The Same Things That Made Game of Thrones Great Make It Impossible for It to End Well

If you’re tired of feeling like Game of Thrones is making it obvious what’s going to happen in its final two episodes, try this for a surprising twist. Shakespeare’s tragedies give us characters with groundbreaking interiority and self-consciousness, plays that use familiar stories to limn the human condition, but they still end in sword duels and death. Game of Thrones has spent quite a bit of time this season reminding us of how the characters’ choices have led them to who they are now. Martin gave us both a story shaped by its relationship to genre tropes and characters with interiority who behaved in unexpected ways that frequently threatened to break the genre’s mechanics. When the final episode airs, there will likely be surprises—the original audience for Hamlet probably found Gertrude’s death shocking, too—but very few of those surprises will reveal new sides to these characters.