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Berman 

David Berman remembered: If a human could feel it, Berman could write it - The Washington Post

The best way to understand the cult following of David Berman would be to talk to one of his obsessive fans, which is to say — talk to any one of his fans. The songwriter and poet, who died at the age of 52 on Wednesday, inspired a rare kind of devotion. If you were into the music Berman made as the leader of Silver Jews and, more recently, Purple Mountains, you were almost certainly ready to evangelize for him as our era’s preeminent lyricist.

“Of, loosely, my generation of songwriters, the best of us,” John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats tweeted about Berman shortly after the news of his death. “I could sit here all day and quote memorable David Berman couplets and never grow tired. He had no competition.”

True enough, when I was writing a profile of Berman a few months ago, one of the most difficult parts of the process was something that should have taken no more than a few minutes — deciding which lyrics to use as examples of his work. He didn’t have just one mode; his songs were generous with moments of wisdom, humor, sadness, anger, silliness, tenderness, mystery. If a human being was capable of feeling it, David could write it and render it profound. His voice was a barrier to entry for some — “All my favorite singers couldn’t sing” was one of his most quotable lines, and it was often tossed back in his direction as a form of praise for his rumbling manner of speak-sing — but was the perfect delivery system for oracle-like transmissions that would materialize every few years.

[David Berman was the cult musician who went away for 10 years. What made him finally come back?]

Berman’s death is all the more shocking because his reemergence was one of 2019’s most unlikely and genuinely inspiring comeback stories. For the past decade he lived in creative silence after dissolving Silver Jews suddenly and decisively at the beginning of 2009. “I always loved bands with mystique,” he told me as part of his reasoning for going dark and staying that way. Much of that mystique grew out of his longtime refusal to adhere to the standard protocols of being in a rock band — up through 2005 he rarely granted interviews and didn’t perform live. His recorded songs were his lone form of communication to the masses.

But he was also something of a perfect tragic figure. There was an almost absurdly cinematic suicide attempt in the specific Nashville hotel suite where Al Gore’s team holed up during the 2000 recount; a Shakespearean feud with his father, Richard Berman, a famous (or notorious, depending on your political leanings) millionaire ­lobbyist who represented right-wing causes; a litany of almost-comebacks and collaborations that as soon as they came close to reality were squashed by Berman.

It’s a minor miracle that “Purple Mountains,” the self-titled album under his new moniker that came out just four weeks ago, exists at all, let alone that it meets the high standards of his previous work. Lyrically, it’s the testament of someone mired in the deepest depths of down-and-out summoning the strength to claw his way back.

“I wanted to prove that someone over 50 could still make a good album,” he told me, which was both a good line (his specialty) and an obvious lowering of expectations. The album was met with universal praise and a new generation was introduced to one of music’s true characters. He recruited a group of properly worshipful millennials to serve as his new traveling backing band. “Our fearless leader,” band member Cyrus Gengras captioned <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B0zUCqZFx-l/" title="www.instagram.com">an Instagram photo </a>of Berman on Monday in New York, where they were rehearsing. The tour was scheduled to start Saturday. Berman died on Wednesday.

[David Berman, indie-rock poet and singer for the Silver Jews, dies at 52]

So “Purple Mountains” is the comeback that’s now a poignant farewell. The 1998 Silver Jews album “American Water” is fully deserving of its status as Berman’s classic. The opening line alone — “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection” —  unfurls an entire universe of possibilities in just eight words. Dylan comparisons often came his way, but he swatted them away every time. (“I came up with an explosive comment to lay on the right person: No matter how great his greatest hits, Dylan never wrote a song as great as American Pie,” he emailed me, unprompted, one evening during our running correspondence over the past year.)

Though less canonically revered, 2005’s “Tanglewood Numbers” is the album that has always felt like his definitive statement. It’s the most cathartic Silver Jews album, recorded after attempted suicide and during a period of newly found sobriety. “To be quite honest I think it’s a record that a man made,” Berman told me in a 2008 interview. “I felt assertive and I was tired of apologizing for, in my own mind, being a ­non-musician. Or being not a beautiful singer.”

