The wait is over, you can finally see this adorable panda cub Viral 'Charlie bit my finger' video to be taken down. Here's why Jon Snow went from outsider to king. Is the Iron Throne next? (CNN) — If someone asks you about what happened this week on that little dragon show you watch, you are more than allowed to just scream at full volume for an hour and 20 minutes. Because that’s what this episode was. Just one, long 80-minute “AAAAHHH!! !” Things start off quietly enough. Without Missandei around to braid her hair or apply her undereye concealer, Daenerys is leaning into the “foreshadowing fiery genocide” aesthetic while moping around Dragonstone. She’s mad at Jon, mad at Tyrion and especially mad at Varys for going around blabbing about Jon’s true lineage. It appears the “Master of Whispers” has become the “Master of Discussing Deadly Secrets at Full Volume,” and before you can even get emotionally prepared for this week’s carnage, everyone’s standing on the beach looking stoic and Dany is sentencing Varys to death and Drogon is bearing his 3,000 teeth and wow, we’re off to the races. One major character death down, a shocking amount left to go. Tyrion, full of doubt and fear and definitely not used to either, finds Jaime who has been captured and imprisoned at Dragonstone. The two brothers share a good hug and Tyrion outlines a plan for Jaime to escape with Cersei and start life anew in Essos, where ostensibly they are more forgiving of murderous incest. Courtesy of HBO But first, it’s time for war. The mood is tense in Kings Landing, where throngs of common folk are being herded inside the Red Keep, and the Golden Company and the Iron Fleet are assuming their positions as unwitting dragon appetizers. If Dany’s general haggard appearance wasn’t foreshadowing enough, we get lots of good, salt-of-the-earth shots of the innocent citizens of Kings Landing with their doe-eyed children in tow. By the laws of television, you only get affectionate close-ups of the unwashed if something really, really terrible is about to happen to them. And, happen it does. Drogon drops out of the sky like a 10-ton seagull, and within minutes the Iron Fleet, the Golden Company and all of the Lannisters’ fancy dragon-killing equipment is flambeed to oblivion. Grey Worm, who is so deep in his feelings he completely forgets his helmet, dispatches the leader of the Golden Company, and with that, the Unsullied and the smattering of remaining Dothraki set about sacking the city. It’s a laughably easy win for Daenerys and company. Even Cersei sees it, perched atop the Red Keep with a concerned Qyburn. Side note: Ol’ Cers must be about 500 months pregnant now, so why does she have the belly of someone who had, like, five bites of a burrito for lunch? Anyway, she’s hemmed in and she knows it. As the city’s fortifications burn to ash and enemy forces close in, the bells of surrender begin to sound. A single tear rolls down Cersei’s proud face. Drogon and Daenerys let up, the Unsullied and the Lannister forces exchange a hearty round of handshakes and the two sides proceed with a peaceful transfer of power. Just kidding! Dany goes full-on Mad Queen and burns the living hell out of EVERYTHING. Innocent children? You get a Dracarys! Entire city blocks? You get a Dracarys! Everyone gets a Dracarys! Jon and Tyrion’s faces say it all. This is definitely not how it was supposed to go. Daenerys Targaryen has gone rogue. Courtesy of HBO However, don’t think that just because thousands of people are being burned alive and King’s Landing is literally crumbling to the ground that there isn’t time to have a slapfight about who gets to be Cersei’s boyfriend. Somehow, among everything going on, Euron, the drunk cockroach of Westeros, finds Jaime and they have an extremely athletic tussle on the banks of Blackwater Bay. It’s not all bad though: Jaime kills Euron, which we can agree is a personal favor to us all. Oh, right! By the way, Arya and the Hound must have ditched their horses for high speed rail, because they’re also here in Kings Landing. The Hound urges Arya to get out while she can, and they part with as much tenderness as two soft murder beings can muster. There’s nothing like apocalyptic dragon fire to make a girl forget all about her kill list, and before long Arya is running terrified through the streets like everyone else. Helen Sloan/HBO Meanwhile, The Hound has revenge on his mind. He runs into Cersei, Qyburn and The Mountain as they’re fleeing the Red Keep, and after The Mountain ragdolls Qyburn into the afterlife, CLEGANEBOWL IS ON. (Again, gentle reminder: Everything is burning! Is now the best time to be settling personal scores?) Actually, the answer is yes. The Hound finally unmasks The Mountain, revealing a swole moldy Darth Vader where his brother used to be. They fight. It’s glorious and gory. Goryious? Apparently, The Mountain is impervious to literally everything, up to and including daggers through the brain, so The Hound does the only thing left he can do: Trucks him through a crumbling wall and off the side of the Red Keep to a fiery, mutual death. (By the way, people are still burning.) Jaime and Cersei finally find each other, and if they weren’t both deeply horrible people who have committed unspeakable sins and backtracked on seasons worth of character development, their reunion would almost be sweet. You would almost, for one second, be forgiven for hoping they could escape and be weird with each other in Pentos for the rest of their days. But you only get one second! Remember Brienne! And Missandei! And Margaery and everyone else who has ever suffered and died at these people’s three collective hands! Jaime and Cersei deserve the poetic, meaningful deaths that are inevitably coming their way! Hmm? What’s that? Oh, they get crushed under some rubble while trying to escape?