Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8 episode 5. If you don’t want to know what happens in this beast of an episode, turn back now!
• Cersei and Jaime Lannister appeared to die on Sunday night’s Game of Thrones.
• Some fans were disappointed that after all this time, the villainous Cersei died in such an anticlimactic way: crushed by a collapsing ceiling in King’s Landing.
• Others wonder if Cersei is really dead, since we didn’t see a corpse.
Whew. We’re still trying to process everything that happened in the second-to-last episode of Game of Thrones. Out of all the shocking things that happened in Sunday night’s episode, Cersei Lannister’s apparent death (on Mother’s Day) might take the cake—not merely that it happened, but how it happened.
Basically, it was anti-climactic as hell! Cowering in the arms of her twin brother Jaime, Cersei was crushed by a collapsing ceiling in the bowels of King’s Landing. Her demise was inevitable as Daenerys Targaryen and her one remaining dragon, Drogon, charged through the city incinerating everything. (Yes, the Mother of Dragons took Missandei’s last words extremely seriously.)
By season 8, Cersei had become the biggest villain on Game of Thrones. The final boss. And after years of waiting for the evil Lannister to meet her demise, fans were disappointed that it happened so quickly—it just wasn’t satisfying!
“Never in my life did I imagine there’d be a scenario where Cersei’s death wouldn’t be satisfying,” one viewer tweeted.
Which is why some fans are wondering…is Cersei really dead? It all happened so unremarkably, it makes you wonder if the twins died, in fact, die. I mean, we didn’t see their corpses…
It’s not just Cersei’s unceremonious death that seems peculiar, but Jaime’s, too. Why spend the series crafting a redemptive narrative arc for Jaime, if only to have him die right back where he started, in the arms of his evil sister? What’s the point?
Anything is possible on Game of Thrones, and we suppose there’s a chance that Cersei and Jaime are still alive. But then again, how do you survive the whole ceiling falling in on your underground chamber? Plus, neither Lannister made an appearance in the preview for the finale.
Cersei and Jaime are probably dead. We suspected the queen would go down at some point, but we gotta say, we thought it would be better than this.