“Tanglewood Numbers” is when his laid-back drawl became a serious growl. The album starts with him looking for a paper bag to puke in and ends with him chanting “I saw God’s shadow on this world!’” It is the sound of pure catharsis, of being proudly alive after so being perilously close to death. He addressed his addiction, singing about wanting to “smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch” a solid decade before anybody except junkies and doctors knew what fentanyl was.

“There is a place past the blues I never want to see again,” he sang later on the album. If most lyrics come from the brain or from the heart, on this album Berman was most in touch with his gut.

“Talking about drugs and rehab and stuff, nobody wants me to do that,” he told me in 2008. “It’s not something that I can’t not talk about. I honestly feel like you have to talk about it to be a model for somebody else. Because I didn’t have any models of artists getting sober and still doing well. I had models like Paul Westerberg.”

That dig at the work of the former Replacements frontman seemingly comes out of nowhere but gets to an important part of who Berman was — an often hilarious dude. When I spent time with him in his temporary home of Chicago last fall and again this past spring, there was no doubt that his life was not exactly in great shape, but his humor remained. He loved to talk trash to his friends and his enemies, real and perceived, of which he claimed many.

But as the tributes to him rolled in Wednesday and Thursday, it was truly a tender portrait of Berman that came into fuller picture. So many people who had reached out, particularly during his public absence, who always received a thoughtful reply. Fans who stayed after a concert to get a record signed, always with a personalized note. And the lyrics — of course everyone had a different favorite lyric to share, how that one line captured their own life’s depths or heights or mystery. And that is the greatest tribute: art melding into life, itself, and continuing past death.

<email>david.malitz@washpost.com</email>

Since 2014, David Malitz has been deputy editor in The Washington Post's Features department, overseeing coverage including culture, arts and entertainment. He has been with The Post since 2004 and was previously pop culture editor and a staff writer for the Weekend section.

David Malitz

The Washington Post

David Berman remembered: If a human could feel it, Berman could write it

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David Berman was the cult musician who went away for 10 years. What made him finally come back? - The Washington Post

It was the middle of winter, two days after Barack Obama’s inauguration, when David Berman sat down at the computer in his Nashville home, typed out a post titled “Silver Jews End — Lead Singer Bids his Well-Wishers Adieu” and published it on his record label’s online message board. The decision to dissolve his band, which by that point had made Berman a cult figure in the world of underground music, was sudden and surprising, but Berman seemed in good spirits. “I always said we would stop before we got bad,” he wrote. “If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to Shiny Happy People.”

A few hours later, another post written by Berman appeared on the same message board. This one was titled “My Father, My Attack Dog” and gave additional context to his decision beyond simply wanting to avoid creating the sequel to R.E.M.’s most noxiously catchy hit. “Now that the Joos are over I can tell you my gravest secret,” he wrote, claiming that this secret was “worse than suicide” (which he had attempted in 2003) and “worse than crack addiction” (the scourge of his life around that same time).

His gravest secret was the identity of his father.

“You might be surprised to know he is famous, for terrible reasons,” Berman wrote. “My father is a despicable man.”

It turns out that this poet laureate of indie rock was the son of one of the most notorious denizens of the Swamp — Richard Berman, a lobbyist who made millions and became D.C.-famous for his relentless tactics on behalf of clients including big tobacco, soft-drink companies and union-busting corporations. A “60 Minutes” segment about him dubbed Berman “Dr. Evil” and “the booze and food industries’ weapon of mass destruction.” The clip and quote are proudly featured <a href="https://www.bermanco.com/rick-berman/" title="www.bermanco.com">on the bio page</a> of his firm’s website.

“This winter I decided that the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused. . . . I’ve always hid this terrible shame from you, the fan. Hopefully it won’t contaminate your feelings about the work.”