<doc-sep>Over all, it made for one of the show’s most gruesome episodes. For those irked by the relatively scanty death toll so far this season, well, on Sunday your cup runneth over. Varys was the eunuch in the coal mine, offering an early glimpse of the corner Daenerys had turned — less the fact that she dracarys’d him, her default response to open defiance, than the casual way she got on with it. This was a person for whom human life had ceased to matter as much as it should. Euron discovered that what is dead may never die, unless you put a sword in its guts and twist. Qyburn met the fate of all who play God, and he was dispatched by Mountainstein with its signature smash-and-toss finishing move. And the Hound discovered that what is actually dead may really, really never die, unless you shove it into the hellmaw of a burning city. (Even now I’m not positive a charcoaly Mountain torso isn’t scooting around King’s Landing like half a Terminator.) Then there were the toxic Lannister twins, whose grand fall was symbolized by the fact that they kick-started this whole story by fornicating in a northern tower and ended by dying in a southern crypt. It’s a testament to the dramatic talents of Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau that an incest reunion that took a somewhat galling amount of forced plot mechanics to enact still tugged at my heart strings. Cersei and Jaime were destined to die together, of course, whether he killed her or she killed him or they killed each other. The outcome was less interpersonally violent than most of us probably expected, which is perhaps oddly fitting for what, in the end, was the most enduring romance of this story. I just wish we’d gotten here more gracefully. If there’s anyone who’s been more narratively jerked around than Daenerys this season, it’s Jaime. We talked a few weeks ago about how his villainy was always overblown, and his trajectory since that tower liaison has been mostly about how people can get past the world’s definition of them by doing the hard work of trying to be good. (And if you have a warrior maiden around to help, so much the better.)<doc-sep>Spoiler alert! The following contains details from “Game of Thrones” Season 8 Episode 5, "The Bells." Read our recap of Season 8, Episode 4 here. What is left for "Game of Thrones"? Nothing, really. For viewers who have stuck around for eight seasons of the HBO fantasy series, all that's left after the penultimate episode is ash and a bad taste. When Daenerys Targaryen lived up to her terrible family's reputation and burned King's Landing to the ground, she incinerated the last hope for "Thrones" along with it. Where to begin with "The Bells," an absolute disaster of an episode that exhibited every bad habit the series' writers have ever had? They threw out their own rule book (suddenly the scorpions don't work and Drogon can burn everything?) to pursue gross spectacle. Character and substance were left by the wayside so that the plot could go where the writers wanted. The pace was rushed in the beginning, painfully lagging by the end. The script created plot devices and conflicts out of thin air (no really, when were the bells ever so important? ), relished in violence and let a main character survive beyond any reasonable odds. (How many buildings have to fall on Arya before she stays down?) "Bells" is somehow both fan service and indulgence in all the tropes that fans hate. Had this episode taken place just before the finale of Season 4 or 5, it might be forgivable, but with just over an hour left in the series, it's far too late to make a mistake of this magnitude. There's no time to switch gears, because Mad Queen Dany (and, apparently Arya's inexplicable survival and possible revenge) is what "Thrones" will always have been about. This disappointment is what we've all been waiting for. Don't walk alone with winter coming: All the news, recaps, thoughts and plot analysis right to your inbox The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and few TV shows have gotten quite as big as "Thrones." Even fewer have failed so spectacularly for so many viewers. Theoretically, the series has one last hour to redeem itself. And maybe some fans hold out hope that the finale can wrap things up in a way that makes emotional and logical sense. But betting on "Thrones" to fix itself is really just doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. Just like Cersei, Tyrion and the rest, we should know better by now. More:Those shocking deaths from 'Game of Thrones' King's Landing battle, ranked One last little bird The latest member of the “suddenly I’m very dumb” club is Varys, whose campaign to supplant Dany with Jon goes comically wrong in the blink of an eye. We barely have