[Disclaimer: Game of Thrones spoilers abound in what follows.]

Fans of the world’s biggest television show are howling today. The immediate furor will eventually die down, but future viewers who are disciplined enough to experience the show as it has been presented the first time around — that is, those viewers who manage to insulate themselves from the details of the show’s ending until they view it for themselves — will surely experience the same vague sense of disappointment. There is a final, awful, “so what was that all about?”

The finale of Game of Thrones’ eighth season earned the lowest Rotten Tomatoes rating of any final episode among all eight seasons of the show, currently weighing in at 56%. Accusations of bad writing and the squandering of important character arcs abound. Some fans have gone so far as to demand a re-do of the final episode. As of this writing, less than 24 hours after the finale’s initial airing, the petition entitled “Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers.” on change.org has 1.3 million votes and counting — fully 10% of the episode’s 13.6 million live viewers.

What happened?

Game of Thrones is based on A Song of Ice and Fire, a series of novels by author George R. R. Martin. Martin published his first novel in the series, A Game of Thrones, in 1996. He originally intended to publish only three novels, but with the success of his initial offerings the story grew larger. To date, he has still only published five of the now seven anticipated novels. And thus, Game of Thrones outpaced Martin’s books three seasons ago. His most recent novel, A Dance with Dragons, was published in mid-2011, and closed with Arya Stark in training at the House of Black and White, Cersei Lannister’s walk of shame, and the revelation that Daenerys, having fled from Mereen on Drogon’s back, still lived. These events were all depicted on-screen in 2015 in ‘Mother’s Mercy’, the final episode of Game of Thrones’ fifth season. And to any avid watcher of the show, they seem like ancient history. A lot has happened since then.

By the close of season five, HBO had probably invested at least $300 million in the Game of Thrones franchise, but the show had likely produced $4-5 billion in revenue. With so much profit riding on the future of the program, and with no new novels published since shortly after season one began, it is little wonder that Martin was asked to meet privately with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Game of Thrones’ showrunners, to outline the remainder of the plot for them. He did so in 2013.

Benioff and Weiss are at least as responsible for the success (or failure) of Game of Thrones as Martin is. For years, they have skillfully distilled his panoramic story into logical, lucid installments suitable for the small screen. And through the end of season five, they had very rich source material from which to draw. Martin pays great attention to the smallest details in his books, often listing even the specific items on each person’s plate during a meal. In the distinctly visual medium of television, some of Martin’s detailed wordcraft translated into lavish costuming and set design, some into fantastical wonders of CGI, and some, of course, into actual plot and character development.

Slow and steady wins the race

Few would call any Game of Thrones plot-line boring. But in keeping with the detail offered in Martin’s books, the show has historically developed characters and conflicts at a slow, walking pace. Much of the story has been told as a series of conversations between two characters at a time. Fans will remember prominent pairings with ease: We have watched Cersei converse privately with Jaime, Robert, Tyrion, Joffrey, Sansa, Margaery, and many, many others. We have watched Daenerys and Jorah, Jon and Sam, Arya and the Hound, Jaime and Brienne, Theon and Ramsay. And these are a mere sampling. Game of Thrones describes a truly vast array of granular interactions, such that plot and character exposition is accomplished in a nuanced and delightfully interwoven manner. We have come to know the characters as we might come to know real people: by watching them interact with one another in a broad variety of settings. Many of these move the main plot line ahead only a little, if at all.

This gentle, meandering pace has come to distinguish television, generally, as an entertainment medium. Early programs were produced as a series of self-contained episodes that always involved the same small group of characters. But these have given way to sweeping, serialized narratives that span years, kill off important characters along the way, and develop bit by bit. The Honeymooners has given way to The Sopranos. Game of Thrones, taken as a whole, has made masterful use of the format. But this historic strength of the show has proven to be its downfall as well. Its methodical pace, maintained for years, produced a dense network of expectation that was ultimately frustrated and confounded by a too-rapid pace at the end. The events that appear to have transpired during the blackout after Daenerys’ death in the finale could easily have filled an entire season of the show if offered at its usual pace. The character arc of the dragon queen herself became particularly truncated in the last couple of episodes, and thus felt odd and wrong. To its detriment, Game of Thrones proved to be slow, but not steadily so.

The importance of detail

Ultimately, Game of Thrones demonstrates the importance of detail. Our memory functions like an outline. Whether we look back on a fictional narrative or our actual history, we tend only to recall the high points. But these were originally constructed from all the tiny details. When the high points are presented as the details, satisfying meaning does not readily emerge.

Consider these synopses:

A big shark scares everyone and eats some of them, but in the end he dies. Oh, and one guy got bitten in half.

A cool adventurer finds the lost Ark of the Covenant. Oh, and one guy’s face melts off.

A farmboy ends up saving the whole galaxy. Oh, and the villain was actually his dad.

A story can only be reduced so far without diminishing its impact. Tyrion’s justification for Bran’s coronation amounted to little more than the synopses above, but the greater problem is that there is precious little preceding narrative to fill in the blanks even if we wish to. Tyrion’s summarized version is no more succinct than the sum of Bran’s collected time on screen. “A boy paralyzed from childhood became the king. Oh, and he has psychic powers.”

This ham-handed approach permeates Tyrion’s speech. “He crossed beyond the wall,” Tyrion recalls, “a crippled boy, and became the three-eyed raven.” But what does Brienne of Tarth, or Edmure Tully, or Robin Arryn know about three-eyed ravens? What do any of the people seated there know about that? The meaning of the three-eyed raven was always presented as a mystery — even to Bran himself throughout most of his journey. Tyrion was not really making an appeal to the lords and ladies of Westeros; he was making an appeal to us. Peter Dinklage (whose interpretation of Tyrion Lannister, to be fair, was always inspired and convincing) may as well have officially broken the fourth wall and gazed directly at the camera to say, “Come on guys, this ending is cool. The guy fell from a tower and now he’s the king.”

