As a creator, the second you spot a cliché, it's your job to cut its head off. Patterns develop because they work, but repetition has diminishing returns in art, a medium that thrives on dynamic unpredictability. The more you do something, the more your audience expects it, the more tired they are by it. Patterns and clichés are poison to creativity, and Game of Thrones is looking a little like Joffrey at the Purple Wedding right now.
For five seasons, Game of Thrones has operated under a very recognizable pattern: the ninth, penultimate episode is a balls-out, jaw-dropping shocker, and the season finale is a cool-down used both for tying up loose ends and setting the gears in motion for the coming season. Or, to phrase that differently, the second-to-last episode is very good, and the finale is just fine. Ned Stark's execution, the Battle of the Blackwater, the Red Wedding, the Battle of Castle Black were all penultimate episodes, and they were each followed up with some mild chess-piece-moving and some moments featuring Daenerys—moments the show no doubt wanted us to accept as "big," but that never actually felt that way. Season one did introduce us to dragons, and season four did feature Tyrion putting an arrow through his father Tywin's heart, but even those developments paled in comparison to events that came before them.
The original thinking behind Game of Thrones putting their seasons' best moments before the finale was smart and radical. (The Wire and Sopranos also employed this strategy from time to time.) TV watchers are intelligent; they know how seasons generally work, how showrunners are incentivized to withhold the best plot points until the very end. When tension boils in pre-finale episodes of any show, the viewer, if subconsciously, undercuts that with the presupposition that the moment is merely a small storm before the hurricane. They won't kill Arya right now, the viewer thinks, and they're usually right. By moving their most shocking moments to the penultimate episode though, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss subverted that expectation, broke a well-worn pattern, and caused their viewers to feel genuine shock, grief, and awe.
But now that they've done that four out of five seasons—last season was outlier in which the finale eclipsed the episode that preceded it—the unexpected has become expected.
This coming Sunday's episode, the ninth of the sixth season, is titled "The Battle of the Bastards." Coupled with the episode preview and the show's history, it's safe to assume all of the episode will be devoted to this battle, between Ramsay Bolton and Jon Snow. That's not the problem: Thrones' previous battle-bottle episodes, "Blackwater" in season two and "The Watchers on the Wall" in season four, are certified classics, and an entire episode built around the endlessly hyped faceoff between Ramsay and Jon could top both of them. The mere prospect alone of Jon—or even better, Sansa—castrating Ramsay and brutally exacting justice on him is going to be worth the price of admission.
The problem is, what will Thrones have left for its finale when the dust in the North settles? Why should we have to accept the trade-off of a mediocre finale for a great penultimate episode?
This season, hopefully Game of Thrones is planning to take a tip from Breaking Bad, a show that routinely topped their shocking second-to-last episodes with even more shocking finales. Walter watched Jane choke to death in a ninth episode, and in the next her dad caused two planes to crash together and rain bodies and teddy bears onto Walter's backyard; "Ozymandias," the most heartbreaking episode of the series, came two episodes before the show's series finale. "The Battle of the Bastards" can and should be jaw-dropping, twisted, and breathtaking, but it can't be this season's peak, not if Benioff and Weiss want season six to be anything but a letdown.
That may be the real reason why we're placing so much importance on these last two episodes of the season. After a very good start to season six, which was capped off with an all-time episode in "The Door," Game of Thrones has been notably bare. Things that appeared to be building towards huge payoffs—the Lannisters and Tullys joining forces to combat the Faith Militant, Jaime coming face-to-face with the Blackfish at Riverrun, Arya and whatever was going on at the House of Black and White for the past two seasons—were resolved quickly and quietly. The middle episodes of season six haven't been bad, but they haven't been memorable. And if the show is going to ask that much of its viewers, to be patient for what has amounted to almost a month, then it should be prepared to reward them—far more than they have in the past.
Thinking optimistically, the show has at least seemingly put itself in a position to produce a finale that exceeds the episode that precedes it. "Cersei faces her trial," is how HBO is describing the finale for now. More exciting than the trial is what it might incite: all-out war in the capital city of Westeros. Hints have been dropped about Cersei tapping into the caches of wildfire that sit beneath King's Landings. There's a feeling that if she's going down, she's going to try to take anything and everything with her, and that may have some serious, very real consequences, ie. her brother/lover Jaime needing to put a sword through her back for the good of the people. We also haven't returned to the Tower of Joy since episode three of this season—that, combined with a report that "we will definitely know who Jon Snow's parents are by the end of season six," points to "R+L=J," the biggest, most central theory in Game of Thrones, finally being confirmed.
Those two events might be big enough to make up a Game of Thrones season six finale that surpasses the penultimate episode. But if the show is planning to just stick to what they've done in the past, we might as well get our bricks out right now.
