had more than 42 million viewers worldwide, the largest audience ever for an artistic work. The TV series scored another precedent: more than 1,400,000 viewers were unhappy with the ending that culminated more than 80 hours of drama in what was probably television's most thrilling, most breathtaking, most blood pressure raising production of mighty battles, fraught confrontations, impassioned dialogues (even when whispered) and, from time to time, love and sex scenes to round out the picture of the human condition with all its sweetness and bitterness, its courage and cowardice, its patriotism and treason, its beauty and ugliness. All those people insisted that the last episode should be remade with a more satisfactory ending. Maybe they don't want the series to end. Maybe they want to give it another lease on life if only for the sake of addicts of this kind of series which, according to convention, should have nice and tidy endings. If novels, plays and films and, sometimes, statues and paintings sometimes serve as reference works for political analysts, then Game of Thrones was more than an exciting television series that won many prizes, an Emmy above all. It was an entire compendium on political studies, intelligence studies, war and peace strategies, battle plans engaging weapons from daggers to dragons and, of course, plots and conspiracies. Many political experts and commentators turned the world of the dynasties of the seven kingdoms of Westeros and Essos into a political laboratory consisting of the ruses and strategies in the power struggle for the Iron Throne and the weapons of an ancient era used to attain ends and objectives common to all eras. As for lay audiences, they found nothing to disappoint them except that ending which failed to give the brave and good Jon Snow the throne he merits for all his valiant deeds and noble sacrifices and failed to give the erstwhile brave and good Daenerys Targaryen, freer of slaves and stunningly beautiful iron lady, the opportunity to marry her valiant lover and share with him the great throne as befits TV serials with happy endings. What happens, instead, is that the hero kills the heroine — or slaughters her, to be more precise — after she turns from liberation leader to fascist commander bent on murder, burning down cities and monopolising the throne to the exclusion of all, friend or foe. In other words, power prevailed over love. In her article in The New Yorker on 22 May 2019, “What Game of Thrones Could Have Taught Us About Electoral Politics,” Amy Davidson Sorkin observes that the resolution to eight seasons of war and plotting occurred in an assembly of “prince-electors”, or something akin to a council of the wise, who convened in the Dragon Pit in the city of King's Landing in order to elect a successor to the Iron Throne. Their choice fell on Bran Stark, AKA “Bran the Broken” because he was crippled from the waist down in the first episode of season one (“Winter Is Coming”) after having been pushed off a tower and, ever since, having to rely on a wheelchair or people to carry him. Audiences read Bran's election as a victory of paralysis over health and mobility, of frailty over strength, of impotence over potency. But Sorkin has offered another reading of what was effectively an early form of an electoral process. The choice of Bran was not about “strength” but about “wisdom” prevailing. Bran was the first victim in Game of Thrones. Yet, despite all he suffered during the many twists and turns of the tale, he ultimately attained the throne. Moreover, he is endowed with metaphysical powers that enable him to see the future. He has the eyes of the “Three-Eyed Raven” enabling him to see the whole from far above, to discern good from evil and to tell truth from fiction. Do we have a virtue of the electoral process here? If so, it's another story. The series does not lend itself to an approach in the current global debate on liberalism and democracy and on whether these ideologies and their practices are on the verge of the same fate as socialism. However, the epic fantasy does lend itself to approaches to other difficult questions that continue to trouble people and their political elites in the world today, such as the bases of authority and the sources of legitimacy. Plato teaches us that authority and legitimacy are rooted in the “Law” because that is what separates civilisation from barbarity. The world of Westeros and Essos seems to present a condition somewhere in between and, therefore, the convening of an assembly to elect a ruler among peers marks a transition from the state of barbarity to civilisation. Sorkin believes that the council's choice of Bran could have been more understandable and perhaps more exciting for audiences frustrated with the ending had Bran Stark been a teller of his own story from the outset. This would have given him much more credibility with respect to the other protagonists who all had stories of their own and others to tell. This is all the more the case given the central importance given to narrative, or the media spin, used to justify things from massacres to marriages. The storyline packs plenty of melodramatic surprises about illegitimate offspring and their discovery of biological parents long after rivalries and hatreds wreaked their havoc. These and other human questions present themselves throughout. But, essentially, the whole series unfolds on three planes: the political terrain as shaped by the demography, geography and political order in which the rivalries between dynasties and lords and vassals play out; the patterns of relations between the seven political entities or kingdoms vying with each other over the throne; and the relationship between all of these and the forces of nature (the “winter that is coming” or climate change in our times) and the forces of history. The latter, here, are represented by the dead who rise from their graves to fight and kill, perhaps in continuation of the wave of “zombie” films or perhaps to serve as metaphors for other questions related to what is history and what lays ahead in the future. Technology plays an important role in these multifaceted interplays. Sorkin draws attention to the role played by the fire breathing dragon, Drogon, which saves Daenerys Targaryen but also is instrumental in shaping the balances of power, though not definitively in the age of Westeros just as is the case in our current age in which the role of airpower is exaggerated as determinant of the outcome of wars. Ultimately, the battle in Westeros is resolved when Arya Stark kills the Night King using a dagger, which was probably mankind's first instrument of death. Be that as it may, the series is definitely worth seeing for the sagacity it contains and more. 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The writer is chairman of the board, CEO and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies.