Show, don’t tell.

“Show, don’t tell” is the generally recommended approach to fiction, and Game of Thrones largely honors it. We are not told that Joffrey is cruel; we are shown his cruel deeds and allowed to draw our own conclusions. But in the end, Game of Thrones was reduced to a telling. The final season adopted a compressed narrative pace more typical of feature films, where a montage lasting a few seconds serves for character explication and the entire point is made in under two hours. The most effective scenes in the finale work only by cashing in on the immense backstory laid out in earlier seasons.

Brienne and Jaime‘s relationship, as an example, is meaningful to us because we have spent so much time watching it develop. We have watched them explore the nuances of strength and bravery, of loyalty and duty, of gender roles, and of the true qualifications for nobility. We have listened to them discuss it all and watched them live it all out. We have watched them stand naked before each other, as unwilling captives, in indignity, shame and exhausted resignation. And we have watched them lie down willingly in passion, as two knighted servants of the realm, despite the threatening doom of the Night King’s approach. It was moving to watch Brienne redeem the Kingslayer posthumously by recording and reframing his deeds to highlight his nobility. She knew more of Jaime than she could tell, and so do we. And that is why the scene is so gratifying to us. The same can be said of Jon’s farewell to the Starks. There is much history there. We feel the weight of it, because we have lived it along with them.

If we may take anything away from Game of Thrones, it is this: We will not tweet our way into enlightenment. Big ideas require a cohesive, long form presentation full of detail and subtlety. It is fine for the narrative to be broken down and serialized; but it will lose its power if it is minimalized. We extract nuggets of meaning from a story once it is complete, but we cannot just be handed the nuggets when we walk in the door. When they are presented that way, it is almost impossible for us to receive them as true. Benioff and Weiss would have done better to heed the words of Tolkien’s Treebeard: “We never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”

A storyteller need not connect all the dots. It’s generally more interesting if they don’t. But they must at least provide us with sufficient dots to extract meaning from what is presented. We appreciate whole stories just as we appreciate the characters within them: We don’t want to be told what a story means; we want to be shown. And little details are the raw material for that process.

Game of Thrones, for now, has not gone out with a bang. It has gone out with a whimper. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the way the story ends; it’s just that we haven’t really heard the ending presented as a story. At best, we might say we have been provided with the Cliff’s Notes. We can only hope that in the coming years, Martin will rein in his fiery beast of a tale and complete the books he began decades ago. As Tyrion has told us, there’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. But a powerful story needs a proper ending. Together, HBO and George R. R. Martin have yet to give us one.

A queen I could not recognize

We were led to believe that Daenerys was a kinder, gentler soul than the savages around her. She was heralded as Mhysa, one who would bring enlightenment to Westeros and restore justice. But in the end, she was depicted only as a banal tyrant bent on imposing her will. That story has already been told, and told far better. I personally mourned the end of The Sopranos, because Tony — for all his flaws and brutality — was still hard not to like. He wrestled with the darkness that finally consumed him, to fill our television screens with inky silence. Even at the end, Tony still seemed a good bit like me. Daenerys, too, was still someone right up to the end, but we have yet to meet that person. We did not get to watch Daenerys become that person, and we certainly did not take the journey along with her. The Daenerys we knew seemed to vanish sometime after arriving in Westeros. The platinum-haired figure who died at the hands of Jon Snow was but a caricature of her.

In Game of Thrones’ final episode, Daenerys Stormborn calls on her gathered armies — savages still — to help her break the wheel. It had been revealed as her intention for years, and it generally sounded like a good plan at the time. The wheel then appeared to be crushing many decent people beneath its weight. But that same wheel has also carried us, at times haltingly, from where we were to where we are. In the end, we don’t actually want the wheel to be broken.

We want it to be fixed.

What Game of Thrones got right

Much of the frustration surrounding Game of Thrones’ ending involves the story of Jon Snow. We heard through the years of The Prince That Was Promised, and Jon certainly appeared to be that prince. He even went so far as to rise from the dead. His life seemed to be bound up with immense purpose, and so his end seemed anti-climactic.

Still, there is a deeper truth that Jon’s life reveals. We were led to believe that Jon would save the world; and in fact he did — twice. He simply did so in a different manner than we might’ve expected.

Jon recognized Arya’s potential to use her strength to do good in the world. He gave her a proper sword, Needle. And though it was small, it was still useful enough for “sticking them with the pointy end.“ Jon’s gift set Arya out on a journey of self-discovery that culminated in the defeat of the Night King.

The Night King must, at least, represent that danger that comes from outside ourselves. That is a frightening thing indeed. Many fought bravely to defeat the Night King, and Arya finished the task. She did not even use Needle to do it. But still, Jon’s gift to Arya planted the seed of her victory. The true gift was not a sword; but rather, a charge to her: An affirmation that despite her youth, and despite her gender, what strength she had could be used to fight for justice, and even to win.

It doubtless came as a surprise to many that the Night King did not prove to be the central antagonist of the story. But there is a truth here as well. In the end, our greatest enemy does not come from outside ourselves. It is within us. And Jon saved the world of Westeros from this enemy as well. He did so, first, by setting aside his own rightful claim to rule and serving the realm of men instead. And he did so, finally, by killing the one that threatened to end the world under pretense of saving it. Jon demonstrated that in the end, we do not save the world by ruling it. We save the world by loving it. It was for this purpose, anti-climactic though it might seem, that Jon rose from the dead.

And with this, the story begins to sound familiar.