Jon Snow mooched into a freezing sunset. Sansa smiled from her throne as her bannermen held aloft their swords (careful m’lady – all that unsheathed steel is a health and safety hazard). Bran and his Small Council boys pretended they were in an early episode of Seinfeld. And as the credits finally rolled on Game of Thrones, one year ago today, many fans reckoned with the empty pit in their stomachs.

The expectation had been that the last episode of the fantasy saga would reduce diehards and casual viewers alike to a puddle of emotion. Sadness, joy, frustration, melancholy, quiet wonder… all running together like the blades from the Iron Throne as Drogon breathed dragonfire.

Instead a huge number of us came away feeling nothing. We had watched Jon kill Daenerys, Sansa proclaim independence for the North and the Branbot 3000 somehow inveigle his way into ruling what remained of the Seven Kings. Yet so inept and underwhelming was the concluding series of Game of Thrones that the impact of all of these supposedly seismic happenings was negligible.

In the aftermath, more than 1.8 million fans signed a petition calling for the entire season to be reshot. It’s clear Game of Thrones’s big farewell was a letdown for the ages. The more complicated question is: how did one of the smartest and most politically astute TV shows end up bowing out so shoddily?

Some of the reasons are straightforward. Show runners David Benioff and DB Weiss rushed the conclusion, meaning character arcs that might have made sense if teased out – Daenerys’s plunge into madness, for instance – felt like cheap manipulations in the moment.

Episode by episode, it also became obvious that Benioff and Weiss were not nearly as invested in some of the key mysteries – the origins of the White Walkers, the secret of Jon’s parentage – as we had assumed. And with an influx of new viewers drawn by the spectacle of later seasons, there was also a schism between what veteran fans expected and what satisfied a more mainstream following.

Pull up a pew then as, like Tywin gutting a symbolic Baratheon stag, we take a knife to Game of Thrones’ sad fadeout and diagnose what went wrong.