The Last of the Dragons: What Drogon's Ending Reveals Near Game of Thrones

When I picture show the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen's dragons, the outset word that comes to mind is obscene.

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

Surviving the deaths of his siblings, Drogon leveled Rex'due south Landing at the behest of his master and mother, killing countless thousands. Yet afterward her death, freed from human command for the first time in his life, he appears to decide against further devastation in favor of escape. He flies abroad and his futurity is unknown.

Just 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 ii very dissimilar enemies and the third taking off on its ain, the departures of the dragons track with the trajectory of the testify's final flavour. Every bit such, they serve as legends on a map of the futurity. Ii paths say, "Here be dragons." The third is wide open.

Named afterward Daenerys's abusive and ultimately pathetic brother Viserys, Viserion is the start dragon to go. He has just participated in the rescue of Jon Snow's Magnificent Seven from the undead hordes who've encircled them beyond the Wall. Roaring out of the skies following a sequence of muted sound and slowed-downwards activeness, that rescue is both a daze and a spectacle. Information technology'south the delayed promise of a zombie versus dragon, water ice against fire showdown that the show had been making since the start and last scenes of season one, realized at last.

What happens after this soaring, triumphant moment of loftier fantasy? Death, on a scale unmatched by fifty-fifty the biggest giants and mammoths and direwolves. Taking his sweetness time, the Night King grabs a magical ice spear from ane of his White Walker lieutenants and hurls it skyward, similar a cold, expressionless inversion of Zeus and his thunderbolts. The weapon catches Viserion mid-flying as flame however blazes forth from his mouth. Information technology takes him down in a torrent of fire and blood, turning Dany's own business firm words against her. The creature's pained shrieks every bit it falters and falls sound incredulous, as if an animate being this magnificent and destructive is equally stunned to find itself dying as everyone else is. Skidding across the weakened water ice of the frozen lake upon which Jon and his men have made their stand, Viserion comes to a terminate, closes his eyes for the final fourth dimension equally a living matter, and sinks beneath the water. When he opens them again, they are the ice-blue optics of the living expressionless.

The second expiry is that of Rhaegal. This is the dragon later on Rhaegar, the brother Daenerys never knew — and secretly the father of Jon Snow, the man she loves, whose merits to the Iron Throne she spent her young life unwittingly usurping. The creature dies well-nigh the seat of power of his namesake, whose titles included prince of Dragonstone. This time, there's no tension, no suspense, no build at all. As rousing, hopeful music plays, Dany and her dragons soar above their fleet. Nineteen seconds and three scorpion bolts later — one lodged in the breast, one shot through the wing, one jutting through the neck — Rhaegal is already sinking into a watery grave.

The culprit this time is no supernatural strength millennia in the making, but an asshole pirate named Euron Greyjoy, king of the Iron Islands and would-be king of Westeros. Euron is a chuckling, swaggering void in the shape of a human. He lacks the grandiose ambition of his fuck buddy Cersei and his embittered brother Balon, or the extravagant cruelty of past heavies like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton. He's merely a dipshit who kills things considering it's how he gets his jollies, and he just so happens to exist pretty good at it. (In the end, he's every bit happy to die as he is to live, equally long as that death is bitchin', bro.) With the awful gurgle of Rhaegal's last breaths still fresh in our ears, the look of pure yeet on Euron'southward face up is detestable. He gives off the impression that if he weren't shooting down the most magnificent animals on the face of the earth, he'd be down at the junkyard, lighting fires and shooting rats.

That leaves one concluding dragon — the ane who lives. Drogon's survival marks the signal at which the show's finale itself shifts from the business of state of war to the struggle for peace, from decease on a jumbo scale to the preservation of life.

Jon Snow betrays his queen, aunt, and lover, whose visions of scouring away the sins of the world with burn down and blood take consumed her, by stabbing her during a mail-victory embrace. Inevitably, Drogon's roars beginning soon thereafter. At first distant and muted, they rise to a crescendo. Then the colossal black monster arrives in the mankind. He enters the ruined throne room to demand answers and, perhaps, justice from a killer, just like Ned Stark did with Cersei Lannister and then long agone. Jon Snow, born Aegon Targaryen, prepares to accept the judgment of the beast that is his family's birthright. Merely if Jon expected an execution, he is instead granted a reprieve.

