The final episode of Game of Thrones proved to be one of the most polarizing endings in television history. Fans of How I Met Your Mother were disappointed by the mother’s untimely death, and Sopranos fans were let down by the show’s abrupt cut to black, but that was nothing compared to the crushing disappointment of being a Game of Thrones fan during its last season.

Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had already run out of books to adapt, and they were looking for a quick getaway because they’d signed a deal with Lucasfilm, so they rushed through the bullet points of George R.R. Martin’s loose story outlines in a truncated final season, leaving audiences everywhere bitterly underwhelmed. We couldn’t see the climactic battle we’d been waiting so long for because it was lit so poorly that the whole thing played out on a black screen. Daenerys went full-tilt mass murderer at the drop of a hat, and Bran Stark of all people ended up on the Iron Throne.

It’s hard to overstate just how disheartening it was to be a Game of Thrones fan in 2019, watching that final season. But what if Game of Thrones aired a decade earlier? There was a very different climate around the pop culture landscape in 2009, and Game of Thrones season 8 might not have been treated so harshly.

2010 Changed The Discourse Around Series Finales

If Game of Thrones had aired a decade earlier, and we got its series finale in 2009, it would’ve been a very different story. The climate around series finales changed drastically when Lost ended in 2010. Lost was the first show of its kind, with so much resting on a highly anticipated ending. Shows like Twin Peaks and The Prisoner had both experimented with Lost-style mystery-box storytelling before it, but their final episodes weren’t expected to be a big, climactic culmination like Lost‘s was.

Lost unfairly became synonymous with “bad ending” for a decade after it ended. There was suddenly so much pressure for a series finale to stick the landing and pay off years’ worth of investment. If it didn’t tie up every loose end or answer every mystery, then it was deemed a failure, just like Lost, and the entire show was retroactively deemed a failure.

Back in the day, TV shows just ended. There was no fanfare around a series finale; the show just didn’t come back the next week. At the end of Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula never made the leap home; we just stopped seeing his adventures because NBC stopped airing them. That all changed with the final episode of Lost. J.J. Abrams’ signature “mystery box” style of storytelling had left Lost with dozens of unanswered questions and unexplained mysteries that the final episode had to resolve. Everyone had their theories — it was all a dream, they were dead the whole time, etc. — and if the actual ending didn’t align with their headcanon, they were disappointed.

After Lost, audiences started judging series finales much more harshly. In earlier times, a show like Dexter wouldn’t need an extravagant ending. It would be an episodic show about a serial killer who only kills other serial killers, and it would eventually just sort of end. But in a post-Lost era, Dexter needed a big, momentous series finale with a twist ending, which arguably ruined the entire series in retrospect.

A final episode could make or break an entire series after Lost. A show that had been hailed as one of television’s greatest achievements for years could suddenly be labeled a disaster and banished from cultural memory if its ending disappointed viewers. Case in point: Dexter, and Game of Thrones.

The proliferation of social media played a significant role in the controversy surrounding Game of Thrones‘ ending. Platforms like Twitter and Reddit were filled with furious fans expressing their disgust worldwide. It would’ve been a completely different story if Game of Thrones had ended in 2009. In that dying MySpace and early Facebook era, we hadn’t yet entered the algorithm age characterized by echo chamber opinions.

A decade earlier, when Lost ended, there was plenty of vitriol online, but it was mostly confined to specialty blogs and dedicated fan forums. The backlash against the Game of Thrones finale, however, was deafening. Even people who didn’t watch Game of Thrones, heard about how bad its ending was. This created a consensus that the ending was terrible, leading even those who hadn’t seen it to jump on the bandwagon. Much like with films such as The Marvels, many critics hadn’t even watched it.

Game Of Thrones’ Finale Had Much Room For Improvement, But Wasn’t Terrible

Game of Thrones‘ series finale was far from perfect but wasn’t an outright disaster like that of Two and a Half Men. If it had aired in 2009 instead of 2019 when social media was still developing and trolls were mostly hidden away, I can imagine people being mildly underwhelmed by the ending rather than utterly outraged. Regardless of opinions about it, at least it answered one question posed at the beginning: who will claim the Iron Throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms?

The creators may have been too focused on being unpredictable. They attempted to craft an ending that no one would foresee instead of simply going with what felt right. Billy Butcher’s climactic beatdown of a depowered Homelander was an obvious way for The Boys‘ story to conclude but didn’t make Homelander’s demise any less satisfying. No one would guess that Bran would end up on the Iron Throne because it’s such an absurd notion.

B ut at least it provided a definitive conclusion. It wasn’t pandering fan service nor was it a creative compromise due to meddling executives. For better or worse, Benioff and Weiss gave us their intended ending for <b>Game of Thrones</b>, which is more than can be said for most TV shows.