The Last Of Jon And Sansa

The Last of Jon and Sansa

[No review for the series finale - I don’t know if I want to write one - but suffice it to say I may be in the minority that was satisfied. For now I’m back to writing on interesting aspects I take out of the episode. This should be short. Shorter than my combined review of Episodes 3 and 5. I hope]

A lot has been said about the series finale. Most critics and most viewers have been left disappointed which was predictable. Jon as a character in particular was a big contentious point. The episode seemed to cement this idea that he really was a lovestruck fool in the end. That, all this time he really loved Daenerys. And yet the behaviour viewers have seen is at least as erratic as Dany’s changes of mood. The previous episode seemed to point at the last of their relationship as news of his birthright spread and he couldn’t return her affections, which was part of what set her on her path to her barbecue fiesta in King’s Landing. So naturally what everyone expected was the final Dance of Dragons i.e. the final clash between the last two Targaryens. A bit late in the endgame but due nonetheless. The first part of the episode even seems to point in the right direction as Jon wearily witnesses Dany’s speech to her armies and guesses nothing good is going to come out of it, especially when he hears her utter the name of Winterfell. He’s again agitated when she sentences Tyrion, upset at the carnage, the useless slaughtering of prisoners and worried as she looks past him - with a look that carries nothing of love there, as the distorted version of Truth plays - and enters the ruins of the Red Keep. So in that first part of the finale, both Jon and Dany still seem to be consistent character-wise.

And then suddenly they don’t. Jon visits Tyrion who has the greatest difficulties to swerve Jon into doing the right thing when the Jon viewers know would not hesitate and would absolutely know what to do. One could argue that the resurrected Jon is less certain, more doubtful of everything that’s not White Walkers- related but come on. Is it love ? Fear ? We don’t even know what it is that restrains him. He certainly doesn’t seem to know either. And Dany is no better. The next time she sees Jon, she’s all of a sudden all over him again. Bad writing ? Or maybe she feels so elated over her victory that she feels in a good mood ? Enough to forgive his betrayal ? He did betray her, per her own words. And she was angry with him. And as Arya pointed out, she knows her claim will be threatened as long as he lives. Well she seems to forgive him. But not the others. She goes on about wanting them to rule side by side and for a split second I thought ‘oh she’s gonna off him’. That’s the big twist. He’s not killing her, she’ll make an attempt. Except no she really was in love all over again. Consistency ? Think again.

How does Jon respond ? With his favorite sentence. ‘You are my queen’. Duty duty duty. But no ‘I love you’. Thank the Gods. Because that at least leaves room for interpretation and is a remnant of consistency carrying over from Jon’s behaviour from Seasons 7 and 8. For those who cling onto the lovestruck fool theory, it works. The general audience stopped there. And for those who wish to find a way to tie all of this, it leaves just enough to try and understand Jon. As everyone pointed out, blocking his point of view was a huge mistake. Strangely the show tries to satisfy everyone but ends up frustrating everybody instead by relying too much on the fans’ ability to figure everything out themselves and expecting them to find the truth. Sometimes just spelling it loud and clear works better. Anyway Jon protects himself by appealing to Dany’s sense of entitlement. And proceeds to do the deed. His reaction to it and how he fares for the rest of the episode is thankfully consistent with who he is as character. Kit Harington really played it well. Once again, it works whether or not he really was in love with her. If he really loved Dany, the tears and the angst and the guilt all work themselves out on their own. If he didn’t, it still works in terms of the man he is and what he has done - a man of honor who has committed the highest treason, a protector of the innocents (this plays into his final fate as he returns with the people he spent so many seasons trying to protect) who has murdered an unarmed woman (to save thousands of innocents but still…) Too bad Jaime isn’t around anymore to give him a prep talk.

