Happy Endings GoT SPOILER ALERT
GAME OF THRONES - SPOILER ALERT
Was the ending contrived? Were you satisfied by the way it ended? What makes a good ending?
Things mentioned in this podcast:
- ‘Creative Writing Now’ on endings
- NYT article: closers and clinchers
- Unconventional ending tropes
- An IMDB poll of the ‘most iconic endings’
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing the final series of Game of Thrones. So first of all, have we all watched it? Yeah. Good, that's a good start.
Speaker B:I guess spoiler alert for people who haven't though.
Speaker A:Yes, I think that's about right. Let's cut straight to it. Chris, did you enjoy it?
Speaker C:Yes, I did. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of debate about whether or not it was a good ending. And for me, it was it was perfectly okay. I'm certainly not one of these people who's, you know, kind of sending death threats to the, you know, the screenwriting team or whatever. My only problem generally with the progress of the whole thing is I found that last two seasons, because they were driving to a conclusion, were not as satisfactory as everything that preceded it. They felt rushed, lots more had to happen.
Speaker A:A bit concertinaed.
Speaker C:A bit concertinaed. And therefore, you've lost all of those subtleties and nice bits of dialogue and random little side stories that, you know, that you...
Speaker B:It's very hard to see how they could have avoided that. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, you know, you have that sense of they have to shift gear. You know, they've got to put the brakes on. And so the excitement that you get from the opening of new character arcs and, you know, discovering new aspects of it, well, they've got to actively stop that happening. So, yeah, it's going to feel very different.
Speaker A:I mean, one thing I sort of felt, yeah, in that last one was I actually missed being transported from Westeros one moment to the Wall in a moment. But exactly as you say, that's part of the characters all coming together. And actually, that's part of the, you know, all those threads sort of coming back together. That's part of it. Did you enjoy it, Nick?
Speaker B:Yeah, I did, actually. Much more so than I was expecting to. I think partly because some of the things that happened, it did feel a bit like, you know, it wasn't spectacularly neat always, you know, and that's one of the hallmarks of Game of Thrones. What sets it apart is that they don't do things because, you know, that is how stories work. They do things because you get a sense that they do things because it's sort of realistic. Whatever that means in the world of Westeros. And I thought, well, it's not totally, it's not like everything's sewn up, you know. Actually, it's quite an interesting way to end. But there was this nice, what I liked about it was the sort of denouement, you know, that here they are all going back to their day-to-day business actually felt very, it was a nice domestic feeling to it, you know, seeing the small council running and people just going about their business again. That was great.
Speaker A:I think the only bit I was disappointed by was the death of Cersei and her lover stroke. Jaime. Yeah. I thought that, I'd have felt, I think I was looking for a bit more.
Speaker B:Right, and that's what I mean. So that's like, I was expecting them to have survived so that there could be something more climactic and there wasn't. That was how they died. And I was like, yeah, well, in real life, that's kind of how people die. So yeah, good.
Speaker A:So let's broaden this out. Well, I mean, we feel that that, yeah, amongst us three, we feel that, I mean, I felt satisfied.
Speaker B:Yeah, let's just say that is a very, that's quite not a mainstream opinion. I mean, most people think it was contrived. That's the complaint that people have is it is contrived. It goes against some of the sort of values, the high, you know, values of realism and world building. And so, you know, people weren't happy about it generally. So yeah, I think what we're going to talk about is what makes a good ending, right?
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what does, I mean, I think a part of it and almost using interchangeably here is feeling satisfied. So yeah, well, what does make for a good ending? Let's talk about that, Chris.
