Why the real winner of the Game of Thrones season finale was the music

last updated 30 June 2016

One unexpected delight of "The Winds of Winter," the season six finale of Game of Thrones, was the eerie leisure of its opening. We so rarely get to see these characters alone, just thinking and feeling. Lena Headey's acting was jaw-droppingly rich without speaking a single line, an effect helped by Miguel Sapochnik, the director of "The Battle of the Bastards," who gave her space for reflection. (Long live Sapochnik, who brings as much artistry to contemplative scenes as he does to battle formations.) But the real winner of those first 15 minutes is the music. The poetic minutes leading up to Cersei's revenge owe a great deal to Sapochnik's skillful cinematic blazon of the principals who he shows in parts (a sleeve, a ring, a face) but it owes more to Ramin Djawadi's score. The musical direction puts this episode up there with the best stuff Game of Thrones has ever done.

To appreciate some of what Djawadi was doing in "Light of the Seven," the music accompanying the 15-minute build-up to the wildfire explosion, here's a step-by-step exploration of how music functioned in key moments, using music clips, sheet music, and screenshots (sadly, HBO didn't make public enough video). Feel free to follow along by watching these chunks of the episode — approximate time stamps are included below so you can — but the sound clips are there in case you don't have HBO on you.

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Musically speaking, a single bell is straightforward, even disappointingly minimalist. From a poetic perspective, it's creepy as hell; especially here, its simplicity and solemnity is deceptive. Both the bell's form and function will collapse by the end of this sequence. For now, though, it's establishing how sound works in this universe: There is order. Everyone is listening to the same thing at the beginning. Everyone has the same in-universe soundtrack and it's eerie in the monotonal way the bells that keep time tend to be.

It's time for the trial. People start filing into the Sept: Margaery, Mace, and the High Sparrow assume their places. A gentle melody trickles out of a completely extradiegetic piano to announce that the hour of the trial is here. It's jarring — can you imagine a piano in Game of Thrones' universe? — and it splits the soundtrack from the world just as firmly as the bell brought both together. Let's call this Theme A.

I love this sequence for how gorgeously it renders Cersei's interiority. She's trapped. She's out of options. She's alone and bereaved, and she's going to do what she needs to do to save herself and her son and kill her enemies. Her actions here are less a product of ambition than necessity, and her silences reflect that. They're thoughtful and solemn and deliberate; she's switching out The Mother for The Warrior because she has no choice. While there is a hint of pleasure in all this — cf. Cersei's wine — I found the cartoonishly villainous "because I liked it" speech to be a clumsy bit of writing that did a disservice to the incredible texture Headey brought to these early moments. The deep melancholy of the score does more to illustrate Cersei's dire straits, and Sapochnik's direction shows the care with which she's assuming her new role.

When Margaery confronts the High Sparrow about his broken promise (he had agreed not to mutilate Loras), something interesting happens: The music responds to his dishonesty. The second he replies "I've kept my word," Theme A restarts. It's becoming a hallmark of his complacency, his hypocrisy, and his doom. And when the High Sparrow orders Lancel to go escort Cersei from the Red Keep, what follows is 1. a distraction (he opts to hunt a Little Bird instead) and 2. the saddest, most gently scored chase sequence there has ever been. Only Margaery seems sensitive to these changes in register; only she responds with suspicion and dread.

She's right, of course: The various strands of Cersei's musical plot are intertwining. The cellos of Theme G leak through over the distant piano of Theme B, Cersei's Song (which had already infiltrated the Sept, but alone). Remember the sonic contrast between the crazy organs (as Lancel and Pycelle got stabbed) and the calm of Cersei's Song in the Sept at 18:14? Now cello Themes E and G are bleeding into the Sept as well; the sounds between the underground wildfire repositories where Lancel is struggling and the Sept above are merging. Nothing is soundproof.

Of all the family leitmotifs, the Stark theme has always been closest to the Game of Thrones theme that plays over the opening credits. But I can't remember the last time the show's anthem made this prominent an appearance — it really becomes indistinguishable from the Stark theme as the Northerners hail Jon the King of the North. In an episode that finally admits R + L = J, the music legitimizes Jon Snow as a Stark in ways that neither Sansa nor even Lady Lyanna Mormont can. It's as strong an endorsement of the Starks (and Jon's claim) as you could ever hope to get.

We're expecting the Lannister theme, the Rains of Castamere, to play here. (Cersei has lectured Margaery about the warlike overtones of her family anthem before.) The cellos throb almost as if in pain while Cersei walks down the aisle. It feels like they're trying to gather the surrounding chaos into the usual family theme, and they do — they do find their way into the first few notes of The Rains of Castamere — but Qyburn interrupts to crown Cersei and announce her as the new ruler of King's Landing.

The cellos try again: They resume a heavy, slow version of the Rains of Castamere, but it snaps. There is no Theme B this time, no hint of the melody we've come to associate with Cersei's plot. What there is, at 1:08:02, is an outbreak of spry, frantic triplets from Theme E — the Mad Queen cellos from before the explosion — and Theme I, the cello runs that built to the explosion itself. There is no piano. The meditative, trapped Cersei with whom we began the episode is gone. This one doesn't seem likely to be as careful a plotter; hard to imagine her making arrangements to spare what remains of her family, or to confine her wildfire to a specific target. Long live the Mad Queen.

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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