You know what I hate? I hate when professional sportscasters tell sports fans to chill out over a bad call that cost their team a championship because, after all, “it’s only a game.” Mind you, I don’t disagree with the sentiment.  I just object to the messenger. That professional sportscaster has made a nice living based on the passion of those fans for “a game.” If not for that passion, that professional sportscaster would most likely be doing something far less enjoyable for a living. So, he or she needs to leave it to the fan’s friends and family and, in some cases, therapists, to talk good sense about not getting too worked up over a missed hand pass, and basically shut the hell up about it.

It is that feeling that makes it awkward for me to tell Game of Thrones fans to chill the f*ck out about season eight and the finale of this juggernaut. It’s only a television show. But since most of my work revolves around the cinematic arts, I do admit to feeling like a grade A hypocrite when I talk like that.

Hence, I will try to offer some perspective on the crafting of the final season, and especially the controversial Bells episode that uses insider lingo like “foreshadowing” and “character arc” and the like. For all the good it will do me. I know people are angry.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

GOT season eight was rushed. That’s its biggest sin. It was always going to be a challenge to wrap up such a sprawling drama with so many characters and complex relationships. The decision to do it over the course of six extended episodes, in hindsight, seems to me to be the single biggest judgment error made by showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. I imagine there were reasons for doing it this way that may have little to do with dramatic imperative. Can’t really get into that. It led to cramming together two massive battles in too short a time, which in turn left too little time for character evolution amid the chaotic final events of the story.

Of course, there were other missteps along the way. There were redundant motifs throughout the show – last minute rescues to rival D.W. Griffith (Tywin’s arrival at The Battle of the Blackwater, the Knights of the Vale tipping the scales in the Battle of the Bastards, Dany and Drogon saving the day north of the wall…) – or scenes in which a big guy lifts up a small guy only to be stabbed by that small guy (with the giant who may or may not have been Wun Wun, the Night King, and the Mountain taking on the role of the big guys, and Lady Lyanna Mormont, Aria Stark, and the Hound being the small guys. Yeah, I know the Hound isn’t small, but it’s a relative thing.) But I think most of us forgive those examples. I mean, there were a lot of battles and there are only so many ways David can slay Goliath.

The less forgivable problem in the final seasons mostly involved the weakest major character – Euron Greyjoy. Euron was fighting a losing battle. He entered the story far too late to merit the kind of power he was accorded. He didn’t earn his stripes the way the other main players did. Benioff and Weiss needed a character like Euron because as the show neared its conclusion pretty much every main character was fighting on team Stark. Team Lannister had virtually no one left. The last great independent, Littlefinger, was gone by the final season, and even Jamie abandoned Cersei for a while. Cersei needed allies beyond secondary characters like the Mountain and Qyburn. Enter Euron. Euron’s killing of Dragon number two Rhaegal was the single biggest misstep of the final season. It was a largely unmotivated and illogical waste of a great asset.

Now, even casual fans of the show will notice that I just called Rhaegal’s death the worst decision of Season 8. That means I am not calling Dany’s rogue turn in The Bells the worst decision. I realize there are many fans who consider Dany’s incineration of King’s Landing as not only the worst creative decision in all of GOT, but quite possibly the worst decision in the history of all things. Multitudes have signed petitions demanding that HBO redo the entire final season after Dany went mad. Others, realizing the – shall we say – unlikely nature of that demand, have started hashtag movements to unsubscribe from HBO. (BTW – that somehow seems fitting, doesn’t it? When you play the game of cable television, you either win or you die.)

I want to say right up front that I am not in favor of burning innocent men, women, and children to death. But I will argue that Dany’s actions, though reprehensible and hard to watch, are not entirely unmotivated or even illogical. In order to make sense of her heel turn, you have to consider moments before and after the act itself. (Which is where we get to those insider tricks like foreshadowing and arc.)

Back in season 7, episode 2, the very wise Lady Olenna gives Dany some crucial advice. (And please, if you haven’t seen the show, you have to imagine these words coming from Diana Rigg.) “I’ve known a great number of clever men. I’ve outlived them all. You know how? I ignored them.” Olenna is specifically referring to the very clever Tyrion Lannister, who has become Dany’s primary advisor as she leaves the continent of Essos, where she has built extraordinary power, to come to Westeros, where she is likely to be painted as a foreign usurper. Dany will heed Tyrion’s advice, and it will be uniformly disastrous. In The Bells, she proves definitively that Tyrion was wrong about most things. She is able to capture the city with her one remaining dragon, without harming any of the innocents. Her mistake, it appears, was not trusting her own instincts and intelligence earlier.