Speaker C:Yeah, well, I think for me, first of all, you've got to think what is a story for, right? So why do we use stories? What are we trying to do with them? And if you look at the sort of, you know, some of the theoretical approaches to why humans are storytelling creatures, you know, stuff kind of thought through by people like Jonathan Gottschall, that essentially what we're doing with stories is two things. We are engaging in vicarious learning. So, you know, we don't need to have been attacked by a lion to know a lion is dangerous. If somebody tells us a story about having been attacked by a lion, we learn that from somebody else's experience. And the second thing is social conformity, like encouraging people to stick to a set of rules by setting a sort of moralistic story and kind of infecting them with ideas about what is good and wrong through a story. So if you sort of, you know, accept that, then the ending, so if effectively their utility is about passing on information, what is the ending about? Well, the ending for me is where you actually find out the outcome, right? It's where most of the information value in the story comes from. It's like some stuff happened, but then this outcome occurred and that's what I take away from it. There was some stuff and it caused this thing here and that's what I've learnt or this is what I now need to, these are the lessons I now need to adhere to. So that's the kind of ending is so important. And you know, what stories do is through sort of the evocative creation of the world and the characters, they make you feel like you are in them. So the more engaging the story is, the more memorable it becomes and the more likely you are to heed its lessons in the future. And the ending is where you get that payoff and a lot of
Speaker B:that sort of resonance comes through. Nick? Yeah, I mean, I agree. Storytelling is adaptive and the only slight dissatisfaction I have with the sort of what Chris was spelling out there about, you know, we like doing it, I suppose the argument, storytelling is useful because it's a way of simulating the world and we learn from it, is that doesn't explain why we would have a preference for anything other than a realistic ending, right? What we would prefer if we were using it really to learn stuff is endings where, you know, someone gets eaten, somebody else, you know, dies of a heart attack and then some random guy you've never heard of becomes king and it ends. And that's what happens in real life. Yeah. But I mean, you know, so for whatever reason, we do, we like story. And I think there are two, certainly looking at sort of some of the competing theories for what makes a good ending, you know, from within the kind of creative writing community, what do they say? That you have major, the major sort of conflict is resolved and the results are discovered, which ties into what Chris was saying, that elements throughout the stories are used, you know, that we want to see the end result being actually being a result of something that we've been doing the whole way through, in some sense. So it needs to be meaningful. Yeah. And but that it also results in some way from the actions of the main characters. And of course, that it has emotional meaning so that the ending is different. We kind of prefer the ending that happened or in some sense, the ending that happened is meaningfully different from other endings that could have happened. There's also, I've seen one guy in the New Yorker arguing about, you know, that actually all endings are a kind of closer or a clincher, that closers are just where the storylines end, everyone is paid off, and the thing ends, versus the clincher where they all come together, everything comes together in a kind of climax. But I think personally, I think that's missing, these are kind of in world, what makes a satisfying ending, you know, what plots make a satisfying ending. But I think there are some other necessary conditions. And this ties in probably to the Game of Thrones thing here, which is that we also want consistency. We want the ending to be consistent, like in terms of tone, in terms of the way the characters behave, and their knowledge and so on. Like those are sort of the meta level things that we also want to be true. We don't just want that kind of neat ending. We want also to feel like the ending works within the world that the story is taking place in.
Speaker C:Which reinforces your theory about, you know, stories having to be realistic. We suspend our disbelief, you know, obviously we know there aren't dragons and, you know, magic and walking zombies and so on. But we suspend our disbelief about those things. But what we don't suspend our disbelief about is the behaviour of the characters in there. If somebody does something that's totally against their character, that really jars. And so within the world, we accept that as an allegory of our world, but we want the rest of it to feel realistic so that we can learn
Speaker A:from it, I guess. Just one question, which is, I just wonder just how kind of Western culture centric we're being with this, because don't get me wrong, I'm not a big expert or aficionado of, let's say, Asian cinema, for example, or storytelling. But one of the things I like is that it can be a little bit more nuanced than we're used to in UK, US. So, and I'm not necessarily talking about endings, but also, for example, if you're familiar with, there's a Japanese animator. What's his name? I think he, Howl's Moving Castle was one of them. But I don't think, I can't remember if it's that one or another one. But anyway, a lot of his films are very similar. And what I like about them is, it's not very clear cut, in terms of black and white, and who is good and who is bad, it's much more ambiguous. And I suspect it might be like that with the endings as well.
Speaker B:Well, he is, I think, going slightly against a kind of received wisdom that people like happy endings, or, you know, that we like everything to be neat and tidy. I think it's more complicated than that, because I looked at what, according to an IMDB poll, what are the most iconic endings ever? And I tried to sort of classify them into open versus closed.
Speaker A:One of them is going to be, you know, Casablanca. Yeah, there we go. For the rest of your life, which is definitely an open one.
