Opinion: The final 35 minutes of Game of Thrones Finale should have been a full season

By Joe Skrebels

Complete annotations for the Game of Thrones series finale continue below.

To learn more about Game of Thrones, do not miss the most important questions of the final, or browse all IGN's episode review matches ever. You can also understand why the new Westeros chef could be a terrifying choice and why Drogon acted like he did in the final.

Drogon gently lifts Daenerys' body in his heel and flies under the gaze of Jon, who watches, tears stinging his eyes. the last dragon of the world (and its last dragon queen) has disappeared in the ash smoke that hangs over Blackwater Bay. Fade to black. That should have been the end of season 8.

I'm not saying that the next 35 minutes were neither worthy nor necessary, quite the opposite. For me, these final scenes – starring the rest of the casting of the Seven Kingdoms' systematic rise trying to determine what could and should come next – were as close as the epic of HBO was felt by his good old One day. It should have been more than 35 minutes

. These scenes seemed familiar to me: Tyrion managed to surpbad the silverware of the Kingdoms while she was still hindered; politicization and tense negotiations; satire while Sam's democratic dream was crushed and slices of history faded away with a stroke of the pen; brothers and sisters with just a hug, without being threatened by an imminent and terrifying death. And there were jokes! Do you remember those?

Before the zombie armies, the killings of dragons, even before the ghost murderers, that was what made Game of Thrones so compelling. It was a world built on the same kind of rules as ours, but without the constraints of history to make it predictable. Having a taste of it was nice, but ultimately without reward.

Like Laura Prudom, our reviewer, I felt strangely emotional to say goodbye to this still immense band of characters. In a way, Drogon managed to express the most palpable emotion in the finale, and the dragon faces are famous as illegible. An extra season – perhaps borrowing even GRRM's character-driven chapter techniques and dedicating an episode to each major cast member – would have largely contributed to the injection of the farewell pain that we expected to feel a few weeks ago.

It is interesting to see how this could have given the last decade a truly meaningful story. We spent so much time watching characters tell people how they want the world to change, but see so few of these final changes. A full season spent unraveling the repercussions of changing national horrors at each end of the Seven Kingdoms, not to mention the seismic effects of a change of government, would help create a tangible sense of a destination for this trip.

Do not be brief on the subject: what are the consequences of tearing the country apart? What about dornish separatism, loyal Lannisters, opportunistic bandits and displaced homes? Are people uncomfortable with the idea of ​​a Stark on both thrones? And where the heck was Bronn, and how did people react when he came forward and gave him one of the biggest castles in the area for not having had that a crossbow in a pub?

Honestly, I would have taken a full bottle for an episode of Tyrion, Gray Worm, the lords and ladies debating the future in the dragon post, with multiple claims on the throne, changes of policy, arguments and compromises. Basically, I want a game of thrones, but it's the west wing.

This is not even as if it would have been unusual for the series. The seasons of Game of Thrones have tended to be structured around a climax filled with action in the penultimate episode and a more thought out final episode. This notional season would simply be this structure in the macrocosm.

We probably never get a definitive answer as to why spectators David Benioff and DB Weiss thought the show was to end in eight seasons while HBO and George RR Martin wanted to do a lot more (although miiight has something to do with Star Wars), but I can not help thinking about something else. think it was in perspective at one point. I'm not totally against how the series was solved but, as in most of the last two seasons, she seemed to be stuck with the speed with which she had to do it. There is so much to see between these exceptional moments of coronation, condemnation and corruption (I really do not like Bronn), and it seems a pity we just have to imagine it.

But imagine it. Even if I disagree with the choices of his last season – both intrigue and rhythm – Game of Thrones, perhaps more than any other show of my life, remains one that inspires an imaginary fervor. The discussions about the water coolers after the episodes did not deal with what had happened, but about what could happen, and the theories of the fans had spread to become a wisdom accepted. In his wild swing, there was simply no time for Season 8 to allow this, at least beyond "what will happen next?" So it was nice, at the very least, to get an end that would imagine me again.

Joe Skrebels is the deputy editor of IGN in the UK and he realizes that he only wants all the action shows becoming The West Wing after a certain point. Follow him on Twitter .