But what’s interesting there - and I finally get to the main point of this - is the presence of Sansa despite her physical absence. If there are so many downsides to this way of making fans analyze and guess instead of simply telling it the way it is, it is still amusing and interesting to try decoding and admiring it when it’s properly done. Per their own admission, Sansa is one of the producers’ favorite characters and they have done her mostly right - certainly not perfectly, not even admirably, but she fares much better than the rest of the cast. The relationship between Jon and Sansa has been one of the most important on the show, ever since they reunited back in Season 6, retook their ancestral home as a team and ruled it as a team. The dynamics established between them has been an important part of Seasons 6 and 7 as it was shown that they were often at odds with each other as essentially two strangers rediscovering themselves but that the partnership could potentially lead to greatness if allowed the time to develop. Unfortunately it didn’t achieve its potential. So much foreshadowing, so many Ned/Catelyn parallels… All wasted away. Or was it really ? Game of Thrones has always been about the be-careful-what-you-wish-for trope. And not fulfilling the potential of Jon and Sansa as a ruling team also works with the bittersweet ending which basically denies everybody their wishes. At best, the characters end up with satisfying situations but not perfect ones. Perhaps it was best to leave Jon and Sansa in this state rather than explicitly declare them in the end. We all saw what happened with explicit relationships. Sure it’s frustrating but Jon and Sansa were always about the subtlety of subtext, analysis and interpretation. In that regard, if indeed the producers were trying to set up the pair during Seasons 6 and 7, then Season 8 did not destroy them - which is more than can be said for the show’s flagship pairing - but it didn’t exactly prepare the ground the way the two previous seasons did. Subtlety was still the keyword but it largely took a step back compared to the rest. Blame it on the shortened amount of episodes.

It was established clearly that Sansa plays an important part in Jon’s life. Season 8 reminds viewers of this in the season premiere. Unfortunately, it does not seem to explicitly go anywhere. Except, once again, we are supposed to look deeper than what we see on screen. Astute fans have deduced that Jon’s dismissive behaviour towards Sansa was really his own way of protecting her against Daenerys. That again is brought up in the series finale where both Arya and Tyrion mention Sansa as a potential dissident to her reign - the notion of how Jon will deal with protecting his sister from her. Dany has low-key threatened Sansa several times and certainly does not view her favorably - she blames her for Jon’s treason, for Varys and she does not like her relationship with Tyrion, she knows Sansa wants the North to secede from the rest of the Kingdoms and she knows how much the North respects her. All of this points to Dany targeting Sansa next had she had the opportunity. This was a running theory throughout the entire season and even the potential snapping point for Jon, were he to choose between his family and Dany. None of it happens but the eventuality of it is adressed in the episode. Daenerys mentions Winterfell in her opening speech and tell me that your minds did not automatically switch to Sansa. Not Bran, not Arya. Sansa. Because Sansa is now representative of Winterfell and the North more than any other person still alive at this point. Even absent from the entirety of Episode 5 and the aftermath in King’s Landing, Sansa’s specter looms over Jon - and Jon in particular. He definitely thinks of her when he hears the name of Winterfell. The show established their relationship such as she’s now closely associated with him in a way neither she and Arya or Jon and Arya are. That’s not to diminish Arya’s bond with her brother and sister but Seasons 7 and 8 have established that she is a changed woman, whose relationship with her sister and brother may be still loving but there’s a melancholy to Arya that pushes her towards other horizons, to seek her purpose beyond mere revenge.

