The season finale of Game of Thrones began with the great summit meeting of all of the players to discuss the common enemy beyond the wall. It ended with the Night King using his newly acquired zombie dragon to breach said wall and to turn the next and final season of the long running HBO fantasy epic into “The Walking Dead.” Some spoilers follow.
Never let a crisis pass as an opportunity
One of the many tragedies of “Game of Thrones” is how long it took for Jamie to realize that his sister Cersei was a raving psychopath. The two took away from the revelation that The Walking Dead were coming to kill everyone differently.
Jamie realized that they represented an existential threat beside which everything else pales. So he was genuinely shocked when Cersei walked in on him and, discovering that he was readying the Lannister Army to march north to confront the white walker horse, openly wondered if he was really that stupid. To be sure the judgment of anyone who would sleep with his own sister and she being a lunatic has to be called into question.
Cersei, you see, could be a student of Saul Alinsky in which she will always use a crisis as an opportunity. Instead of helping the other players against the white walker threat, she intends to shiv them in the back. She has become the Negan or the Governor of this zombie apocalypse.
Jamie, to his credit, will not be part of that.
How Littlefinger proved to be too clever by half
Meanwhile, at Winterfell, Littlefinger’s scheme to turn Sanda and Arya against one another so that he could slip into the former’s bed seemed to be coming to fruition. Litttlefinger, like Cersei, is not going to let a little thing like the zombie apocalypse shake him out of his old patterns.
So, imagine his surprise when Sanda accused him of treason and murder.
To be sure, tossing Aunt Lysa out the Moon Door was all for the best. The woman was quite insane. However, Sansa did not see it that way. Besides, Littlefinger also betrayed her father and sold her to Ramsey Bolton. So, while the master schemer whined and begged for mercy, Sansa nodded to Arya who proceeded to cross him off her list with a dagger across the throat.
As Littlefinger bled out, one can only imagine him wondering what went wrong.
The problem was that Littlefinger had underestimated her mark. Sansa has come a long way from the simpering girl who dreamed of knights and romance in a world of violence and betrayal. She is now ready to deal with the world as it is and not what she would wish it to be.