Logical or not — did the son really bear the supposed sins of the father? — there was no turning back. His band of nearly two decades couldn’t exist, or else his very own credibility would be destroyed. (For his part, Richard Berman, 76, wants none of the public dad-lad drama his son revels in, refusing multiple requests for comment. “Rick won’t discuss his family,” a spokeswoman at Berman and Co. told The Washington Post, but the father has been known to describe his son as someone who constructs his own life story.)

“I don’t remember anything except feeling like one of those Buddhist monks who throws gasoline on themselves,” David Berman says a decade later, thinking back on that decisive day. We’re in a small one-room apartment above his record label’s offices that feels like a cross between a dorm room and a thrift shop, and is serving as his temporary home. In his first extensive interviews since going dark, Berman is ready to talk: about where he’s been and what he’s been up to the past 10 years, what inspired his return, and why he made such a self-immolating exit.

“I think I wanted to take the option of slinking back to the constant affirmation from fans away from myself,” says Berman, who is releasing a new album under the name Purple Mountains in July. “I always loved bands with mystique.”

Talking to Berman alternately feels like basking in the erudition of a professor or the absurdity of a class clown. His eyeglasses are taped together over his right ear, his hair is long and a bit stringy. His beard is dark and a little bit patchy. He looked ragged in his 30s and now looks positively grizzled. He toggles from the virtues of silence as the most powerful artistic statement, as laid out by Susan Sontag in her 1967 essay “<a href="http://www.kim-cohen.com/Assets/CourseAssets/Texts/Sontag_The%20Aesthetics%20of%20Silence.pdf" title="www.kim-cohen.com">The Aesthetics of Silence</a>” (which he insisted I read before our first meeting), to the virtues of getting banned from websites for trolling (which he admits happened to him).

The 2009 breakup note was surprising; what wasn’t surprising was how it was delivered. Berman had always been one for grand gestures. When he attempted suicide by consuming a near-lethal combination of crack and pills, 
he did so in the same hotel suite where Al Gore and his team waited out the 2000 presidential election recount. “I want to die where the presidency died!” he infamously said at the time.

Ultimately, in trying to kill his own career, Berman was fleeing from a shadow that had shaped his adult life — the artist son rebuking a succeed-at-all costs father. The only son who found ways to sabotage whatever success might come his way. The 52-year-old son still smarting from the wounds of his parents’ decades-ago divorce, who has renounced any inheritance from his father.

David Berman became a cult hero singer-songwriter largely because he never said much, making his public expiation all the more startling. Silver Jews did not tour. He did not grant interviews. He didn't even let his record label take out ads to promote Silver Jews albums. It was as a lyricist that Berman attained his status as something of an oracle.

“There was a certain feeling of wisdom handed down constantly line after line,” says Dan Bejar of Destroyer, one of the many songwriters who ranks Berman as an inspiration and influence. “Real wisdom or wisdom that came from something, you know, damaged or damaging.”

A quick survey of simply the first lines on his records showed how he could be heart-wrenchingly straightforward (“No I don’t really want to die/I only want to die in your eyes”) or darkly funny (“Where’s the paper bag that holds a liquor/Just in case I feel the need to puke”), while the opener of his most cherished album, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000AG9W?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=washpost-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B00000AG9W" >American Water</a>,” splits the difference and has taken on a sort of Dickensian mythos in the world of indie rock (“In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection”).

“It’s beautiful and serious, but it’s also a little bit funny,” says Kurt Vile, another one of Berman’s disciples. “Like a foreign perspective of human emotion.”

Berman famously obsessed over his lyrics — “I’ve seen him get hung up on a single line for literally months,” says Dan Koretzky, president of Drag City — and privately obsessed over his public image and narrative.

When Silver Jews were labeled a “Pavement side project” after their first album because of the presence of his college pals Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich, Berman kicked his friends out of the band and recorded the follow-up without them.