Drogon nuzzles his mother in the elementary, tender fashion of so many animals when they have yet to accept that some other fauna they care for has died. When he finally accepts the truth and vents his rage, he aims it not at Jon, who can but cower from the furious inferno, but at the Fe Throne itself, the thing Dany brought him all this way for only to die before claiming it every bit her own. Now, no one will exist able to do so ever over again.

His work done, Drogon picks up the corpse of the adult female who brought him into the world, then used him to set much of it alight, and flies off. East, we're told later by Samwell Tarly — the direction of both his birthplace in the lands of the Dothraki, and the birthplace of dragons themselves, the now-fallen empire of Valyria. Only Bran Stark — Bran the Broken, king in the South, the Three-Eyed Raven, heir to the collective memory of humankind — is depicted as having a gamble to notice where the grieving fugitive has gone.

Author George R.R Martin's source material ofttimes repeats a single prophetic refrain: "The dragon has three heads." Taken literally, it describes the sigil of House Targaryen. Adjusting for the facts on the ground, or in the skies equally it were, it is seen as a reference to the three dragons Daenerys has inherited and awoken. Rumors and theories, within both the books and their fandom, speculate that three people, not one, are heirs of the Dragon and fated to drive dorsum the Long Night.

But hither, the saying takes on a new pregnant: three dragons, three fates, three ways of looking at the show'south central themes and conflicts and agreement the prove in which those fates are met.

Viserion is slain past the Nighttime King, the personification of decease. Supernatural in origin, he is the enemy that faces all people, a collective and existential threat. Such is his power that Viserion is reborn equally his own ultimate weapon, an undead dragon breathing blue fire. This is a threat nosotros all should see coming — indeed, we in the audience are given a painfully long await at its approach — but practice non movement by our own immediate concerns to cease until it is almost also late.

But when Arya kills the Night Male monarch to end the Battle of Winterfell, information technology marks the end of the united nations-Viserion as well. In a surprisingly optimistic development, humankind successfully bands together from across Westeros and the world at large to put an end to the ending that is their common enemy. What now?

Euron Greyjoy, that'south what. With the question of humanity against literal inhumanity settled, the series shifts its focus back to its longtime wheelhouse: humanity against its own inhumanity. That this proves to be the final struggle feels, in some ineffable way, insulting to the nature and scope of the threat defeated at Winterfell. That's precisely the indicate. People tin do such great things together, yet they'll render to destroying each other given the slightest opportunity.

Rhaegal's expiry at Euron's hands feels repulsive, almost absurd, considering so are the venal forces he represents. We meet those forces reach their zenith in the fall of King'due south Landing — perversely carried out in function as vengeance for that decease. When Daenerys burns King'southward Landing and its people to ash, she'south doing something that the man who killed her child would recognize, understand, and bask. (Indeed, his dying act is to get in on the action by forcing a pointless duel with Jaime Lannister, but to meaninglessly add one more than body to the heap.)

While the conqueror of King's Landing dies herself, her last surviving child does non. Withal Drogon's departure speaks simply equally straight to the course of the final flavor as practise his siblings' deaths. Faced with the selection of killing someone close to him to avenge the death of some other — a killing that would have eliminated the human bargaining chip that forced the conflicting sides of the war to the negotiating table in the finish — Drogon says, or rather roars, Fuck it. He burns the symbol of power, though he leaves the organisation and its governors largely intact, and sets off for the unknown, clinging to the embodied retention of the life he'd known before.

Here, once once again, nosotros meet the larger project of the testify at work. "The Fe Throne" is non a series finale that either fully vindicates or fully condemns its survivors. It marks the kickoff of a world that'southward an improvement over the onetime one, but is neither a utopia ruled by an aware autocrat, nor an anachronistic republic that would have scored some cheap points with the audience.

