In the end, the dragons were just too big to control.

When “Game of Thrones” began eight years ago, there were no dragons. It started as a more intimate story of family and politics, and Daenerys Targaryen’s cat-sized fire babies didn’t hatch until the end of the first season.

They got bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger, and with them grew the series’s reliance on spectacle and stunning set pieces. (As did the production scale; next to the show’s final battles, Daenerys’s conquest of Astapor, jaw-dropping back in Season 3, looks like a pickup soccer match.)

So it was fitting, if not entirely satisfying, that the climactic act and the tenderest emotional moment in the series finale, “The Iron Throne,” belonged not to any human but to Drogon, Daenerys’s last surviving lizard-child.

After eight seasons of carnage over the throne, it was Drogon — First of Its Name, Flame-Broiler of Cities — who came upon Daenerys, dead at the hand of her soldier/lover/nephew/betrayer Jon Snow, reared back, belched fire and smelted the seat of power into a puddle of lava.