Game of Thrones after 10 p.m.

Spoilers ahead.

I got HBO Max for Band of Brothers. I’d loved it when I was younger, and when HBO Max came to Italy I wanted to spend a few evenings with Easy Company again. Somehow I ended up spending my nights with the Lannisters.

Game of Thrones had been on my list since its tenth anniversary. I watch very few series. I like my evenings with my family, and the business still needs me in the morning. The hours after ten, though, were mine. That was how I watched all eight seasons.

The arrangement suited everybody except the following morning’s version of me.

Oddly enough, I could follow a battle when I was tired. What demanded my full attention at midnight was a marriage proposal. Two men would talk quietly about somebody’s daughter, and I’d be trying to remember what one of them had promised her uncle three episodes earlier. Half the pleasure was that, if I could remember, I knew why the other man was smiling.

The company you keep

I kept thinking about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Reading it, I can meet someone who lived centuries ago, in a world I barely know, and recognise the little manoeuvre by which a person makes a selfish decision sound honourable. I know it because I’ve done it myself. That’s one of the things a great work of art can give you: a better understanding of the people around you, and occasionally an uncomfortable glimpse of yourself.

I think Game of Thrones is a work of art for much the same reason. After a few seasons I could sit down with almost any family in Westeros and know who wanted their father’s approval, who resented a brother, who would be kind if nobody was watching. I came for the dragons. By the end, one of the scenes I cared about most was two people talking in a bath.

*** SPOILER MODE ON ***

By the time Jaime and Brienne reach Harrenhal, they’ve been on the road together long enough to get thoroughly sick of each other. Now Jaime has lost his sword hand. He looks too tired to come up with a clever remark. Brienne, for once, is willing to hear him out.

He tells her about the wildfire under King’s Landing. The king he’d sworn to protect meant to burn the city with everyone in it. Brienne has wanted to be a knight all her life. You can almost see her trying on his oath. Would she have stood there while the city burned?

I’d watched Jaime push a child out of a window. I hadn’t forgiven him. Yet when Brienne calls for help for the Kingslayer and he asks her to use his name, I want her to call him Jaime too. Ten minutes earlier I’d have used the nickname myself.

When the bells ring

By season seven I’d begun to miss those long journeys. Jon gets stranded beyond the Wall. Gendry runs for help, a raven goes south and Daenerys flies north. I’m prepared to grant the raven an exceptionally good day. But think how much less we’d know about Jaime and Brienne if a dragon had given them a lift.

With Daenerys, the hurry of the final two seasons costs the series something it can’t get back. I could believe that the young woman who freed slaves might grow accustomed to being thanked, then to being obeyed. Emilia Clarke had been letting us glimpse that temper for years.

Then the bells ring. The city has surrendered. Daenerys sits on Drogon looking across the roofs at the Red Keep. For a few seconds we have time to wonder what she’ll do to Cersei. Instead she flies down into the streets and burns the people who live there.

I knew why she hated Cersei. What I wanted to know was when the people in those houses had become her enemies. I could understand her grief over Jorah and Missandei and still find myself completely lost in that moment. It felt as though I’d missed an episode. Watching them the way I did, I was fairly sure I hadn’t.

A vote I’d have liked to hear

Bran becoming king made even less sense to me. He’d turned down Winterfell. He’d been quite persuasive on the subject of how little worldly power interested him. Then Tyrion offers him a kingdom and Bran says, “Why do you think I came all this way?”

Well, yes, Bran. That was rather what I wanted to know.

I’d happily have watched an entire episode in that ruined arena. Let the man from Dorne hear Sansa claim independence for the North. Give him a minute to glance around and see who else has noticed the possibilities. Let somebody ask Tyrion, who came to this meeting as a prisoner, how he came to be running it.

The earlier seasons could have got a wedding and two murders out of that afternoon. Here the lords vote and we’re on to the next scene.

I’m still mildly annoyed on behalf of Dorne. I’m also rather fond of a series that could make the constitutional interests of Dorne feel like a reasonable thing to be annoyed about after midnight. If I had one more evening in Westeros, though, I know where I’d spend it. Back at Harrenhal, with Brienne listening to a man she thought she knew.