| Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in HBO's "Game of Thrones." (Helen Sloan/HBO) | Every week, I answer a question from Monday's Act Four Live chat in this Wednesday newsletter. For the next several weeks, as the show winds to a close, this newsletter may be a mite "Game of Thrones"-centric: I know it's not what all of you watch, but long-term Act Four readers have been discussing the franchise passionately with me for years, and its end is a big deal for all of us. That said, if you have questions about other subjects you badly want answered, submit them for next week's chat here. You can read the transcript for the April 22 chat here. This week, a reader asks about a mission gone awry. | | It's interesting and maybe surprising to me that Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) seems to be feeling now that what she's really out to do is get herself on the Throne. Particularly between when she lost her first Khaleesiship (when Khal Drogo [Jason Momoa] died) and went on to liberate a lot of formerly oppressed people in Essos, it seemed to me like she felt a calling to liberate people throughout the world from, you know, being ruled by kings and enslavers and aristocracy (or plutocracy, too) generally. Do you think I was just reading too much into her earlier drive or motivations from a 21st-century USA perspective, i.e. wishfully thinking she wanted to fight for what I might personally think of as liberation? Or do you think her perspective has been intentionally presented as having shifted in these ways during the course of the show? I do think that she was *first* shown to us as just wanting to (a) survive and (b) retake the Throne for the Targaryens, when Viserys (Harry Lloyd) was still alive (and trying to control/manipulate her toward those purposes himself). But I really had the impression her goals had evolved in later seasons, and maybe now they've evolved back closer to where they were in Season 1? | | One of the things that's been dramatically disappointing but potentially morally interesting about Dany's return to Westeros is the extent to which both she and "Game of Thrones" seem to have entirely forgotten about Essos. Dany has not exactly been checking in with Daario Naharis (Michiel Huisman) about the status of Meereen's transition to a representative government, nor does she seem overly preoccupied with how the former slaves of Yunkai are doing in her absence. | | | Some of that is logistics: The show doesn't have main characters left on the continent to follow such that it would justify the expense of shooting scenes there, unless we're going to see a vast human retreat across the Narrow Sea following a decision to cede Westeros to the Night King. But some of it also has the uneasy tinge of a moral retreat. Dany may have intended to learn to be a queen in Essos before she returned to Westeros, but she does not seem to have fully absorbed the lessons the continent had to teach her. The tactics of brute conquest she used in Essos won't work in Westeros, a continent where she actually wants to stay. And uniting people who have been free for generations is rather different than liberating grateful slaves and crushing their masters. | | Dany herself said in "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" that the Iron Throne has been the guiding goal of her life. Perhaps her time as a liberating "Mhysa" was a deviation from Dany's true norm, a temporary diversion from her Targaryen nature rather than proof she had transcended her lineage and its taint. | | Maybe this will be the case. Or maybe it will be that a show as big as "Game of Thrones" can't actually tie up all of its loose ends, even with four episodes, some of them super-sized, left to come. "Game of Thrones" has been a series I love, but not one without sprawl and flaws. "Game of Thrones" may have lost its plot when it comes to the larger themes of liberation and a different time of governance. Or it may be preparing us for a descent into darkness. | | | Recommended for you | | | | Start and end your week with important and empowering stories for women in the know. Delivered on Mondays and Thursdays. | | | | | | | | | | |
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