I just wrapped up one of my quarantine projects, which was to finally watch Game of Thrones.
It was good! Not great, but pretty darn good.
I knew that the final season (and the series finale) was pretty heavily panned when it aired. I was expecting a total shitshow and was honestly kind of disappointed. The ending, like the rest of the show, was pretty good. A little abrupt, yes, but not godawful.
Did it just boil down to an unwinnable situation for the showrunners? It aired for the greater part of a decade and there was probably no resolution that would have made everyone happy. Having watched it all at a go, I was never really invested in the show as an experience like a lot of people were.
For six seasons it took its time to world build and develop characters, and then after building up anticipation raced through the ending like it had a bus to catch.
They spent much more time on torturing Theon than they did on Dany’s heel turn. They spent more time on killing Meryn Trant than they did the Clegane bowl. They spent more time on who should run the night’s watch then on who should be king of the seven kingdoms after the war. The sons of the harpy were harder to beat than the army of the dead and the Lancasters combined.
Yep! Just poor writing. The actors did the best they could with poor material, but it was way, way rushed, to a point in which the characters were behaving wildly out of character.
Plus Bran became super-boring pointless boy who didn’t do anything, and they made him king. His powers could have been used for some really interesting stuff besides just learning secrets of the past (maybe he tries to warg a dragon; maybe he learns to control the undead; maybe he does anything besides sit like a lump and make cryptic comments in a monotone).
It wasn’t just season 8 – the flaws started to show in season 5 (hello Dorne!), and got more and more noticeable in 6 and 7. And even 8 had some good episodes – the one before the Battle of Winterfell, where they just sat and drank and pondered about their impending doom, was classic GoT. But most of season 8, much of season 7, and some of 5 and 6 were just very poor writing.
Also, the top-notch quality of seasons 1-4 really highlighted the flaws of 5-8. If this was the Witcher from the beginning – an action-fantasy show with quips and sex (I like the Witcher, by the way) but nothing special when it comes to story and character, then season 8 would have been fine. But this was GoT – with writing and acting and characters and everything as good as anything ever on TV, at least for seasons 1-4. The comedown to just-average writing, at best, in season 8, was just incredibly, massively disappointing (even if it was kind of predictable based on the preceding seasons).
Well, the “conclusion” was the entire final season, albeit an abbreviated one. Besides, how long can you stretch out a battle? The determining battles in, “Lord of the Rings”, were epic, and the ones in, “Game of Thrones”, were comparable.
I have no complaints because I never had any preconceived vision of how I thought things should end. Daenerys Targaryen’s end was almost inevitable. The entire series hinted at it because she had such a single minded unbridled desire to rule everything. She would either succeed or die. And what about Arya? She was trained by the best, The Faceless Man, to be a remorseless assassin. She was made for ending the Night King. Who better?
I don’t think there should have been a bigger battle. Better and more dramatic, IMO, would have been for Winterfell to have been overrun quite quickly, with our heroes being forced into a fighting retreat. Maybe best if Dany’s dragons haven’t arrived yet (or are busy elsewhere, or perhaps so bothered by the cold they can’t take part this far north), since dragons necessarily end a battle pretty soon.
The best parts of GoT have never been battles, IMO – the best parts have been characters talking and plotting, and secret plans coming to fruition. A better ending for the White Walker storyline would have been for our heroes retreating south, but knowing that the Lannister army was waiting to kill them, coming up with some desperate secret plan, using a combination of Bran’s and Arya’s abilities (maybe the fire witch whatshername too) – maybe he can warg the undead, or warg the zombies, or teach Arya to change her face into a zombie or even a White Walker. Then a secret mission of Arya and the best warriors (Hound, Brienne, Jorah, Jon, etc.) armed with Valyrian Steel and dragonglass somehow sneak into the White Walker camp, battle the White Walkers while Arya somehow finds and kills the Night King with her own skills.
But the big battle was just too dark and chaotic to be fun, IMO.
The unwinnable situation was partially their own fault. HBO wanted more seasons, they said no so they could go work on other projects. Some shows drag on too long, but GoT would have benefited from more time to show Dany’s descent and the fight with the White Walkers.
