This is the dragon after Rhaegar, the brother Daenerys never knew - and secretly the father of Jon Snow, the man she loves, whose claim to the Iron Throne she spent her young life unwittingly usurping. When he opens them again, they are the ice-blue eyes of the living dead. Skidding across the weakened ice of the frozen lake upon which Jon and his men have made their stand, Viserion comes to a stop, closes his eyes for the last time as a living thing, and sinks beneath the water.
The creature’s pained shrieks as it falters and falls sound incredulous, as if an animal this magnificent and destructive is as stunned to find itself dying as everyone else is.
It takes him down in a torrent of fire and blood, turning Dany’s own house words against her. The weapon catches Viserion mid-flight as flame still blazes forth from his mouth. Taking his sweet time, the Night King grabs a magical ice spear from one of his White Walker lieutenants and hurls it skyward, like a cold, dead inversion of Zeus and his thunderbolts. What happens after this soaring, triumphant moment of high fantasy? Death, on a scale unmatched by even the biggest giants and mammoths and direwolves. It’s the delayed promise of a zombie versus dragon, ice against fire showdown that the show had been making since the first and last scenes of season one, realized at last. Roaring out of the skies following a sequence of muted sound and slowed-down action, that rescue is both a shock and a spectacle. He has just participated in the rescue of Jon Snow’s Magnificent Seven from the undead hordes who’ve encircled them beyond the Wall. Named after Daenerys’s abusive and ultimately pathetic brother Viserys, Viserion is the first dragon to go. Two paths say, “Here be dragons.” The third is wide open. As such, they serve as legends on a map of the future. With two of the creatures killed by two very different enemies and the third taking off on its own, the departures of the dragons track with the trajectory of the show’s final season. He flies away and his future is unknown.īut while the minds of these dragons remain a mystery, what they symbolize can be sussed out more readily. Yet after her death, freed from human control for the first time in his life, he appears to decide against further devastation in favor of escape. Surviving the deaths of his siblings, Drogon leveled King’s Landing at the behest of his master and mother, killing countless thousands. And the survival of the third, greatest, and last dragon in the Game of Thrones finale made that need impossible to resist. For all these reasons, their killings made me want to look away … which is exactly why I felt the need to look closer. Most guttingly, they are symbols of the wonders of the natural world, pointlessly destroyed by merchants of death. They are emblems of high-fantasy spectacle with real awe and real bite, in a field now dominated by literally and figuratively bloodless blockbusters. The dragons are technical filmmaking achievements of a scale and quality never before seen on television. When I picture the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, the first word that comes to mind is obscene.