Speaker B:Right. So you've got, I thought, well, open closed. So open endings being where you're not really actually totally sure what the outcome is going to be. Happy versus sad. Basically, does it work out well for them or not? Expected versus twist. So is this ending, you know, more or less where we were going the whole way through? And there is no consistency at all. I mean, you can find pretty much even split of each of those. So you have, you know, open endings, which would be Butch Cassidy, The Usual Suspects, Inception, all regarded as, you know, fairly open things. And then real sort of closed ones like Citizen Kane, Life is Beautiful, Planet of the Apes, where there is a closure at the end. And then you have kind of happy versus sad. And again, Shawshank Redemption, happy ending. It's a wonderful life. Happy ending. But then you've got sad endings. You've got, you know, Doctor Strange love where the world gets destroyed. Life is Beautiful, of course, where the main character dies. And likewise, with twists, you know, you can find, I mean, you know, some of them are just really straightforward and kind of telegraphed, like The Godfather. And some of them are twists, like, you know, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which you could classify as a twist or, of course, The Usual Suspects. Sixth Sense. Yeah. Yeah. So so anyway, yeah, what I'm saying is, actually, there isn't a kind of ending that we all think is great, that actually, we are prepared to accept endings that come in quite different flavours.
Speaker C:And I think that's probably reflective of the fact that there are all kinds of different outcomes that we might experience. And, you know, sometimes we do end up, you know, with what we require. Sometimes we don't end up with what we require. Sometimes it's unexpected, entirely unexpected. Sometimes, you know, you can see it coming a mile away.
Speaker A:Sorry to interrupt. I disagree, Nick, because actually, you've given some different examples there. But actually, it's a fairly limited number of examples, really, just in terms of options.
Speaker B:Well, I was classifying what were regarded by this poll as the most iconic endings of all time.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, but what I mean is, is within the classification. So you've got a choice of open versus closed, happy versus sad.
Speaker B:There were just some things I thought of that I thought, OK, do people prefer endings that are closed? Do they prefer endings that are happy? Sure. Do they prefer endings with a twist? And I would have thought, well, people are going to really like films that have a twist, but a happy ending, and which give all the answers. And it's not actually OK. You can't bottle it.
Speaker A:Yeah, fair enough. But actually, also, there's another thing, which is, you've got to have a climax. No film ever stops at the climactic moment, OK? You've always got to, so that is definitely, I think that's something regardless, I can only think of one film where that doesn't happen, which I'll come on to in a moment. But you've always got to have, you know, in the story arc, you know, someone starts high, your main character starts high, gets brought low, a series of struggles, goes back up, and something amazing happens, like a marriage, for example, or a death. And then there's a calm bit afterwards, which I actually personally think, I do think that mimics human physiology and, you know, basically having orgasms because...
Speaker B:Well, I mean, more broadly, our emotional responses to conflict, you know, to crisis. You've got to have a calm afterwards. Well, as the crisis builds, we then have some difficult decisions to make, and it is resolved.
Speaker A:Yes, exactly. So you've always got to have that resolution, because even though, whether it's open or closed, whether it's a twist, whether it's not, you've got to have that kind of quiet moment afterwards, with the exception of, I can only think of one film that doesn't do that. Any ideas? It could be a number of things. So perhaps I can only think of one, but Monty Python, Holy Grail, where famously, I think they ran out of money, didn't they?
Speaker B: the ending of The Shining or: Speaker A:I think there is a kind of resolution. The resolution is just, it's just got a question mark. I do, I do think it is.
Speaker B:Yeah, I guess, I see what you mean. I mean, even in Blade Runner, the climax is actually the fight with, with the, what's his name, Roy Batty, isn't it? And then, and then, then that is, denouement is kind of left open.
Speaker C:Rutger Hauer running around in his pants. Yeah.
Speaker A:Just before you come in, Chris, I think also an ending, which was famously, I think, I've not seen the film, but it was changed from the book to the film, I believe, Captain Crowley's Mandolin. And actually, I do think that is quite unusual in that book. And I think it's, I think there are many things that contributed to the popularity of that book. I think one of them is the ending, actually. You talk about sweet sorrow, where, where you have this longing, where the two who are meant to be together, they just missed their chance. And they do get together right at the end of their lives. But it's not quite as, as one would want it to be.