Berman hit rock bottom around the time of<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01G4EBY9Q?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=washpost-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B01G4EBY9Q" > 2001’s “Bright Flight</a>,” lost in a haze of drug addiction that resulted in the bleakest album of his career. He sobered up in rehab (paid for by his father), made a rousing return with 2005’s “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01G65897S?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=washpost-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B01G65897S" >Tanglewood Numbers</a>,” and by the time of 2008’s “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015XIE0O?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=washpost-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B0015XIE0O" >Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea</a>,” Berman was against all odds leading what passed as a normal musician life. Silver Jews started touring in 2006, with his wife, Cassie (together since 1999), now a full-time member and bassist. She was a stabilizing force, particularly in concert, where her calm professionalism served as the perfect counter to his endearingly shambolic presence, and their duets served as nightly highlights.

Then, a few months after wrapping the band’s most triumphant tour, Berman bailed. He chose private solitude over a public partnership with Cassie and the band, stopping at the moment it was shaping up as an actual career for both him and his wife.

“I knew it was coming, and we did talk about it,” Koretzky says. “My feeling was that the very complicated emotions and motivations he had for ending the band felt in some ways like 100 percent the right thing to do and felt in some ways like complete madness.”

The Flats at Dupont Circle. It had to be the Flats.

Berman’s first order of business after dissolving the Silver Jews was to return to the exact D.C. street corner  that was seared into his brain as a child, renting an apartment temporarily to gather his thoughts and take on his dad.

When David was 6, his parents split up, and Rick Berman moved out of the family’s Reston, Va., home and into an apartment in the District. David would shuttle between the two locations — weekdays in the suburbs with his mom and weekends in his dad’s new downtown apartment. He remembers the usual minutiae of everyday life (“We would feed pigeons up at the circle, keeping a safe distance from hippies and homeless”); the first signs of his dad’s win-at-all-costs behavior (“When we played Sorry! he loved to send you back to the start. And he wasn’t the least bit sorry!”); and he remembers seeing his dad with other women.

When David was growing up, Richard Berman was not yet the major power broker he would later become, an ascension that started when he worked for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and became an executive for the Steak and Ale restaurant chain. In the mid-’80s, Richard Berman started Berman and Co., when David was a student at the University of Virginia.

Rick wasn’t big into music or literature, passions that David developed on his own. One movie David says his dad loved was “Animal House,” which he says explains his worldview. “When Belushi smashes the guitar over the folk singer’s head, he’s owning the libs,” David says. “There was a way in which it cast bullies as rebels.”

The specific apartment David subletted from February through June in 2009 allowed him to see the building his father lived in for those years in the 1970s. He would look out his window and use that sight as inspiration while writing an “exposé” of his father, portraying him as a union-busting, mercenary instrument of corporate behemoths.

Berman says he was in talks with HBO but balked when the network offered him $150,000 for simply the rights to his story, without any of his input. He was convinced they were going to make his father into an appealing, Tony Soprano-like antihero. (An HBO spokeswoman could not confirm these details.)

Even the way David shaped his career came in response to his father’s actions, he says.

Rick became a pioneer of astroturfing, a new form of fake-grassroots messaging; David wrote poetry. (In 2005, a former U.S. poet laureate <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/arts/music/so-you-want-to-be-a-poet-i-mean-rock-star-i-mean-poet.html" title="www.nytimes.com">told the New York Times</a> of Berman’s poems in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0965618366?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=washpost-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=0965618366" >his 1999 collection, “Actual Air”</a>: “They are full of complex turns and tricks and conceptual hijinks, and yet there’s this surface clarity. You’re welcomed into the poem.”)

Rick’s clients included the biggest industries in all of business; David actively fought against mainstream success.

“In a way I enjoyed showing him that he had to go to so much effort to get people to follow him, and I didn’t have to do anything,” he says.

Even as David set out to “take down” his father, they remained in touch over email once in a while. “The time that he got the most furious was when I said, well, this is the ultimate for you. This is your guy,” Berman says of an email he sent his dad after Donald Trump’s win in November 2016. “You’re just like this guy. He didn’t like that at all. But it’s true.”

Mike Elk is a labor reporter for <a href="http://paydayreport.com/exclusive-union-buster-rick-berman-on-his-anti-uaw-strategy-at-vw-in-chattanooga/" title="paydayreport.com">PaydayReport.com</a> and the Guardian who has covered Rick Berman extensively over the past five years. He doesn’t see him as a Trump-like figure but more of an old-school Republican.

