Article

Belief

Books

Culture

Film & TV

7 July 2025

5 min read

Waiting for George: why I am yearning for an ending in Game of Thrones

Why does it matter so much that the series is unfinished?

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Two people sit at a table strewen with old books lit by candle light.

Looking for the next chapter.

HBO.

Should you start something if you can’t be sure it’s going to finish? More specifically, should I read A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin? It’s book five in the Game of Thrones series. The author is 76. Fans have been waiting fourteen years for book six, The Winds of Winter. And many are doubting the book will ever arrive, let alone book seven, A Dream of Spring. If current trends continue, HS2 will be completed faster than the Game of Thrones book series.

There are plenty of other reasons not to read A Dance with Dragons. I’ve seen the adaptation for HBO which hit our screens in 2011. The plots have been already spoiled. I already know what’s going to happen.

Yet over the last couple of years, I’ve read the first four books in the series and enjoyed them. A Storm of Swords, the third book in the series, was stunning, even though the plot had been thoroughly spoiled. I already knew about the Red Wedding, and the fate of King Joffrey and what happened to Jamie Lannister’s hand. Nonetheless, A Storm of Swords was enthralling and relentless. Just when I thought my jaw could not drop any further, it would drop again. The fact that A Dance with Dragons has already been on TV is not a consideration.

A stronger reason against reading A Dance with Dragons is this: book four in the series, A Feast for Crows is, frankly, for the birds. Following on from the scintillating Storm of Swords, George RR Martin decided to focus on all of the least interesting characters who wander around Westeros desperately seeking a plot. But A Dance with Dragons, I’m told, returns to the best characters, like Tyrion Lannister, Varys and John Snow. What’s not to like?

Here’s what: I end up being captivated by the world of Westeros all over again and left in the lurch. It could happen. In fact, I would expect it to happen. I might find myself primed and ready for the sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter, which may never come. It’s been fourteen years. Say it comes next year. Book seven may takes another five. He’ll be 82. He might not make it. Heck, I’ll be 56. I might not make it!

George RR Martin is aware of this fan fury. He often refers to it in interviews or on his blog. In 2019 he wrote:

“…if I don’t have THE WINDS OF WINTER in hand when I arrive in New Zealand for worldcon, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.”

The lake has been prepared, George. You’ll need to do better than ‘direwolves ate my homework.’ Martin explains he’s been working on related projects which now includes opening a pub called Milk of the Poppy. He doesn’t work the bar or change the barrels but fans now suspect that Martin is avoiding finishing the books on purpose. Why?

Some say he knows he can’t finish the book because he’s an existentialist. After all, he wrote the books to show the sprawling messiness of the real world by using the anarchy of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. For George RR Martin, life is not full of heroes and villains like Gandalf and Saruman. He has a point. The most interesting characters in Lord of the Rings are Gollum and Boromir.

Game of Thrones is an intentionally complex mess of compromise and chaos. There are no good guys, except John Snow. And there are no real villains except King Joffrey. And Cersei, Melisandre, Little Finger, The Mountain and, wow, that’s already quite a long list, isn’t it?

The moral complexity was highlighted by the end of the TV series, which had to invent its own finale, as none was provided by the author. Many fans were appalled at the last series, outraged that the resolution was jarringly neat. Others were just happy there was an ending – which made that first group of fans even angrier.

Here’s the real question. Why does it matter? So the series is unfinished. Big deal.

You know what else is unfinished? Your life. And the lives of everyone around us. We live with not knowing how our story will end. We are finite beings. We are born. We live with the limitations.

And then the biggest limitation of all hits us: death. So why not just enjoy the moment? If we enjoyed the characters and the stories, what’s the problem? Storm of Swords was incredible. Maybe A Dance with Dragons will be brilliant too. Can’t I just enjoy that and move on?

No. We yearn for an ending. Life is not one perpetual cliffhanger. Let us not confuse limited knowledge with suspense. The fact is that we are eternal beings. The Lord has set eternity in our hearts. Even the characters of Westeros believe in something beyond themselves – although all the talk of the old gods and the new is entirely unconvincing. I don’t really believe they believe in those gods.

