It’s not a particularly unpopular opinion to say that “Game of Thrones” didn’t have the best ending (though I’ll say that some people right here at /Film might disagree with me). The series, which is based on George R.R. Martin’s novel series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” came to a close after eight seasons in May of 2019 not with a bang, but with a piteous whimper. So, do showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have any regrets? Yes, apparently — but their regrets aren’t related to the series finale “The Iron Throne” at all!
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In a January 2024 story for The Hollywood Reporter, Benioff and Weiss said they had one major shared regret: that Mord the Jailer, a small character seen in the show’s first season who was played by Ciaran Bermingham, never returned. “One thing I know I wish we could have done is there’s the character Mord the Jailer,” Benioff said in the piece.
“It was a mistake not bringing Mord the Jailer back into it,” Weiss agreed. “We always talked about doing it.” Apparently, they had a specific idea. “And we had the scene for it,” Benioff added. “There’s a scene set in a tavern …”
“Was it Brienne or The Hound?” Weiss followed up, mentioning fan-favorite characters Brienne of Tarth and Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, played by Gwendoline Christie and Rory McCann. “But we realized too late that Mord could have owned the tavern. We could have had that actor in the background acting exactly the way he did as a jailer, except now as a small-business owner. It was just such an obvious, no-brainer, day-after idea.”
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Wait — who’s Mord the Jailer again?
Hold on. Who the heck is Mord the Jailer again? Well, he appears ever so briefly in a whopping two episodes in the show’s first season as a guard at the Eyrie, the stronghold controlled by Lady Lysa Arryn (Katie Dickie). After Lysa’s husband Jon Arryn, who served as Hand of the King to Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), died under suspicious circumstances just before the show’s narrative actually begins, she told the Starks of Winterfell that she believed her husband was murdered; at the same time, the Starks, including patriarch Ned (Sean Bean), receive the royal family of Westeros at their Northern castle. Everything goes south very quickly when Ned and Catelyn’s (Michelle Fairley) second-youngest son Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) then catches Robert’s wife and queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) in flagrante with her own brother Jaime (Nikolaj-Coster Waldau) and Jaime shoves the kid out of a window, nearly killing him. Then, a hired assassin attacks Catelyn and an unconscious Bran to finish the job … and Catelyn incorrectly believes that Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), Cersei and Jaime’s younger brother, ordered the hit.
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All of this context is to say that Catelyn takes Tyrion prisoner in the wilds of Westeros and brings him to the Eyrie to be put on trial, faced with the possibility that he’ll be shoved out of the castle’s “moon door” (which is just a hole in the floor that drops you to your death, basically). While imprisoned in the sky cells of the Eyrie, which don’t have any railings that prevent Tyrion from falling (again, to his death), Tyrion tries to reason with Mord the Jailer, saying he’ll pay the guy handsomely if he frees him — reminding him that Lannisters always pay their debts. Tyrion wins his trial after demanding it be a trial by combat and snagging sellsword Bronn (Jerome Flynn) as his champion, and on his way out, he tosses a sack of gold at Mord, keeping his promise.
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David Benioff and D.B. Weiss should have some other regrets about Game of Thrones
If I’m being honest, it is absurd that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss picked Mord the Jailer as their biggest regret when it comes to “Game of Thrones,” although I guess I could give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they were just making a little joke after most people really hated the end of their show. Here’s what they should actually regret: rushing “Game of Thrones” to its endpoint to such a degree that the last two seasons felt like an empty, ridiculous shell of the actually good seasons that preceded them.
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Let’s use Daenerys Targaryen, the self-dubbed “Mother of Dragons” played by Emilia Clarke, as a perfect example of this. Realistically, Daenerys was probably always going to descend into darkness; her dad was literally nicknamed the “Mad King,” and characters often say that every time a Targaryen is born, “the gods flip a coin” regarding their sanity. (A history of incest will, apparently, do that to your bloodline.) It didn’t have to shake out the way it did, though, if Benioff and Weiss hadn’t been in such a rush to go make their “Star Wars” movie (which ultimately got canceled anyway) and had let “Game of Thrones” end across another season or two. Instead of watching an increasingly isolated and paranoid Daenerys experience a realistic and normally paced panic about whether or not she’d ever get to sit on the Iron Throne, we watched this happen at hyper-speed. It all culminates in a scene in the show’s penultimate episode, “The Bells,” where Daenerys mentally deteriorates in the blink of an eye and commits straight-up genocide in King’s Landing from dragonback.
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That’s what these two jamokes should regret. They should feel apologetic about the rampant character assassination in the show’s final seasons, along with the wildly rushed pacing and the series’ increasingly absurd attempts to “subvert expectations.” (Bran is king at the end?! Really?!?) They shouldn’t be regretting Mord the Jailer. That guy did not need to come back.
“Game of Thrones” is streaming on Max now.