time to register that he has a little bird spy again and is writing letters about Jon’s true parentage before he is found out. Dany has figured out that Jon told Sansa who told Tyrion who told Varys about Jon's parentage, and is angry at both Jon and Tyrion. (How did she find out? How much time has even passed since Missandei's death? Who knows or cares, apparently?!) Dany burns Varys alive for his betrayal, and it's rather underwhelming. Varys survived so many monarchs, only to be finally killed because he was, what, writing too loudly? It was a poor end for one of the series’ best characters. I have a bad feeling about this Dany and Grey Worm share a brief moment mourning over Missandei's slave collar (though why she would bring that to Westeros is baffling), before Jon arrives for an "I told you so" from his aunt. Dany complains that she doesn't have love from the people of the Seven Kingdoms, only fear, and even though Jon says he loves her, he recoils from her kiss. (Finally Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington's lack of chemistry is useful). Tyrion begs for the lives of the people of King's Landing, and gets Dany to agree to spare them if they surrender by ringing the city bells. His obsession with saving commoners doesn't make much sense, but I suppose someone needed to foreshadow Dany's reign of terror. Dany also mentions that Jaime was captured trying to sneak into the city, and tells Tyrion if he fails her again, it will be the last time. Instead of, say, following the orders of the queen he's so intent on supporting, Tyrion frees Jaime in the hope that he'll convince Cersei to flee the city. The brothers hug before leaving each other for good. Unlike Jaime, Arya and the Hound manage to sneak into the city easily, perhaps the last time she has to declare herself Arya Stark to get past a guard. What kind of fire burns stone? The morning of the battle dawns and everyone's holding their breath and their positions: Jon and the allied troops outside the front gates staring down the Golden Company, while Euron and the Iron Fleet are in the Blackwater with their scorpions pointed at the sky. Cersei's troops look menacing and more impressive than the raggedy band of northerners and surviving Unsullied and Dothraki that Dany has assembled. At this point the episode spends copious time showing us all the innocent civilians Dany is about to murder, including a mother and daughter who are given enough screen time for us to know that they will be this episode's symbolic sufferers. And then Dany and Drogon fly down. After being ineffectual at the Battle of Winterfell and against the Iron Fleet, Drogon has suddenly become a weapon of mass destruction that no scorpion crossbow can hit. Like every other plot device on "Thrones" the past few seasons, the dragons were useless, until they were needed. Drogon lights up the Iron Fleet with ease, before moving to the King's Landing battlements, eventually burning the Golden Company from behind before Dany's army charges. As Dany's forces attack, Cersei watched from the Red Keep, but loses her trademark sneer. Qyburn informs her that all the scorpions have been destroyed (truly how does he know that?<doc-sep>Symbolism runs rampant in Game of Thrones, particularly when it comes to the animals on the show. This week’s episode, however, introduced an unfamiliar beast in an unexpected setting. What does it mean? Where did it come from? Let’s investigate. [Ed. note: Spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8, episode 5, “The Bells,” follow.] The final scene of Game of Thrones’ penultimate episode sees Arya Stark wandering through the wreckage of King’s Landing. Miraculously, she’s managed to survive the ravaging of the city, and, just as Ben Affleck’s Batman saw a white horse in the ashes of Metropolis, Arya sees a white horse in what remains of the Red Keep. That Arya survived seems improbable, so the fact that a horse also made it through the ordeal scot-free is particularly strange, to the point that it’s impossible not to theorize as to what the horse’s appearance may mean for what will happen on the final episode of the show. The horse means Arya is Death The most on-the-nose symbolism is that of death and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on it was Death,” goes the Book of Revelation. It’s a fitting reference given Arya’s story arc and transformation into ruthless killer, perhaps indicating the fact that the last of her human tenderness — as per her surprise at Sandor Clegane effectively saving her life and her attempts at getting civilians out of harm’s way — has now dissipated. It also serves as something of a complement to her catchphrase (“What do we say to the god of death?” “Not today.”), perhaps indicating that she has now taken on that mantle, and now is the one who will take on the new Mad Queen. However, it’s also a reference to Christian religious imagery that doesn’t totally jive with the high fantasy of Game of Thrones. The horse is secretly a Stark family member Some have begun theorizing that Bran (otherwise absent from the episode) warged into the horse and came to save his sister, while others have also pointed out that Ned Stark’s horse near the beginning of the series was a white one. Neither of these options seems