Game of Thrones: What grade should Daenerys Targaryen get for season 7?

Daenerys Targaryen is still the Mother of Dragons in the plural, but it’s a smaller plural than it used to be, and it affects her Game of Thrones grade.

If Jon Snow left season 7 of Game of Thrones in a mostly better position than he found himself in at the start, and Cersei Lannister ended on a very low note, Daenerys Targaryen is sort of the middle between the two. Like Cersei, she suffered a major loss, but like Jon, she also has a powerful new ally (…it’s Jon).

Throughout the season, it appeared as though Daenerys’ main challenge took the appearance of striking some balance — between listening to her advisers and her own instincts. Both served her well at different times; both also failed her at other times. Seriously, when Daenerys says “Enough with the clever plans”?

It’s because listening to Tyrion lost her some major alliances. But listening to him again in King’s Landing and letting him work for her by speaking to Cersei appeared to work (or at least saved them from being murdered by the Queensguard). When we talked about Jon, we mentioned that Tyrion might not really approve of her and Jon together, and so that idea of balancing her Hand of the Queen’s opinions with her own is going to be even more of an issue now that there’s another guy who has her ear.

Speaking of the dude in question, going to help Jon cost her Viserion. This is not to be discounted or waved away because she did a heroic thing by showing up. If she hadn’t, there likely would have been more than one (human) casualty and no wight to scare Cersei with. But she’d also still have three dragons and a Wall giving her and Jon more time to actually prepare for the war against the Night King (and Cersei).

Now, there’s no way she could have exactly known that something bad was going to happen, but the fact that the mission was treated with such gravity and the fact that she probably knew she would be dealing with something ancient and murderous should have tipped her off to maybe at least formulating a slight plan other than “have the dragons murder anything in sight and save Jon.”

Daenerys is still quite young and impetuous at times, and that’s probably not going to go away even though we have a more-somber Mother of Dragons on our hands. (Witness her apparently being unable to resist Jon.) And that issue with long-term plans means she has to lean on Tyrion (or Jon) more, which brings us back to the whole personality conflict issue.

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If Jon got a B and Cersei a C-minus, then Daenerys should probably end up splitting the difference between them with a C-plus. We still think she’s the most likely to be Queen of whatever’s left of the Seven Kingdoms (or at least queen consort), but that doesn’t mean that she’s not going to have some difficulty getting there.