But things have changed from the time she initially allowed Tyrion to dissuade her from attacking the capital to the time she actually does launch her final assault. The major change is that the world (or at least the important people in that world) learns of Jon Snow’s true birthright. Dany now understands that she will never be accepted by the people of Westeros if Jon is around. Since she is unwilling to murder Jon, she takes the only other option she sees. There has been ample discussion about the concept that the masses follow a leader out of either love or out of fear. Since she realizes the people of Westeros will never love her, she settles on fear. From the moment she says this, the die is cast.

Of course, you could argue that she goes way to far when she begins murdering the innocents. We can probably assume that after witnessing one woman and her dragon lay waste to a vast fleet and a vast army, the common folk of King’s Landing would understand the “fear” she is going for. She probably didn’t have to slaughter them to drive that point home. At the end of The Bells, it was commonly assumed that Dany’s fragile mental state was jolted by the callous and brutal murder of her closest confidante Missandei, in front of her very eyes, shortly before this final battle. Missandei’s final word to her queen and friend was “dracarys” – dragonspeak for burn this bastard to the ground. Missandei and Dany, for all their feminine beauty, have seen firsthand how utterly depraved the world of men is, and it is not that hard to believe the spark of self-righteous vengeance would go off with the right provocation.

But that by itself, is still something of a stretch for a character who has followed Dany’s arc (there’s that word) up until now. It isn’t until the final episode that we get a clearer picture of her mindset. I wish Benioff and Weiss had hit this point just a bit harder, because it shows that Dany may well be deranged by this point, but she is not acting entirely out of character.

Dany has freed slaves and slaughtered masters throughout Essos on her journey. When she comes to Westeros, she encounters the brutal Machiavellian brilliance of Cersei, Dany’s only equal as a strategist by the show’s final seasons. Cersei surrounds herself with the innocent citizens of King’s Landing, using them as human shields, assuming that Dany’s inherent goodness will prevent her from unleashing the full fury of her dragonfire for fear of killing the commoners. Indeed, Tyrion uses this very argument to get Dany to delay her attack. Cersei’s strategy proves futile, as Dany is able to strategically strike at Cersei’s forces and defeat them without killing any civilians. So why then, after securing surrender, does she go ahead with her apparently senseless slaughter? It is not to get any measure of revenge on Cersei, who watches this all unfold helplessly, before eventually meeting her own demise. Cersei never cared for the common people. She feels nothing for them. Indeed, Dany’s motive is not apparent in The Bells, and so it appears to be unmotivated madness – something that runs in her family.

But in the final episode, we get a glimpse into the true nature of that madness. Dany congratulates and thanks her loyal soldiers for their efforts is seizing the city. Then she springs this on them. The battle is far from over. After “liberating” King’s Landing from the likes of Cersei, she now intends to liberate the rest of the world – to “break the wheel” – to destroy the system of oppression that makes slaves of the commoners. How does incinerating the commoners of King’s Landing further that noble goal? Well, to Dany’s way of thinking, it proves definitively that she will never again be seen as merciful and weak. This is how Cersei saw her, and Cersei devised her game plan based on this impression. In The Bells, Dany is saying to the masters of the rest of the world that surrounding yourself with innocents will never deter me from wiping you off the face of the earth. To her, it is a price worth paying.

We didn’t know that Dany had expanded her sights beyond Westeros to the rest of the world when we saw The Bells. And as I said at the beginning, I do not agree with Dany’s brutality. But I can’t honestly say that it doesn’t make sense, given what we have seen of her during her journey. She tells Jon in the final episode that Cersei saw her mercy as a weakness. Perhaps it would have been too on the nose, but I wish Benioff and Weiss had added one more line to that scene, with Dany saying “No one will ever make that mistake again.” That would have given context to her seemingly mindless barbarism.

And now, our watch has ended, and we can move onto to other things. For instance, have you been watching the refereeing in the NBA finals? Stand back, because I’m about to unleash some dragonfire…