Spoilers below for the “Game of Thrones” series finale.
“Game of Thrones” is over, and Daenerys Targaryen is dead. But is she?
Before you roll your eyes, fans of the show love conspiracy theories about characters not truly being dead. Plenty thought Jaime and Cersei Lannister somehow managed to escape a castle falling on them in Season 8’s “The Bells,” until we saw their bodies in the series finale.
It’s natural to ponder mortality, since this series is known for death fake-outs. (Remember Arya getting stabbed and falling into water in Season 6, or Jaime falling into water in Season 7’s “The Spoils of War”?)
But whether or not the writers intended this, the ending of the story is ambiguous. Sure, Jon stabbed her. She’s definitely dead.
Still, there’s a major plot hole, and that’s the existence of Red Priests. It’s been established that they have the power to resurrect people — see Jon Snow and Beric Dondarrion. It’s also been established that they’re just as interested in Daenerys as they were in Jon. Remember in Season 6, when Red Priestess Kinvara (Ania Bukstein) showed up to establish that she’s all in on Team Dany?
That scene was never revisited, and Kinvara has not shown up again. It’s also never been mentioned that she’s dead — so she’s still out there somewhere in Essos.
With other characters like Jaime and Cersei, Red Priests have never been part of their story lines. So the show has not invited us to see that as a possibility. But for Daenerys, it has. If the story wanted us to accept her death as a definitive ending, then someone should have said something along the lines of “Too bad the Red Priests are all dead!”
Ignoring the “Cursed Child” play, there’s a reason that J.K. Rowling conveniently smashed the Time Turners in the Harry Potter novels — because that was too big of an answer to the question of “Why can’t that just solve every problem?” Smashing them eliminated that possibility.
If “Game of Thrones” wanted us to stop considering resurrection, it needed to kill the Red Priests. And it didn’t do that. It also didn’t destroy Dany’s body, but rather had her dragon fly her away.
What’s to stop him from taking her to Kinvara?
As far as we know, Red Priests are still out there and some of them are still Team Dany. So the chance of her resurrection isn’t so much a conspiracy theory as it is logic, based on facts of this world. It’s a part of the story that it seems to be asking us to just ignore now. Like many other plot lines this season, it’s something the show “kind of forgot.” Let’s pretend Red Priests were never interested in Dany, that scene with Kinvara never happened.
But since when have you known a “Game of Thrones” fan to ignore something? Whether or not the writers intended it (they likely didn’t), the ending is ambiguous.
And if Dany came back, she’d be none too pleased with Jon Snow.
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