"Game of Thrones," Year Eight (Without Spoilers)

I had originally intended to write up reaction posts for each episode of the final season as they aired, but scheduling and access issues made that impossible.  Instead, I marathoned the entire season all at once, leading up to the finale. I'll spend the next post getting into what I thought of specific events in the show, but today I want to talk about the season in a more general sense, along with the show's legacy and its place in the pop culture.

I think it's going to be a long while before television sees a piece of event programming this momentous again.  Millions were spent on this season, particularly the two supersized battle-heavy episodes, with production values that rival anything we've seen in a theatrical film.  It was treated like a pop culture event on the same level as the the roughly analogous "Avengers: Endgame." The show got a ton of press coverage, a behind the scenes documentary, and dozens of brand partners.  I was tickled to find that an HBO show notorious for adult content was getting commemorative limited edition Oreos and Mountain Dew cans sporting Arya Stark's kill list.

However, as multiple critics predicted, there was no way that the show was going to be able to wrap up a story this complicated to the rabid fanbase's satisfaction with only six episodes.  And this was clearly the fault of the creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who turned down more seasons and higher episode counts in favor of ending the series more briskly. There were some grumbles over the first two episodes, but it was the third, "The Long Night," where the unfortunate reality really sunk in.  Keep in mind that this was one of the show's most expensive, elaborate installments that required eleven weeks of night shoots to film the big battle sequences. It was at the center of HBO's promotional efforts and massively hyped for months. It turned into the biggest blunder of the show's entire run, a combination of bad planning, technical issues, and a couple of unpopular artistic decisions.  Not only was one of the show's weightiest, most meaningful plotlines capped off with only a single episode, but the cinematography was so dark that nobody could see what was going on for good chunks of the running time.

Parts of the fanbase started turning on the show after that point.  Ratings victory was assured due to the tremendous hype, but the reactions became increasingly nitpicky and dissatisfied.  We spent several days after episode four talking about a misplaced coffee cup, and a goof with Jaime's prosthetic hand after episode five that turned out not to be a mistake after all.  I wound up getting spoiled for a few major plot points, but I think I actually enjoyed the season more, knowing that they were coming. Though I found "The Long Night" disappointing, I thought "The Bells" mostly made up for it in the spectacle department, and the ending - though clearly not to everyone's taste - felt mostly sound.  The payoff may have been rushed and left a lot of loose ends, but it was at least in keeping with the grim, untidy nature of the books.

I'm not interested in any of the spinoffs currently being prepped or the books that George R.R. Martin may never finish.  Frankly, I don't really count myself as a fan and haven't been truly invested in the story since around the fifth season. I'm glad I saw the whole series through to the end, but I view "Game of Thrones" much like I view "Harry Potter" - lots of fun and helpful for keeping on top of pop culture, but not a franchise that I ever really connected with.  I appreciate that it helped usher in the era of blockbuster television shows, and that it's done wonders for the fantasy genre, but in the end I thought it was far too preoccupied with sex and spectacle, and didn't do right by many of its characters. I knew we were in trouble when cataloguing how many important characters died in various episodes became a thing.

But I'll get into the specifics of that in the next post.

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