Hey folks, as promised, Wes and I have released a continuation of episode 216 on Game of Thrones,

a casual discussion about 40 minutes long recorded the morning after the finale aired,

where we reflect upon how that ending affects the overall theme of the show.

As a preview, I'm going to play you a few minutes here of clips from that conversation

to give you a taste of the kind of topics we brought up.

Game of Thrones was never really about power.

It was about the audience enjoying in a soap opera kind of way, powerful people and the

machinations of powerful people and all that.

But in the last two episodes, it did become about something which was kind of weird but

also interesting and definitely in the final episode by really going against their expectations,

not just by killing off people in the way that Game of Thrones has done, but in sort of

saying, yeah, this whole thing is stupid.

This whole power struggle, it's all just a waste.

They're kind of telling the audience, you're a whole vicariously living in this world

of people killing each other and defeating each other and all that stuff.

It's a critique of the audience, I think, as well, on the whole game of watching the game.

A lot of people were talking about from the beginning, like, why don't they just have

a democracy and the fact that actually gets explicitly brought up and all the nobles

laugh about it.

That was...

When Sam says that, I'm like, oh my god, they're not going where are they?

Are they really going to go there?

...