<em>Game of Thrones </em>Is Considering ‘Electability.’ It Isn’t Going Well.
This story contains spoilers through Season 8, Episode 4 of Game of Thrones.
An early scene in “The Last of the Starks,” the latest episode of Game of Thrones, finds Jon Snow giving a speech to the survivors of the Battle of Winterfell as the weary warriors prepare to burn the bodies of those who have fallen. “We’re here to say goodbye to our brothers and sisters, to our fathers and mothers—to our friends,” Jon says, projecting his voice so that it will echo over the orderly display of corpses. “Our fellow men and women who set aside their differences to fight together, and die together, so that others might live.”
He goes on from there: words that are inspiring, words that are necessary, words—and, in that, it announces the primary theme of “The Last of the Starks”: Maybe … it’s Jon. Maybe, after spent seven seasons winnowing the field, the attrition pointing to a climactic contest between Dany and Cersei, a third-party candidate will swoop in at the last minute to change the game. “People are drawn to him,” Varys notes to Tyrion later in the episode, as the two kingmakers discuss the political matter of Jon’s charisma. And Tyrion, the hand of a different leader, cannot help but agree. The primaries may have been fought, and the conventions may have been settled, but loves nothing more than a last-minute plot twist. Jon Snow 2020: , you win or you die or, alternatively, you spend years not playing at all, only to find victory, in the final moments, placed gently in your lap.