Speaker C:I think, I think that sort of fits in. I mean, I'd kind of, there are obviously ending tropes, right? So there are, there are maybe factors you can cut across them, whether they're happy, sad, bittersweet, whatever. But I'd kind of just been coming up with a series of ending tropes that I, that I think exist, one of which being the twist, you know, the classic twist, like the usual suspects and Sixth Sense, Blaze of Glory, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The kind of triumphant return, where, you know, like Lord of the Rings or Rocky, where they go up and down and then they win at the end, you know, and it's a sort of triumphant return. Like a sacrifice ending. So something like Tale of Two Cities, where Sydney Carton, you know, puts his head on the block, you know, for his, in substitute of somebody else. Then you have kind of redemption stories, which I think are similar to Sacrifice, like Star Wars, you know, the end of Star Wars is really about Darth Vader's redemption. And then frustrated love stories, like you were talking, talking about, you know, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, where it's not unrequited love, but it's, it's not satisfactory. Yes, exactly. The, you know, the cliffhanger. So where you don't really necessarily find out what's going to like, like, like the thing, or literally the Italian job where, you know, left hanging off of a cliff. And then you've got sort of comeuppance kind of endings like Wolf of Wall Street or, or Dr. Faustus, those kinds of things. So I think there are, there are, while you might not be able to sort of produce a formula for what, what a good ending is, there are definitely, there's definitely a sort of suite of options.
Speaker B:You didn't cover the classic riding off into the sunset, which I'd say I love. Yeah, no, no, exactly. The Holy Grail. Yeah. Sorry, the Indiana Jones.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think I did. So what did I think of that? I think I called that something like, oh, unknown. The unknown ending. Like, so the classic, another classic being the road, you know, where the father, the book, at least I haven't seen the film, but where the father dies and the son kind of, you know, looks like he might be okay, might not, we don't know. So, so yeah, I think, and you know, whether there's anything in those different types of, of ending, which people keep coming back to because they deliver some kind of satisfaction, whether there's something in those which you can unpick to say, ah, well, that's why we, why we like those things. I'm not, I'm not sure about.
Speaker A:Okay, so where have we got to? We like a story, right? That's where we've got to. I feel like we made more progress than that, but yeah, you carry on. Well, no, that's all I had to say. I mean, all I, you know, humans like a story. I mean, I'm sure we've talked about this before in a podcast, but this is where we get into religion as well and things like that.
Speaker C:Yeah, well, right. So religion is stories, right? You know, we use stories for like history myths. You know, America is not the story of, of a country which was founded by, by slave owners and then, you know, genocidal expansion. It's, it's one of, you know, the country of the free that turns out all right. So we, you know, we use stories to get across those, those ideas and the endings are critical because they give a sort of value to them. But I think if you take it outside of that and you look at things like even just like our jobs doing analysis, right? When it, when you do some analysis and then you present it to your customers, you're effectively telling them a story. You know, when you do data visualization, you're using bits of data to, to put together a narrative about things. And so actually thinking about the satisfactory conclusion of that is key to getting people to do something about it because stories are there to make people act.
Speaker B:They're there to make people be better or to not wander off into the woods on their own. Right. So, yeah, I mean, but he's one of those things where the more you think about it, and this is something I know people think we probably overthink very commonplace aspects of everyday life. But why do we still, why do we want it to be packaged as a story rather than as facts? Like, why am I going to learn more by hearing a story about someone getting eaten by a lion than I will from merely being told, well, there have been three fatal lion attacks the last three months. If it's adaptive, then I would expect to want to really demand that. But we just prefer, strongly prefer to have a story.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, but I think the reason why is emotions. That's, I mean, one of the ways we learn is through emotions.