‘Try telling Sansa’, Arya says. To which Jon says nothing because he knows Sansa will never bow. Not after something like this. He himself knows as well but he is trapped. He’s hopeless for himself but the main focus is Sansa. Not even Bran or Arya who’s standing there in front of him and who’s certainly not about to bow either but no, once again Sansa is the focal point. Sansa really permeates the first part of the episode while being absent. Too bad the recently released script [good thing this thing waited in my drafts for so long] does not make it explicit but it is not hard to connect the dots. Next, Tyrion resorts to mentioning Jon’s family as a last attempt to sway him. Both ‘sisters’ are mentioned first before Tyrion zeroes in on Sansa - perhaps because he knows her best - but still it works. This time Jon plays the obedient subservient version of himself and says she doesn’t get to choose. The switching between seemingly Political!Jon and Dumb!Jon makes it hard to keep tabs. Then finally the big moment between Dany and Jon. And again, Sansa is present without ever being physically there. Jon adopts a similar pattern to Tyrion in his attempt to appease Dany. First the question of the rightness of the massacre in King’s Landing, the forgiveness to prove that she is not only fire and blood and finally, family. Jon does not explicitly mention his siblings but really, the 'everyone else who think they know what’s good’ is for Sansa mainly. It also works for Arya, for Bran, for Sam, all potential opponents to Dany, but really it’s all about Sansa, who is the last ruler in Westeros competent and loved enough to hold the power necessary to pretend to know what’s good. Dany implicitly targets Winterfell - and Sansa. Arya mentions Sansa. Then Tyrion. Finally Jon implicitly asks Dany ‘And what of my sister ? What about Sansa ?’ Her response ? She doesn’t get to choose. No matter how competent she is, no matter how loved and respected she is, no matter that she’s the Lady of Winterfell, commandant of the largest Kingdom in Westeros, allied to many Great Houses, no matter the fact that she is Jon’s own family. If she dares oppose, she doesn’t get to choose. She’ll bow or she’ll die. And that’s finally the turning point for Jon. He kills Dany to protect those who also think they know good. On this, the script at least acknowledges the people whom Jon ‘loves the most’; perhaps - and most likely - an unintentional contrast but a contrast nonetheless between Dany, the woman he loves and Sansa, Arya and Bran, the people he loves the most.

The rest of the episode sets Sansa as indeed the last competent ruler of Westeros and I thought for a moment that she would get the Seven Kingdoms. But she settles for the North, the only Kingdom she cares about. Sansa makes it clear that she still stands by Jon; the implications of her short statement about the thousand of Northmen ready to fight if Jon were to be hurt are huge. Upon hearing her brother’s imprisonment, Sansa commandeered the remaining armies of the North (still amounting to thousands of men) and marched south, ready to start another war to save her brother. The girl who’d suffered so much in that city returned to a place full of traumatic memories for her brother, the girl who’d prayed for someone to do exactly that, when places were switched and who didn’t get her wish, decided to do the work herself. Of course, these implications are really just that and are glossed over by the final script but they are legitimate, interesting deductions we can make on the character. This again plays into the subtlety and underlines how strong Jon and Sansa’s relationship is. The guy has threatened and killed for the woman, waged war at her behest; and the woman has worked every way to protect the man, and she’s ready to start yet another war if it means saving him. Her sister is fully on board with the plan by the way.

Then the constrictions of the story call for Jon to go back to the Wall, never mind that the Wall is in the North, now an independant Kingdom under the rule of a Stark, his own kin, or that the Wall is under the jurisdiction of the Starks. Never mind thus that Sansa could legally do whatever she wants with Jon. The coronation scene was beautiful however and it really felt satisfying to watch Sansa be crowned and reflect on her harrowing journey. Sometimes, it is hard to believe when you see the writing and what they put the poor girl through that she is one of D.B. Weiss and David Benioff’s favorites; but I believe that whatever fault there was, it was either demanded by the story, or it wasn’t done with the full intention of hurting just for the sake of hurting. It was merely the result of biased views and opinions. But every one is entitled to that. In the end, Sansa comes up on top, crowned Queen in the North, [a big middle finger to the haters], the sole master of her own agency, and she has earned the respect of everyone, no longer a pawn, no longer a simple player, but a full-on force to be reckoned with on the board. Her hair and costume notably are the final steps to becoming her own person while also not losing this habit she has of incorporating the influence of those around her into her clothes. As such, for the first time, she lets down her hair completely, free from any braid and thus free from trying to emulate Cersei, her mother, her aunt, Margaery… She is Sansa Stark, First of her Name, Queen in the North. By contrast, her coronation gown pays homage to those who loved her and shaped her - Jon, Arya, her parents and deceased brothers, Bran… - and you can especially notice that finally, Sansa reverts to the blue-ish colors of the North and ditches the black dresses. How disappointing then that for a House that liked to hammer on us that the pack survives, they are all separated and no one we know is by Sansa’s side when she is crowned. But while I was personally upset about it at first, I’ve come to view it as a logical evolution of the story. ‘The pack survives’ was Ned’s motto and he imparted it to his children, who have tried to follow it as best as was possible. But this is not Ned’s story anymore, it’s his children’s and now, they are ready to properly live. Now that they have defeated their enemies, now that their world is ready for peace, they can let go of these words if they wish to do so. Each of them has gone on their own formative journey that has enabled them to be able to stand on their own. They don’t need one another to survive. Because the time is not for surviving anymore. Now is the time to live.

