The finale of Game of Thrones opens in the wake of a dragon-fire genocide. Ash is falling like snow on to the corpse of a child, a scorched man wanders aimless, another sits in a peeling corridor and weeps. Our hero Jon Snow and our philosopher king, Tyrion Lannister, step through the scene as tourists, faces stupid with horror, unknowing parties of what lay before them.

This show has always been about the machinations behind the scenes of politics. When Tywin Lannister has The Mountain slaughter his own people, and burn their villages to the ground, this is a direct allusion to the military strategy of ‘scorched earth’, used most famously by Joseph Stalin to force the retreat of the Nazi army by destroying Russian crops and towns and starving the invaders out. It is a ruthless tactic, banned by the Geneva Conventions in 1977, yet we see a drawl Tywin discuss strategy with his war council, we know him to be collaborative and methodical, we understand the involvement of the men surrounding him, and we are convinced of their collective moral culpability.