Game of Thrones ended Sunday night, with a bit of a fizzle where there was supposed to be a bang. The episode wasn’t going too badly, all things considered, until Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) emerged from the Red Keep’s dungeons to propose that Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), a wheelchair-bound prophet, had the best shot at uniting the people of Westeros.

“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it,” he said. “And who has a better story than Bran the Broken, the boy who fell from a high tower and lived? He knew he’d never walk again, so he learned to fly. He crossed beyond the Wall, a crippled boy, and became the three-eyed raven. He is our memory, the keeper of all our stories. The wars, weddings, births, massacres, famines. Our triumphs, our defeats, our past. Who better to lead us into the future?”

So after eight seasons of intrigue, Tyrion’s case for Bran’s ascension is a brief monologue that seemingly lays out the show’s philosophy—how to break the wheel of oppression, rule, and struggle that has defined Westeros’s history. This endless conflict is what made Game of Thrones such a relatable battle epic. Tyrion, within the story, reasserts the power of story in his speech. But what he concludes is that the most compelling story belongs to . . . the cryptic bird guy.

Feinting to Bran is such an odd choice that for a moment I thought it was a joke. (I was not alone; even Hempstead-Wright initially thought the script was having fun at his expense.) To be sure, Game of Thrones has been determined to subvert expectations in its final season, and Vegas bookies had their money on Bran from the beginning of Season 8. But dispassionate, mysterious Bran is not exactly classic leadership material, and he certainly doesn’t seem qualified to lead troops into battle, or to inspire a rabble of hungry Westerosi. It doesn’t help that his sister seceded from Westeros entirely as soon as he was nominated for kingship—meaning that the Stark family isn’t even a part of the Seven (or Six!) Kingdoms anymore, which might sit very strangely with the leaders of Dorne, the Iron Islands, and Highgarden, all of whom have also had their flirtations with independence.

And this is to say nothing of Bran’s immersion in just one of Westeros’s multiple religions. The Three-Eyed Raven is magic from the old gods, not the new; the resurgent sect of fundamentalist worship of the Seven might have a thing or two to say about answering to a heathen tree-worshipping bird warg, and that’s without even touching what kind of inroads Melisandre’s religion, the worship of R’hllor, might have made after Stannis Baratheon brought the gospel of the night being dark and full of terrors to Westeros.

The only reason this tentative plan seems to stick is because Bran can’t have children—a problematic assertion about people in wheelchairs, and also one that Sansa tells absolutely everyone, propriety be damned. The idea is to move away from dynastic monarchs to committee-selected monarchs. This is a nice idea, but not a perfect solution; Bran might break the wheel right now, but Tyrion’s tenuous compromise doesn’t exactly set forward a path for the future.

Tyrion’s good at stories. The first time he was Hand of the King, in Season 2, he was adept at spinning Joffrey’s tyrannical rule into goodwill from the people. He believed in Daenerys’s story—the long-lost Targaryen daughter, bringing her justice and her mercy on the backs of three fire-breathing dragons. I don’t believe for a second that he actually thought Bran’s was the best story of anyone who gathered as part of that council. How could it be? We watched Bran, for multiple seasons, and his plot was frequently as dull as paint drying; a lot of confusing lore in an icy place, where the only action was watching Bran’s eyes roll back in his head. Yet he’s somehow more interesting than a slave-turned-captain, a captive-turned-queen, a nimble assassin, Westeros’s first female knight, and the Lady of the Iron Islands?