But they do believe in something outside of themselves. In Game of Thrones, a few good men are prepared to die with honour. Some awful men die in agony. Others are wrestling with doing the right thing when all around seem not to care. Some characters are yearning for home; some vindication; others love and acceptance.

Our desire for an ending merely matches the desires of the characters that George RR Martin has created. They are so lifelike precisely because they believe in providence, fate, destiny or some divine standard to which they are held to account. In that, George RR Martin has made characters in God’s image, not his own.

What I do know is this: my favourite character in Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister, would read A Dance with Dragons, curious to know what happens next. And that’s good enough for me. I’m in.

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Article

Culture

Justice

Trauma

1 July 2025

4 min read

Why are we so obsessed with true crime?

Our prurience often mistakes curiosity for compassion

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Joshua Coleman on Unsplash.

Last month, Terry Barnes wrote in The Spectator about the ‘Trial of the Century’: that of Erin Patterson, a middle-aged Australian woman accused of murdering a dinner party-full of people with deadly mushrooms. 'All this week, on unusually cold and frosty southern Australian winter mornings, pre-dawn queues of rugged-up and puffer-jacketed hopeful spectators formed outside the rural courthouse, breath steaming in television spotlights as people stamped their feet to stay warm.'

Journalists covering the ongoing trial compete with those spectating - and reporters have flown in from around the world to an obscure, otherwise undisturbed country town. The general fascination mirrors the streaming charts, where you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to observe a pattern in what’s hot. True crime – whether recreated on TV or happening in the courts - is having a moment.

The attention of criminologists, the press, law enforcement and the justice system on real life cases such as Patterson’s is paramount. But is ours?

A voracious appetite for true crime isn't new. In St Augustine's Confessions, he writes about a friend called Alypius who resisted peer pressure to go into the gladiatorial amphitheatre. Augustine writes about his friend being dragged in:

'When they arrived and had found seats where they could, the entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty.'

Alypius kept his eyes closed, but eventually gave in to the spectacle:

'As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure.'

Alypius' story is one of being freed from this addiction, but there's still a thirst for blood today in the arena of both true crime and cancel culture. The human condition, as well as being predisposed to voyeurism, is closer to William Golding's Lord of the Flies than we'd like to admit. It doesn't take much displacement of order for chaos to unravel.

And this is why we're so fascinated: that true crime is true. The whodunnits of Agatha Christie have kept people entertained for decades, but truth is stranger than fiction. The perpetrators aren't ridiculous 2D villains and monsters, but men and women who for whatever reason have given themselves over to darkness. The mixture of motives, methods and mania aren't easily unscrambled, so we like the serialisation. The devil is in the detail, and it takes time to pore over.

The Russian author and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, when he was sent to the gulag, gradually solved his own puzzle: that evil can be observed, but it is much closer than we think: 'Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.’

Even so, we don't like to admit that sobering reality, or nuance. We like to think we're on the side of justice. We confuse curiosity with compassion. But the Netflix shows, podcasts and twists and turns of the courtroom upend our 'just world hypothesis': we see that justice often isn't fully served in this life, making us wonder if it might be possible eternally.

Then there's also the reality of truth being contested. The prophet Isaiah writes of a time where 'Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far off. For truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter.’

Perhaps our thirst here is not just for all the gory details, but for justice and truth. It's a theme picked up by St John in the New Testament, writing 'And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.' Jesus declares later in this same gospel: 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’

The only way we can begin to make sense of evil is to consider one who absorbs our darkness, absorbs all darkness, and yet remains light, even against the backdrop of our world’s darkness.

So what's the right balance? Can I enjoy a true crime show and be filled with light? The tipping point will probably be different for each of us. St Paul, himself a victim of injustice, writes from his prison cell: 'whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’

This isn't a call to turn a blind eye to evil. Paul isn't escaping his prison cell with escapism. He is starkly, soberingly honest about the nature of his own sin and its pervasive, polluting quality in the human condition. And we all have a responsibility to one another to detect, be vigilant and call out where there's injustice. To be ready for it. Our world is in a mess because of blind eyes and burying heads in the sand. Jesus quite clearly says he brings that light to expose the darkness. But meditating on and marinating in darkness as entertainment? That is something different.

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Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

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