You could be forgiven for forgetting the brief scene between Jon Snow and Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones’s season seven finale. Compared to everything else that happened in the episode—the Wall crashing down, Jon and Daenerys Targaryen hooking up, the revelation that Jon is actually Daenerys’s nephew Aegon—it was inconsequential. It ostensibly served to give Theon his groove back, allowing him to beat up a Greyjoy redshirt. But the scene also reveals the main problem Game of Thrones has had since it wriggled free of George R.R. Martin’s source material in season five and became a different narrative beast.

“I’ve always tried to do the right thing,” Theon says. “Be the right kind of person. But I never knew what that meant. It’s always seemed like there was an impossible choice I had to make: Stark or Greyjoy.”



“Our father was more of a father to you than yours ever was,” Jon responds. “And you betrayed him—betrayed his memory. You never lost him. He’s a part of you. Just like he’s a part of me ... You don’t need to choose. You’re a Greyjoy and you’re a Stark.”



It’s a clever scene. Jon is giving Theon a new lease on life, forgiving him for his past sins while resolving the existential crisis that has defined him from the very beginning of the series. But Jon is also laying the groundwork for an existential crisis to come, when it is revealed to him that Ned Stark is not his father either. The scene works because of its dramatic irony: Theon’s crisis is Jon’s, he just doesn’t know it yet. But it also means that this moment is ultimately more about Jon than Theon.



Too often over the last three seasons—particularly since “Hardhome” in season five, when the series began to chart its own course—the show’s secondary characters and plots have seemed lost. Game of Thrones just doesn’t have time for anyone who isn’t Jon, Daenerys, or the Night King anymore. The show has shed George R.R. Martin’s most frustrating tics, which ultimately weighed his story down: his insistence on meticulous world-building, on resisting deus ex machina resolutions, and on subverting fantasy tropes. But in racing toward the end—in giving fans the resolution they have demanded—Game of Thrones has over-learned from Martin’s mistakes, taking the story too far in the other direction.

