In its heyday, Game of Thrones was a political thriller more than a fantasy epic. In this case, it was all I could do to stay awake through the end credits. A happy ending isn’t the same thing as an ending satisfying enough to keep you up at night, thinking about how the show’s elemental questions were resolved (see: Six Feet Under, Mad Men and, just this week, Fleabag). There’s no question that Bran and his sassy council are better news for the people of Westeros than Cersei, Joffrey, the Mad King, Robert Baratheon-or, in all likelihood, Daenerys. Does he have a core set of beliefs, in the same sense that Dany or Arya did? I’m not sure his Three-Eyed Raven body-share arrangement allows for the formation of subjective values. A dispassionate tautology of a person, he has all the answers because he knows everything. Bran is a strange twist on that archetype his omniscient view of the past and the present makes him a sort of flesh-and-blood A.I., blessed with better decision-making tools than anyone this side of IBM’s Watson.

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