It takes a special kind of writing to make a development that’s been literally years in the making feel like it came out of nowhere.
At its best, Game of Thrones’ most shocking plot developments are surprising because of how completely they betray the characters’ expectations, even though they feel tragically inevitable in retrospect. By making the audience empathize with the characters, the show makes the audience share their preoccupations and assumptions about what’s happening next, and thus share their shock when it all goes horribly wrong.
It’s this approach that made the show such an effective adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s books—and why the show’s last and biggest twist feels like such a misfire.
On one level, Daenerys’ decision to burn down King’s Landing shouldn’t really come as a surprise, because the show has been obviously telegraphing it for the better part of three seasons now. Dany herself endorsed the idea back in Season 6, when she paraphrases Khal Drogo’s big speech about ransacking Westeros in order to fire up the Dothraki, and it feels like Tyrion’s primary role in the show for the past couple seasons has been to repeatedly warn her against solving all her problems by immolating everybody.
If the show were operating true to form, they wouldn’t play up the idea so much unless it was all a smokescreen and something entirely different was going to happen instead. So maybe the real twist was that things play out exactly as expected. Which would be a defensible creative choice if the plot twist itself made any kind of sense.
Almost the strangest part of Dany’s decision is what she does after deciding to start burning anything. The obvious move would be to fly straight to the Red Keep and melt it down, but instead she spends like ten minutes setting flame to random neighborhoods, and then kind of halfheartedly flames the Red Keep a bit before she goes back to trashing Flea Bottom.
Pretty much any other chain of events here would have made more sense. If she had decided to attack the Red Keep first, that would make a kind of logic since it’s where Cersei presumably is. Conversely, she’d decided to destroy everything except the Red Keep, one could suppose it’s because her ancestors built that keep and you can’t sit the Iron Throne if the thing is buried in rubble. And it would have made way more sense if she’d just not burned down the city at all, since not only had she already won, but the rapid and total surrender of Cersei’s forces didn’t exactly reinforce her previous narrative that no one will ever accept her.
So why did events play out the way they did? I would guess it was for the drama.
Game of Thrones has kind of built its brand around huge setpiece moments that defy audience expectations, and for being almost nihlistically brutal. So on the one hand, having Daenerys win the Iron Throne, marry Jon, and rule wisely and well really would have been off-brand.
What’s tragic about this—on a bigger, meta level—is that, on a higher narrative level, having Daenerys be a brutal serial arsonist makes perfect sense. The showrunners are totally correct to note her borderline sociopathic reaction to seeing her brother horrifically murdered by having molten gold dumped on his head, which was only the first of many instances involving horrible murder by fire, most of which she was directly responsible for.
The problem is that the show spent the better part of the last two seasons showing her taking a different path. She doesn’t burn King’s Landing back in the middle of Season 7 when it would have made sense, instead rushing to the North to bail Jon out even before he’s agreed to bend the knee. By the start of the eighth season, the show is presenting her as a thoroughly reasonable person who even seems to feel kind of bad when she learns that Samwell’s brother was one of the people she immolated for refusing to pledge himself to her.
All of that is still consistent with someone who might decide to raze a city if she had an actual reason to, but it provides no explanation for why she’d do it when she had no reason to.
There’s a way this could have worked, in which Dany—who before now is used to being welcomed as a liberator basically wherever she goes—gets frustrated with the people of Westeros’ refusal to recognize how great she is and decides to just to just burn anyone who gets in her way—a course that spirals out of control when people just stubbornly refuse to stop resisting. She already came very close to doing this in Meereen, opting to just leave and go to Westeros instead—after basically everyone she met, from her brother to Barristan to Varys to Tyrion to Yara Greyjoy, assured her that people would welcome the return of Targeryan rule.
And I think that’s what the show wanted to do, and might have managed it if these last two seasons had a longer episode count and better writers. Instead, that angle got compressed into an awkward arc in which Daenerys and Jon Snow fall in love and then she burns down a city because he can’t kiss her passionately enough.
The irony of all this is that the show totally failed to make her decision a surprise. Instead, they hyped it breathlessly, to the point of sticking a voiceover at the start of the episode in which a bunch of people talk about how crazy Targaeryns can get. The only thing it accomplished by spending so much time trying to misdirect the audience is to make the ultimate plot twist seem nonsensical.