Speaker B:But what Chris said has made me think of something. Your thing doesn't answer the question, because the question is, why would we feel those emotions about, about. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, go on then. Yeah. So, yeah, which is about information, about with a narrative. So we're not, obviously, when we're doing analysis, I like to think, as to our customers, that it's not fictional. But it is a way, it is absolutely the case that you are trying to tell people what the things you've done and looked at mean, ultimately, in terms of something they have to do. And, and I think, I wonder if there's an argument to be made that stories, that narratives are a way of compressing information, you know, particularly where the narratives are able to hang on certain, you know, tropes. So, you know, if you're able to say, okay, well, now you just need to understand this story, you need to download your concept, your pre-existing concept of the good guy, that's Luke Skywalker. And we need the kind of rogue, that's Han Solo. And we need the evil mastermind, that's, you know, the Emperor. So to understand this story, well, that's fine. We've already got all the ingredients. So that is much easier than showing me, just show me Luke Skywalker being a nice guy and trying to help out and doing things that are a bit against his interest, because he feels it's his duty. Otherwise, it would take me a long time, a lot of exposition of his day-to-day life for me to get that, to understand that. So I wonder if, I wonder if actually the whole point of stories is that they enable us to compress information, to compress data in a way that just enables us to learn stuff more easily. Thought. Nice.
Speaker C:Yeah, no, I think that is an interesting point that you literally just hook into the tropes and download those units. But I think there's also definitely something about the memorability and the resonance of the story that is possibly tied to emotion. You know, it's like that quote about, you know, one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. And there's something about empathizing and imagining ourselves as the statistic that makes us more likely to act upon, we trick ourselves into thinking that data is about us. And therefore, we need to act accordingly, as opposed to it being outside of us and external to us.
Speaker B:Yeah, and I think, of course, that's why screenwriters, you know, they hate dealing with abstract topics because they're boring. You know, you can't show someone the Second World War. You can show someone a guy in the Second World War and the difficulties that he faces, whether it's Churchill or a soldier, you know.
Speaker A:Just need to finish this off. I think that was quite nice. But we need to finish this off very quickly. Let's turn this on its head for a moment. Either your favourite beginning to a book or film or any story, or something that happens in the middle of a story.
Speaker B:Well, I can tell you my favourite beginning. And it's actually a sort of genre of beginning. It's the beginning of any Sherlock Holmes story. I mean, for me, Sherlock Holmes is like just the comfiest jumper you've ever owned. You know, you're suddenly you're back there in the late 19th century with the fire in the greats and Sherlock Holmes smoking his pipe and reading the paper. And, you know, and Dr. Watson's dropped in and they're having a chat about what's going on. And then there's a knock at the door. And you know that the adventure has just turned up and it's going to be someone who's, you know, embroiled in a scandal or has lost a diamond or who's, you know, who's being accused of murder. And all the excitement is yet to come. And it's really nice. The same you get the same beginning every time. And it's just that's what you want. I would hate to imagine if he was trying to be innovative. It'd be awful. It's the similarity of every single story is so nice. And then, you know, you're off. It's like, you know, you're at the same station, but you've got a different destination.
Speaker C:But the setup to an adventure is always the best Lord of the Rings. I love the stuff where they're faffing around in the prancing pony and wandering around just waiting for the call to adventure. Yeah, no.
Speaker A:Is that your answer, Chris?
Speaker C:No, no, I think my I mean, I've you've got to go a long way to be a tale of two cities. And, you know, it was the it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. You know, the season of light, the season of dark, you know, so on. And so I just think that sums up our times to today and of every age. So I think that's brilliant. And I also you know, I also think the ending to the to the story is is is amazing as well. You know, where he says it's a far, far better thing that I do than I've ever done. You know, as he as he walks up to the to the guillotine, it's a far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. And so I think in terms of bookending a story, that's pretty bloody impressive.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm gonna go for something that's Are you going to go for the emoji movie? I'm gonna go for something that happens in the middle of a film. And actually, it's just, I've always liked this bit in this film. And I've seen this film, probably 20, 30 times. But maybe it's in my head, because I was watching it with my children only recently, which is in Life of Brian, Monty And it's very Terry Gilliam. A spaceship suddenly flies out from the middle of nowhere. And he finds himself in the middle of a space chase battle. And then gets after that gets dropped. Yeah, in exactly the same spot. I know. It's fantastic. It's just, it's just wonderful.
Speaker B:There's a kind of meta joke as well about about writers sort of writing themselves out of difficult situations, you know, come up with the most absurd words.
Speaker A:Okay, well, so talking of happy endings here, we've we've we've come to one. So thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, been here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