Instead, half-measures are the order of the day. The Iron Throne is gone and hereditary monarchy is gone with it, merely the inheritance of power is preserved everywhere else. The Northward achieves independence, merely the other Half dozen Kingdoms stay nether fundamental rule. Tyrion Lannister is restored to his in one case-beloved position as Hand of the King, but this fourth dimension information technology'due south finer a prison house judgement he'd rather avoid. Jon Snow is spared the executioner's sword for slaying his queen, but he, besides, is forced to retake his quondam position every bit Lord Commander of the Picket. Grey Worm, Sansa Stark, and Arya Stark are all unhappy with a compromise that neither kills the accused nor grants him clemency, merely they weren't the offset to make that conclusion in this episode. That complicated honor belongs to Drogon, who, rather than burning Jon alive or accepting him as his new primary, just flew away.

Drogon was a bellwether for the final stage of the Game of Thrones journey in ane other respect: He moved on.

While the dragon flies east, Grey Worm sets sheet for the Isle of Naath, rejecting lordship and power in Westeros and so that he and his brothers in artillery can live out the rest of their days in a place famous for its peacefulness. Their difference looks like whatever other "old-timey sailors pull anchor and rig the mainmast" sequence, simply the scene'due south truthful purpose is to prove that the Unsullied soldiers have taken off their helmets and surrendered their shields to decorate and protect the sides of their ships, not defend themselves against new enemies in battle.

Arya Stark takes to the sea every bit well, but for her it's the Sunset Sea, the vast torso of water beyond which no country has e'er been discovered. Sick of saying "not today" to decease with the edge of her blade, she chooses instead to say it past insisting on finding a new life — finding any life — where no one, from whatsoever civilization beyond the entire known world, has ever found information technology earlier.

Sansa Stark returns to her dwelling house, though it, also, is an undiscovered country at present. The N has non had a universally best-selling monarch in centuries. It's quite possible that she's the first queen to rule the North ever. And Sansa has never known power and agency that was not subverted or shaped past other rulers: Ned, Catelyn, Robb, Joffrey, Cersei, Littlefinger, Lysa Arryn, Roose and Ramsay Bolton, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen. Whatever she'll practise next will be a make-new thing.

And in the final image of the series, Jon Snowfall rides into the unknown. In his regained position in the Night's Scout, he'south leading the Wildlings back into their ancestral dwelling beyond the Wall, from which they fled when the Dark Rex'south army invaded. While the fresh-faced Free Folk march confidently onward, Jon casts one last wait over his shoulder every bit the gates shut behind him; he'south equally uncertain about this new life, and as regretful well-nigh the one he's left behind, equally anyone.

But he'south choosing life over death, healing over killing, an open ending over a certain affair. He'll alive out the remainder of his life in the cold, largely among people non his own, in relative anonymity, with his brief reign as male monarch in the North and his true nature every bit lord of the Seven Kingdoms left behind. Withal in doing so, he has a chance to exercise something expert, and yes, something new. It's a start.

In his speech to the Great Council, Tyrion Lannister argues that Rex Bran represents the breaking of the bicycle Daenerys sought earlier breaking herself in the endeavor. He could simply also have cited another magical and mysterious being birthday. The death of Drogon'due south brothers showed us what we stand up to lose if we continue to fight each other, succumbing either to a collective threat to the states all, or to our own murderous folly. But the departure of Drogon shows usa what we stand to gain if nosotros know when to terminate fighting each other and try something new.

In this procedure there are no magic bullets, no guarantees, no happily ever afters. The path to a amend future is 1 of uncertainty and imperfection. It is measured in decades rather than days. It is charted in thousand-mile journeys rather than single bold steps. Its terminal destination is unknown — not a identify we can see, but a promise we tin share, and piece of work together to build. Through the last of the dragons and their human counterparts, Game of Thrones' final argument is that this is the just path worth taking.

Isn't that what Drogon chooses when, instead of turning his fires on the people of Westeros one more time, he flies away, removing himself from their story and allowing them to find a destiny of their own?

What Drogon'due south Catastrophe Reveals Near Game of Thrones