“I think he sees himself as this scrappy Everyman,” Elk says of the powerful lobbyist. They may be diametrically opposed when it comes to labor issues — Elk is a staunch union advocate — but Elk describes him as someone whom you’d like to have as a neighbor. When Elk left his job at Politico in the wake of a labor dispute with the publication, Rick Berman was one of the first people to call and see how he was doing.

“Rick is a competitor; he’s a guy who prides himself on being a good businessman,” Elk says. “He sees defeating unions as the ultimate way of proving you are a good businessman.”

“I grew up the son of a businessman,” David told The Post. “And I didn’t get into music to be a businessman.”

When Harmony Korine, who directed the movie “Spring Breakers,” hosted a Hanukkah party in Nashville several years ago, it was the start of a partnership between an ascendant rock star and a cult hero in hiding — and another opportunity Berman sabotaged.

Korine was a friend and Nashville neighbor of Berman’s. Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach was new to town — not yet at the arena-filling status he’d find in a couple of years, but well on his way — and their families gathered to celebrate the festival of lights.

Berman says they bonded over jokes made at the expense of a fellow Nashville resident, Jack White. “That really brought us together,” Berman remembers. “He liked it when I called Jack White ‘Sir Edgar Scissor Blues.’ ”

“I don’t remember that,” Auerbach says, diplomatically. “But I remember him constantly being funny. It almost felt like when we would hang out, he was almost doing stand-up for me.”

The parameters of the partnership they struck up were pretty simple — Dan would write some music, David would write some words, and maybe they could make something work. But eventually Berman backed out as Auerbach focused on other projects.

“I was definitely honored to be able to write with him,” Auerbach says of the experience. “I feel like I learned a lot from David, whether he knows it or not.”

Nastanovich, one of Berman’s oldest friends, puts it this way: “If things don’t feel right to him, then he’s going to pull the plug.”

“I hope this message finds you well. I’m a Nashville native and a longtime fan. To get to the point I’ve got a bunch of Silver Jews records and a big-ass soundsystem. I wondered if you’d be interested in coming by and having a listen . . .”

It’s April 2019 and David Berman is finally getting around to reading his emails from January 2017. Back in Chicago, the musician is going through the inbox of an abandoned email address that still gets a trickle of emails from some mixture of curious superfans and aspiring poets, everyone looking for a brief interaction with a mysterious figure.

Berman was on the other end of this kind of exchange when he reached out to the jammy indie band Woods last spring via his preferred method of communication — the 3 a.m. email.

When Jeremy Earl woke up and saw the message in his inbox, he was puzzled and intrigued, and texted his bandmate Jarvis Taveniere about the mysterious correspondence. “I was like, what?! That’s amazing. Write him back ASAP!” Taveniere recalls.

Soon enough they were in Chicago, and after three days of rehearsals and four days of recording, the album was basically done. Songs that Berman had been working on for years were closer than ever to being released, although it was hard to stop himself from continuing to tweak them.

“He’d have pages of alternate lyrics for each song. All amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Earl says.

As fast as the final “Purple Mountains” sessions with Woods came together, the coulda-been sessions of almost-collaborators read like an impressive indie festival lineup, including Dan Bejar of Destroyer, Stephen Malkmus, Black Mountain (that grouping recorded an entire album in Vancouver, but Berman scrapped it) and Jeff Tweedy (who did spec production work on a couple of songs, but Berman decided to go in a different direction for the full album).

Outside of “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son” — as straightforward as its title indicates — there are no cathartic takedowns of his father. But from opening track, “That’s Just the Way That I Feel,” you can also tell that this is going to be a different version of Berman in terms of how much more of himself is laid bare on the lyric sheet:

You see the life I live is sickening

I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion

Day to day I’m neck and neck with giving in

I’m the same old wreck I’ve always been.