But where the open ending works in our favour is that nothing prevents us to imagine Jon and Sansa seeing each other in the future and indeed, it’s hard to imagine they won’t. While Arya is sure to come back at some point, once again, she and Bran are the farthest away and we are back to a similar situation to Seasons 5 and 6 with Sansa in Winterfell and Jon at/not far from the Wall. They are geographically the closest and Sansa being Queen, can indeed do as it pleases her regarding Jon. Jon seems content to peace out and settle down with boyfriend Tormund - another ginger - and it makes narrative sense that he would go North, the ‘real North’ that he has in his blood in Tormund’s words, and that he would go with the Wildlings, the only people who accepted him exactly for who he was and won’t even bother about his parentage, or about what atrocities he did in the South. For them, he will always stay the crow who saved them, the Lord Commander who opened the Wall for them, the only man who ever united the Wildlings and the Northmen to stand and fight together. He can be himself with them. But should he sometime want to come back to Winterfell, you can bet your money that Sansa is not going to forbid it. Keep also in mind that when the series ends, these characters are just beginning their life; they are in their bare twenties. They have their whole life ahead of them. Sansa, who was so focused on love and motherhood when she was younger, has her life before her now to think about it with all the freedom she wants. Jon can rest, enjoy life, fall in love again if he wishes (Tormund, hem…)

[Yes that is a very disturbing thought when you think about it. Westeros was torn over while the big boys and big girls played - the Eddards, Roberts, Tywins, Cerseis of the world - and then they were gone and it was up to the surviving children to face off the end of the world. Arya killed the Night King and she is only 18. Bran is King of the Six Kingdoms at 17. Sansa and Jon, the eldest, are 20 and 23 and have waged war and endured much trauma. One of them was raped, the other killed and resurrected. Daenerys conquered the world and saw her short life end in her 23rd year.]

And finally, we get to the last goodbye. Here again, there is lot to observe, especially in light of the released script which differs from the final screen version. First off, Jon stops and inhales a sharp breath when he sees his family. Interesting. Personally, when Sansa apologized, I also thought it was for spilling Jon’s secret. Thus the script “confirms” this and Kit Harington seems to play by it as he seemingly looks conflicted and still a bit resentful. A callback to their first reunion with a repeat of the ‘there’s nothing to forgive’ would have been lovely - I immediately thought of it when I first saw the scene - but I understand Jon’s point of view. Daenerys’ unraveling stemmed in part from the repercussions of Jon’s parentage spreading out. Again, the finale tries to appeal to everyone. Jon/Dany lovers can read into this as Jon being angry he had to kill the woman he loved. Another interpretation is Sansa apologizing for Jon’s exile to the Wall. It also works because the scene comes shortly after Tyrion explaining how Arya and Sansa tried and failed to fight the final decision.

But what’s really interesting is the final goodbye. Jon doesn’t respond to the apology but Harington makes a slight - perhaps involontary - movement of the head which can be read as a nod. A comforting thought for those who wish Jon and Sansa to part on good terms. But then Harington graces us with just that and more. He instead tries to change the subject and finally, openly validates her as the best leader the North can hope for. Sansa spins this back to him and makes it clear she still considers Jon as the King in the North. The script does not dwell long on Sansa and Jon’s goodbyes, instead focusing on Arya, Jon’s favorite sibling. While explicitly stating that Jon knows Sansa loves him, it then just reads ‘Jon and Sansa embrace’. The final screen version gave us much more as we see Sansa embrace Jon, and Jon’s initial resistance to the hug crumble as he gives in and fiercely hugs her back, burying his head in her shoulder in the process. It’s very interesting that in every hug they share we get to see both Jon and Sansa’s faces. It really allows us to see the full range of emotions on Sophie Turner and Harington’s faces. This particular part was not scripted and is either the choice of Harington or the choice of the directors, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss themselves. In any case, they kept it. Another interesting thing to note : the cue Winterfell that starts roughly as Jon and Sansa hug also played during their most emotional scene in the sixth season finale The Winds of Winter.

