jaime and me is true. Your legacy is a lie.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he told her.
‘Yes you do,’ she said assuredly, concluding the debate.
She went straight to Jaime, reiterating her desire to see Tyrion killed for being the ‘disease’ responsible for the death of their mother in childbirth and intent on making their illicit love public.
‘I choose you...People will whisper. They will make their jokes. Let them. They’re all so small, I can’t see them,’ she said, seducing him.
The sight of Tyrion chancing upon Joffrey's old crossbow evoked happy memories of the magnificently vile young King at his worse, and best
In any other series, it would have been a pivotal bombshell. Here though, it was just a prelude for the Lannister family’s continuing implosion.
Appalled by his sister’s callous, crazed obsession to avenge Joffrey’s death, Jaime went to Tyrion’s cell to facilitate his escape.
‘Farewell little brother,’ he said, hugging him in a touching manner rather rare for GoT.
But instead of fleeing Tyrion went to his father’s bedroom where, to his horror, he found the love of his life, the prostitute Shae, in Tywin’s bed.
One of the last noble souls the show had left, not least because of the purity of his romance with Shae, Tyrion furiously strangled her, muttering ‘I’m sorry.’
The fact that the weapon he happened upon and was then able to turn on his father was Joffrey’s crossbow – the prized possession he had delighted in using to menace the likes of Tyrion and Sansa – was brilliantly apposite.
When Tyrion discovered Tywin sitting on the toilet, for once the imperious Lord of Casterly Rock, Shield of Lannisport, Warden of the West and ‘The Lion of Lannister’ was powerless.
‘This is how you want to speak to me is it?’ Tywin carped, trying to talk his way out. ‘Shaming your father has always given you pleasure.’
Of course the opposite was the case.
'All my life you've wanted me dead,' Tyrion said sadly.
'Meet my little friend': Tyrion uses Joffrey's crossbow to kill his father Tywin on the toilet after he made the mistake of referring to Tyrion's beloved Shae as a 'whore' - which, admittedly, she was
Tormented, Tyrion demanded his father explain why he had sentenced him to death despite knowing he was innocent, but Tywin persisted prevaricating, and trying to working his charm to go free.
'What you'll kill your own father in the privy? No you're my son, now enough of this nonsense.'
It was easy to assume it would be Tyrion’s lifetime of grievances that would cause him to pull the crossbow’s trigger, but in fact (almost absurdly) he defended Shae’s honour to the end, firing when Tywin brushed aside both Tyrion’s proclamation of love for her when she was alive and anguish over her death, barking dismissively ‘it doesn’t matter. She was a whore.’
His last words to Tyrion were: ‘You’re no son of mine.’
‘I have always been your son,’ Tyrion said, shooting him again.
Showdown: the fight between Brienne of Tarth and The Hound was a bloody, brutal affair between two of Thrones' favourite characters. It involved rocks, kicks in the crotch and an ear being bitten off. And that was just by Brienne
For all its ingenious machinations between the rulers and families of the seven kingdoms, the predominant theme/device of the finale was actually plot shifts occurring through juxtapositions completely out-of-the-blue.
Tyrion’s unexpected discovery of Shae and Tywin was matched, and even trumped, by Brienne and Podrick stumbling across Arya and The Hound in the hills in the middle of nowhere. (Cementing the parallel, both Tywin and The Hound had both been caught unawares, emptying their bowels.)
If anything Tyrion’s shock showdown with Tywin paled in comparison to the duel that followed between Brienne and The Hound over which of them should be leading Arya to safety. (‘Safety?’ The Hound mocked. ‘Where the f**k’s that?!’)
Don't mess: Brienne appeared to polish off The Hound but failed in her mission to take Arya under her protective wing
They took turns in battering each other with a determined brutality reminiscent of the incrementally fierce fight between King Arthur and The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Even the most battle-hardened Game Of Thrones' fan might have recoiled as The Hound punched, head-butted and kicked Brienne in the crotch. She responded in kind, pounded his head with a rock, and bit off his ear, before sending him tumbling over a cliff side.
‘Kill me!’ he implored Arya, lying at the bottom, having diagnosed his wounds as fatal. ‘Go on girl, another name off your list.'
Fans of The Hound, look away now. Of course, being The Hound, he might not actually be dead yet
The fact that – either out of affection or heartlessness – Arya didn’t put him out of his misery and that therefore we didn’t see The Hound actually die (unheard of given Game Of Thrones’ relish for depicting its characters' demise in explicit, bloody detail) suggests that he is, against all the odds, not dead. Yet.
We live in hope (which is more than the characters do). After all, Arya and The Hound made up one of the show’s most popular double acts.
Into the light...as for series five next year, after this season's Game Of Thrones, anything is possible
This is what Game Of Thrones ultimately revolves around – not families, but pairings.
After the finale, Jon Snow is now adjoined to Stannis, and Tyrion is in a crate on a galleon under the protective gaze of Varys, ‘The Spider.’
The fates of Sansa and Petyr Baelish, Cersei and Jaime, and Khaleesi and her dragons await us in series five, next year.
The one thing we do know: in Game Of Thrones anything is possible.
And, of course, all men must die.
Having been the most pirated show of 2013 with an estimated 5.9million episodes downloaded via BitTorrent, Game Of Thrones season four has now been made available by HBO to download from UK online retailers such as Amazon Instant Video, blinkbox, Google Play, Wuaki.tv and Xbox Video.
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