Then it’s on to “All My Happiness Is Gone,” which surprisingly sounds like the Silver Jews’ take on Modern English’s “I Melt With You.” But in terms of where it lands emotionally, the song couldn’t be further from the new-wave classic; whereas Modern English depicted lovers literally stopping time to liquefy into each other, Berman’s song addresses a relationship in ruins.

By the time things end with a song called “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me” (featuring Auerbach with a co-writing credit), it’s obvious there’s a new fractured relationship at the center of Berman’s life: his separation from his wife, Cassie.

“We’ve been together 20 years, and the first decade we lived in town and had parties and were always together as a couple,” Berman says later in an email. “After the [last Silver Jews show] I completely retreated into our house and buried myself in books. I saw no one and did nothing. Cassie continued to make friends, to play music, to go on vacations and be with family and I Bartlebied my way out of all of it.” (Cassie Berman declined to comment for this story.)

So now Berman has come full circle, one family member sending him into hiding and another serving as the bittersweet muse for his reemergence. Whether he’s ready to fully emerge, though, is a fair question. He rarely leaves his Chicago apartment, to the point where even the video for his comeback single was filmed in that tiny room.

Footage of present-day Berman is interspersed with scenes of the final Silver Jews show. The sepia-toned flashbacks, shot in elegant 16mm, show a smiling Berman surrounded by fans and his bandmates (including Cassie), exalting in their warm embrace, the subject a hero’s send-off.

By contrast, the 2019 Berman sits alone in his room, singing “All My Happiness Is Gone” to a stationary camera, melting into an ineffable sadness.

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‘Game of Thrones’ finale recap: How did it end for Daenerys, Jon Snow and ‘The Iron Throne’? - The Washington Post

Nicki DeMarco

What you missed from the series finale of 'Game of Thrones'

Arts & Entertainment

In the end, nobody sits on the Iron Throne. Forged by a dragon and destroyed by a dragon. Daenerys never got a chance to take her place on the throne as queen, as her lover/nephew/murderer, Jon Snow, listened to his conscience and the advice of Tyrion, putting an end to her reign before it even started. For all of the complaints about Daenerys in this season, this seemed to be the fate she deserved after taking out the entirety of King’s Landing.

So from Robert Baratheon to Joffrey Baratheon to Tommen Baratheon to Cersei Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen and finally to ... Bran Stark. (That list does not include Stannis Baratheon, who never sat on the Iron Throne but technically was the true king and I will continue to believe that forever.) “Game of Thrones” wraps with Bran the Broken starting his reign over the Seven — make that Six — Kingdoms. Sansa Stark takes what’s hers, Tyrion introduces modified democracy to Westeros and Jon Snow goes to where he truly belongs and takes Ghost with him, thank the Lord of Light. It’s the last one of these ever, so let’s get to it.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/20/game-thrones-season-episode-review-iron-throne-melts/?utm_term=.6d156e995b64" target=_blank>As always, read Alyssa Rosenberg’s review.</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/the-game-of-thrones-finale-while-lacking-goes-out-on-an-important-note-stories-matter/2019/05/20/ecb51076-7a62-11e9-a5b3-34f3edf1351e_story.html" target="_blank">And read TV critic Hank Stuever’s takeout on the finale.</a>

Jon Snow does what needs to be done; the death of Daenerys

Daenerys burned down King’s Landing, but her rampage isn’t over. Grey Worm, who has taken after his queen and become a remorseless killing machine, is set to execute a bunch of King’s Landing prisoners over the protests of Jon Snow; Grey Worm says that the war isn’t over until the queen’s enemies are defeated. “How much more defeated do you want them to be?” wonders Davos. Grey Worm answers that question by slitting the throat of a prisoner as Jon and Davos go off to find Daenerys and see if she can be reasoned with.

Before they find her, Dany emerges to address her subjects for the first time as queen. She thanks the Dothraki for keeping all their promises. “You killed my enemies in their iron suits. You tore down their stone houses. You gave me the Seven Kingdoms.” Drogon emphasizes her words with a mighty roar, while Jon does his “this doesn’t seem right” look. Dany names Grey Worm her Master of War and proclaims the Unsullied the liberators of King’s Landing. Dany promises to “liberate” lands from Winterfell to Dorne, from Lannisport to Qarth to the Summer Isles (Drogon should have done a Howard Dean scream here).