The writers of Game of Thrones have been the target of much scrutiny following the backlash of the final season and I’m not going to argue that the writing was sometimes sloppy. However, I will give credit where credit is due and for all its faults, the episode was not that bad. Benioff and Weiss were thrust in an impossible situation where they became the scapegoats of every single default singled out in this final season; but it could have been much worse and we need to remember that screenwriters and authors do not have to answer to fans. They write the story they want to tell, we’re just here for the ride. Whether we’re satisfied or not is ultimately not their main concern. Back to Jon and Sansa, Benioff and Weiss have in my opinion written the pair beautifully and kept them consistent to the end. If indeed they were subtly trying to create an item out of the two or to point them as a potential couple, they did it properly during the sixth and seventh seasons; come Season 8, it was about following G.R.R. Martin’s guidelines. Maybe in the end, it was really the tragedy of Jon and Dany. But still, Benioff and Weiss wrote Jon and Sansa well, exploiting the chemistry between Harington and Turner to give us all too rare but important scenes full of subtext. I’ve written about the season premiere Winterfell about how much could be read into Jon and Sansa’s interactions. I personally think that The Iron Throne is perhaps the second most-charged episode this season in terms of analysis regarding to Jon and Sansa. The subtlety of the relationship is kept until the end and we’re still left satisfied and unsatisfied at the same time. Jon and Sansa love each other as siblings ? Of course. This scene establishes it. Jon and Sansa maybe love each other as more than siblings ? Well… not explicit but the scene does nothing to deny it or the possibility of it in the future. Especially when Kit and Benioff and Weiss include yet another unscripted tidbit. After Jon has finished his goodbyes, the script just states that he steps on the boat as his family watches him go. In the final episode, we see a shoulder-shot of Jon looking back one last time, distraught. Who is he looking at ? Well of course, you guessed it. He’s looking at Sansa, whose right shoulder was framed into that shot. Then he looks in the direction of Arya and Bran and then, one last time, back to Sansa. And as if to confirm it, as we move on to the next shot of the Starks watching him go, who appears first ? Well of course, you guessed it. Sansa, who’s also looking very distraught.

And of course, the lingering look Jon glances even as Sansa is framed in the shot is a well-known storytelling device. The trope of people looking back to their loved ones, whether with an established love or one still in the making, is a very common trope that has been used several times in the show, and even once already for Jon and Sansa. So yes, I will still support Benioff and Weiss at least on this; they might have ruined Jon’s character in surface; they might have written the story better; perhaps they could have done even better by Sansa. But they have done her right and they did write Jon and Sansa well. I would not also exclude Martin still hiding some final aspects in the books or asking them not to explicitly show everything to keep some kind of secrecy on the last books despite the show being completed. He has said that the show would end like the books. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all will be shown; that is pretty much a given when you see all the substories and deviations from books to show. How much of a stretch is it then to suppose that Martin told Benioff and Weiss to subtly prepare Jon and Sansa - thus explaining and validating all the foreshadowing in the books and why they have said that their relationship was ‘crucial to watch’, all the ‘they skirt around the true tension between them’, ‘all is subtext’ and why the relationship was explored over three seasons - but in the end, told them to just commit to subtlety instead of a full-on reveal, so as to keep that secret amongst others for the books as part of the full story?

Whatever the truth here, Benioff and Weiss allowed those unscripted additions that help shape Jon and Sansa more than they were in the original script. What exactly prompted these changes, why and whether it was on Harington or the directors, we may never know. But Harington has already acknowledged the chemistry between Turner and himself and stated he’d like to partner with her on screen again. Add this to the list of unexplained acting choices he made during the past seasons. Puppy eyes, big sighs, long forehead kiss… Let’s take a trip back down memory lane. Oh and of course, they both failed geography.