Jon Snow Is Electable
By 
Todd VanDerWerff has a good summary of the misogynist turn of Season 8 of Game of Thrones:
But especially around the time of season six — when the women of Game of Thrones began to seize power and cast off the men who had oppressed, assaulted, and raped them — the show developed a certain cachet about breaking the Westeros version of the patriarchy. Did it earn this cachet honestly? I don’t know! But it certainly came up whenever TV critics, including this one, wrote about the show at that time.
“The Last of the Starks” is a pretty brutal undercutting of this reading, as it does poorly by essentially every major woman character who’s not Cersei. (Cersei was already a terrible person.)
Sansa betrays her brother’s trust and tells the Hound that without all the years of rape and abuse she suffered, maybe she wouldn’t have risen to her current position of power, which feels less like something someone would say about a lifetime of trauma and more like something a screenwriting manual would say about a character who’s meant to be inspiring for rising above that trauma. Dany does her whole heel turn thing. Brienne hooks up with Jaime, then melts into a weeping mess when he rides off to King’s Landing again. And on and on.
I guess Arya doesn’t have a moment like this. But Missandei is only around to die and enhance other characters’ arcs (she’s also the show’s one significant woman of color, so there’s a whole sub-theme to this particular sociopolitical reading). So “The Last of the Starks” was not a great episode for Game of Thrones’ women to exist as something like human beings instead of pieces on a chessboard.
They probably should have just gone all the way and made “cocks are important, I’m afraid,” the title of the episode.
The piece as also good about the show’s perennially unconvincing attempts to sell us on Jon/Aegon’s alleged leadership abilities. Frankly, I agree with VanDerWeff’s colleague, cited here, on this point:
This is a good take. One of the greatest mistakes this show made was resurrecting the character from the dead. Keeping his (rather mundane) character alive and making him the main character essentially catapulted the whole series story arc into the ditch. https://t.co/Fxly1WFic8— NoSmockingJacketRequired (@oldarenaghost) May 6, 2019
Basically, the crucial plot developments of Season 8 are the fictional equivalent of “Biden needs to be the nominee, he’s “electable,” if you know what I mean.”