Tyrion interrupts Dany’s “Westerosi carnage” speech and she’s none too happy to see him. She accuses him of treason for freeing Jaime, and Tyrion counters with the fact that she slaughtered a city. Tyrion rips off his Hand of the King brooch and sends it flying down the staircase before being taken prisoner. More cutaways to Jon, more flashes of his “I know this is wrong, but will I actually do anything about it?” face. Dany walks away after a brief stare down with Jon, and all of a sudden Arya is next to him because that’s just what Arya does. “She knows who you are,” Arya tells Jon. “You’ll always be a threat to her. I know a killer when I see one.”

Jon visits Tyrion in his holding cell, but he brings no wine and also has bad news about the lack of afterlife, and he’s the only one who can speak with authority on the subject. Tyrion decides oblivion is the best he can hope for seeing as how he strangled his lover (Shae had double-crossed him, but that was still a very painful scene to watch), shot his own father with a crossbow (while he was on the john, no less) and also betrayed his queen. Jon can’t justify the actions of Daenerys but is hoping that now that the war is over, she will change.

“Varys was right and I was wrong. Her nature is fire and blood,” Tyrion says. Jon makes a half-hearted effort to defend Dany — she saw Missandei beheaded, her dragon shot down, she was bound to act out — but Tyrion has an easy way to counter these weak excuses. “Would you have done it?” Jon claims not to know, but he knows. “It doesn’t matter what I’d do,” Jon says. “It matters more than anything,” Tyrion responds, and the message is delivered but not quite received. “It’s a terrible thing I’m asking. It’s also the right thing,” Tyrion says. “Do you think I’m the last man she’ll execute?” When Jon still refuses to accept what he must do, Tyrion knows what will work and invokes Jon’s sisters, and how likely they will be to bend the knee, and what might happen when they refuse.

The King’s Landing throne room has, like pretty much every other room in any dwelling in King’s Landing, been reduced to rubble. But the Iron Throne itself is still a beautiful sight for Daenerys, who places her hand on it and feels the rush of power, the fulfillment of her journey. All that time spent going from Vaes Dothrak to Qarth to Astapor to Meereen … she finally has her prize. Jon finds her in the throne room. She’s beaming and reminiscing about childhood stories about the Iron Throne, but he interrupts the trip down memory lane by confronting her about the continued killings taking place in the city. He also asks her to forgive Tyrion, but she refuses, even if she does show a little humanity in that refusal. Dany has become a conqueror and a killer, but it doesn’t seem quite right to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/05/18/guide-how-daenerys-went-khaleesi-mad-queen/?utm_term=.9e533f67b2dc" target=_blank>call her the Mad Queen</a> at this point. Her actions are perhaps repugnant, but they are calculated.

Her love for Jon seems sincere, and she wants him to break the wheel — that repetitive cycle of tyranny — with her. “You are my queen,” he tells her before a deep makeout session that is followed by a deeper stab right through her heart. There are no final words for Daenerys. Blood trickles from her mouth as Jon holds her and she takes her last breaths. Jon Snow, ever the Stark, took things into his own hands and carried out the sentence himself.

Before Jon can get too distraught, he has to deal with the immediate fallout of his actions, which makes itself known in the shape of one very large dragon. Drogon’s attempts to rouse Dany are unsuccessful, and he lets out a great roar, one which Jon thinks might be the last thing he hears. But Drogon’s target isn’t Jon, it’s the Iron Throne itself, which he manages to melt entirely before staring down Jon and then simply scooping up Daenerys and flying away. And that’s our farewell to Khaleesi; Mother of Dragons; Daenerys Stormborn; Breaker of Chains — a lifeless body whisked away in the claw of a dragon.