totally out of the realm of possibility, though Bran warging seems more likely than Ned returning to the show. (If Ned was going to come back, it should have been in the crypt, right?) The horse is just a horse Of course, there’s always the chance that the incredibly convenient horse was just a horse. It might not actually have any significance to the show; it just happened to come along at a moment that doesn’t really make sense and begs for overanalysis. That said, it’ll be disappointing if this is the door the show ends up taking, as it’s a striking moment in an episode that’s full of surprises, on a show that has a history of using animals in order to get points across. Jon abandoning Ghost in favor of a dragon is the biggest example of Game of Thrones’ animal symbolism. Arya’s direwolf, Nymeria, is still out there, but we haven’t seen her since season 7. Arya bonding with a new animal (not counting the Hound — sorry, too soon) seems like a hint. At any rate, it’s one more mystery to be solved in next week’s final episode.<doc-sep>
Now more than ever, it’s clear that Daenerys has gone full “Mad Queen.” In Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5, “The Bells,” Dany took the Battle of King’s Landing into her own hands and completely threw away any counsel that Tyrion and Jon Snow gave her. Questions about Dany’s stability and ability to rule have been simmering since Season 7 as her actions became more irrational. Recent episodes, however, offered another ruler as an option as Dany’s closest advisors schemed to take her out. In Season 8, Episode 5, Daenerys may have taken out most of the biggest threats facing her path to the Iron Throne, but there’s one loose thread that could be her undoing in the GoT finale: Lord Varys, Master of Whisperers. Spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5 (and probably the series finale) ahead. The opening scene of “The Bells” showed Varys at his desk, writing what looked like one of many scrolls revealing that Jon Snow is really Aegon Targaryen, and his claim to the Iron Throne, not Dany’s, should be supported by others across the Seven Kingdoms. The scrolls look small enough to be sent by raven, so we know how Varys was planning to get the word out. Subscribe for free to Multiverse and get Game of Thrones coverage delivered to your inbox the night the episode airs. The camera doesn’t focus for too long on the scroll, but phrases like “Rhaegar” and “the true heir to the Iron Throne” stand out. We know that Varys is ready to spill the beans after he learned about Jon’s true identity from Tyrion, who learned it from Sansa in Episode 4. Varys' message about Jon Snow's true identity. HBO. Before Varys could send off that scroll, Martha, a young servant working for Varys, comes in to inform him that Dany still isn’t eating. Their exchange seems to align with Varys’ intention to overthrow Dany and put Jon forth as the rightful king of Westeros: Martha: “She won’t eat.” Varys: “We’ll try again at supper.” Martha: “I think they’re watching me.” Varys: “Who?” Martha: “Her soldiers.” Varys: “Of course they are. That’s their job. What have I told you, Martha?” Martha: “The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.” Varys: “Go on. They’ll be missing you in the kitchen.” “The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.” Certainly feels like a telling line, doesn’t it? Proof of Jon’s lineage seemed to push Varys firmly out of Dany’s camp when Tyrion revealed it to him in Episode 4. He may even be trying to poison her, as one theory suggests, though later scenes seem to indicate Varys hasn’t completely given up on Daenerys just yet. Both options are fun to think about, but they don’t feel too Varys-y, do they? Varys has spent his life as a cog in the wheel of different rulers, helping them carry out plans that work against Westeros at large and benefit the rulers themselves. He’s also been known to betray those rulers time and time again, working to unseat them and make way for a supposedly better fit for the throne. Taking Dany out requires finesse. Tyrion and Varys say their goodbyes. Helen Sloan/HBO. In a subsequent scene, Dany’s Unsullied soldiers show up at Varys’ room to take him to his death. He’s ready to go, but not before destroying the evidence of his messages to the outside world. He burns one of his scrolls as Grey Worm comes with the handcuffs, but it’s unclear if this is the same scroll we saw earlier or another one. If it’s a separate message, then we need to consider the possibility that Varys managed to get a few of these messages out before he was executed. Considering Game of Thrones is most interested at this point in moving the story along rather than taking time to develop its characters or investigate each character’s actions, we’ll have to do the scrutinizing ourselves. Knowing Varys can work quick, has the means to get his message out in time, and is actively scheming against Dany, the chances are good that he was planning to send those messages across the Seven Kingdoms. If enough people know the truth, there’s a higher chance that Jon Snow will end up on the Iron Throne instead. Varys has never been much for the battlefield, so there’s no way his plan ever involved trying to kill Daenerys directly (Jon’s more equipped to do that, TBH).