I think the other problem is that GRRM told them at least some details on how it would all end (like Bran becoming king), but with no idea how to get there.
ISTM that the same end outcome would have benefitted from seasons 7 and 8 being full-length (7 more episodes) so that the eventual meltdown of just about everyone could be better staged.
Martin is/was a genius at using all of the standard tropes to draw you in and establish your expectations, then he would add some clever twist that would subvert all of your expectations and propel the story to new heights. He didn’t make it so that you wanted to keep reading/watching. He made it so that you had to keep going because you just had to know what was going to happen next. And the best part was that every POV, every plot twist, every storyline, all of the pacing was carefully crafted and made sense within the greater context of the GoT world.
You give that type of source material to a group of talented actors and you can expect great things.
Then the show ran out of source material and had to rely on less talented individuals to try and complete a story that was out of their depth. Instead of subverting tropes the show runners slowly started to lean into them more and more. Eventually they got to the point where they just said fuck it (last half of season 7) and decided to go the route of a standard drama where they relied on standard tropes to advance the plot. No more clever plot twists. No more carefully crafted storylines with intelligent pacing and many of the individual character arcs stopped making sense within the greater context of the GoT world. The worst part of all this was the show runners kept acting like nothing changed.
I recently read somewhere that streaming of GoT episodes has decreased dramatically since season 8. Apparently folks aren’t interested in revisiting Westeros knowing that it all descends into a big steaming pile of dragon shit.
Because people love to whine online about the end of series. Also happened to Sopranos and Dexter to name a couple. And his royal highness Martin did not write season 8.
“Abrupt” is the main problem. We spent years watching a complex story unfold and the last two half-seasons made a mess of the pacing, made the sequence of events unbelievable, made the character motivations and actions unbelievable. The story is about the journey, not the destination. Perhaps the destination was correct, but the last leg of the journey didn’t take us through the complex, dramatic, emotional, rational step-by-step unfolding that the start of the story led us to expect.
It ended about how I thought it would, but it was rushed and it felt rushed. Still, the Battle of Winterfell was stupendous. People who can’t see it should crank the brightness, people who get upset about the tactics need to relax a little.
I think this is an eloquent explanation that goes to the heart of the issue.
Something I’d add is that in Martin’s extraordinary writing in the early seasons, nothing was ruled out. But this didn’t mean “anything could happen” in the sense of wildly unexpected twists that came out of nowhere. Paradoxically, it often meant quite the opposite. What it meant was that nothing was ruled out by the requirements of the standard tropes. If important characters in whom the audience were highly invested did foolish things, they often faced plausible realistic consequences, not just the standard buildup of tension followed by predictable last-minute relief.
I did enjoy much of the Battle of Winterfell but by the time I got to, maybe, the third instance of Sam rolling on the ground crying like 2 year old while successfully fighting off ice zombies with 2 cheap ass looking dragon glass knives with Brienne in the background randomly grunting and screaming I had lost all suspension of disbelief.
It was pretty good, just not Game of Thrones good.
Maybe the problem is the same one Lost had; they introduced so many plot elements they had no way of resolving all of them satisfactorily. And perhaps Martin has the same problem, which is why he stopped writing the books. (I also read someplace that the backstory is so complex that he relies on a couple of superfans to keep track of everything and vet storylines so they don’t contradict previous ones.)
I watch Season 7 and 8 more often than the other ones because it is the end of the story. The only things that took me out of the story were the 'shippings that went on surrounding the battle of winterfell, but perhaps I’m jaded by the Internet into thinking they were pure fanservice. And I also grew tired of the overused “you’re about to hug or get crushed by someone but lookee here there’s a dagger”: it was overused before those seasons and its use only ramped up from there.
As far as it being predictable and not running counter to fantasy tropes, the only instance of it that I saw was that the evilest people got their justice in the end. Even the trope of “bad leader lets guard down with [del]hilarious[/del] fatal consequences” was believable because that occasionally happens in real life (even if the manner of his death had been overdone.)
Getting sentenced to The Wall yet again was also disbelievable, because while situations of being sent or going to an order only successfully to come back into power also happened in real life, it’s stretching it to think that anyone would trust someone who’s already done it once.