Before we get to the person who will sit in whatever will replace the Iron Throne, there’s the matter of how the news of Dany’s murder was handled. Mainly the question of how anyone knew Jon killed Dany. Did everyone see Drogon take off and just assume the worst? We can bet that Jon confessed to his act of regicide, but are we really to believe that the Unsullied and Dothraki didn’t just tear the city to shreds even more after finding out their queen was murdered?

And then there was what followed in the dragonpit, where Tyrion — still a prisoner, in handcuffs — leads a “Seinfeld” finale-esque group of characters in a roundtable discussion on who should be the kingdom’s next ruler. (Edmure Tully is Bania and Robin Arryn is the Low Talker who made the puffy shirt.) The great lords of Westeros are all there, and yes that does include the aforementioned Edmure and Robin. It’s a good thing we got to see them one more time. (Actually, I guess it was kind of heartening to see Robin Arryn existing as a mostly functional adult. That was certainly not a given.)

The assembled superdelegates of Westeros begin their decision-making process with some sniping, mostly the Starks against the rest. Arya stares down Yara, Sansa warns Grey Worm to stop making threats on Jon Snow’s life. Edmure Tully takes it upon himself to give the first speech of the gathering and Sansa takes it upon herself to mercifully cut that speech short with a brutal three words: “Uncle, please sit.”

Samwell Tarly has the radical suggestion of letting the people decide, which gets a good chuckle from everyone and even the suggestion that maybe dogs should vote as well, which would probably poll in at least the low 30s if Quinnipiac called 1,000 people this week. Tyrion dismisses a suggestion that he should rule, since half the people hate him for serving Daenerys and the other half hate him for betraying her. He says he’s had nothing to do but think these past few weeks (so that tells us how long it’s been since Jon killed Dany, and how long the realm has been without a protector). Nothing in the world is more powerful than a good story, and who has a better story than Bran the Broken? The boy who fell from a high tower and lived, he knew he’d never walk again so he learned to fly, he is our memory, the keeper of our stories, etc. it sounds like Michael Buffer introducing the defending middleweight champion of the world.

Sansa chimes in with the strong points that Bran has no interest in ruling and that he can’t father children, which is the polite way of saying — wait, out of the three surviving Stark children you aren’t choosing the one whose tactical decisions have led to multiple battle victories, or the one who saved every living person by killing the Night King, but instead the one who sits around inspiring people to ask, “Is everything all right with that kid?”

Tyrion argues that it’s a good thing that Bran can’t have children — the one-term promise is a feature, not a bug; he will have no son and therefore no stupid son to inherit the throne and torment his people. And he will be the first ruler to be chosen in the new way — all of the most privileged lords and ladies of Westeros will decide who gets to serve the realm from here on out. Hooray for some modified version of democracy.

Everyone is unanimous in accepting Bran the Broken as their new king — everyone, that is, except Sansa, who we can all agree is much more deserving of the gig. She politely informs Bran that while she’s very sure that he’ll be a good king, the North will be seceding so Bran’s job just got a lot easier — only six kingdoms to rule. Bran chooses Tyrion to be his Hand, much to Tyrion’s chagrin. No amount of strategic blunders or traitorous behavior will ever stop Tyrion from continuing to land important jobs.

Besides Tyrion, the new small council includes Bronn (Master of Coin), Davos (Master of Ships), Brienne (Kingsguard), Samwell (Grand Maester) with a few TBDs on Master of Whisperers, Wars and Laws. Bronn wants to rebuild the brothels, Davos wants to correct everyone’s grammar, and Bran just wants to get away from the meeting and go do some warging to try to find where Drogon has flown off to. It seems like Westeros will be in great hands.

For the crime of killing the queen, Jon gets the lenient sentence of heading back to Castle Black and the Night’s Watch. Tyrion delivers the news to him while Jon wonders if what he did was right. “Ask me again in 10 years,” Tyrion advises. Jon says his goodbyes to his family before riding north to the Wall, where he’s greeted by two friends once he arrives — Tormund and Ghost. And yes, Jon pets that good boy, which means we’re down to 194 things to complain about in the past six episodes.

David Malitz

Washington, D.C.

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