"Non book readers" - Season 8 Episode 6 "The Iron Throne" - Spoilers post 2 forw

meeeeh wrote: »

No extra time would improve serial killer/newspaper storyline.

Agreed. It was a bad idea right from the off.

I still think it's a solid season though, particularly in how it portrays the sheer nihilism of Marlo Stanfield.

Foxtrol wrote: »

On horseback in good weather it is supposed to take at least 3 weeks to get from Winterfell to The Wall, while the wildlings are making the trip during deep winter, had few if any horses, have many children in their group that would be even slower and requiring more rest and shelter, are carrying many supplies to survive the trip slowing them even further, and are in absolutely no rush to get to The Wall.

...but all this pedantic crap is crazy.

Ugh, okay.

Where the characters actually ended up is fundementally grand, so my first reaction to the episode was mildly positive, purely because I expected them to make an utter hames of it narratively - pull something utterly absurd out of the bag just for the sake of being shocking.

I can make peace with where the pieces lie on the board as we exit Westeros, but the episode only becomes indescribably more disappointing upon rewatching and on retrospective thinking.

Jon's fate is grand in itself and a fine send off, but the whole Greyworm angle was a bit farcical.

Jon murders the Queen while Greyworm has his hands full butchering prisoners, but the latter for some reason decides to then imprison Jon Snow for murdering his friend, leader and Queen and later accepts him being sent to the Night's Watch as justice....OK.

The episode had some slightly better dialogue in spots compared to preceeding episodes, though "I know a killer when I see one", in the context of everything, is so absurdly bad it almost feels like a cheap inside joke.

Poor Kit Harrington can only do so much given the writers have not had anything remotely intelligent for him to say this entire season.

Emilia Clarke did a very decent job of portraying a disturbingly child-like manic Queen in that final scene to her credit, and the backdrop of Greyworm executing Lannister prisoners as Jon strides in to confront her was a fantastic mood-setter.

The death itself was completely hollow though and carried almost no real emotional weight, though I didn't have too much of an issue with the symbolic melting of the Iron Throne or the questions raised over the level of sentient thinking attributable to dragons.

There is so much wrong with the episode and wider season I just can just accept that without too much critical thinking.

The whole climax of Daenery's journey is just absurdly flat, rushed and poorly handled however.

Hark back to pivotal moments like Ned Stark's beheading, Robb's murder, Joffrey's death, the Mountain crushing the Viper's skull, Tyrion shooting Tywin, Jon facing down Ramsey.

You would imagine that Jon Snow murdering Daenerys Targaryen would inevitably feature in that list, but it doesn't, and it doesn't even come close either. It's just something that happens in a clumsy, unconvincing manner because it needs to and doesn't connect on any level.

Also, Jon also could've somewhat credibly claimed Daenerys melted the Iron Throne and simply flew off on Drogon, but that wouldn't have allowed the 'new world' to develop as the Unsullied and Dothraki would've remained in place awaiting her return, so they had to learn she was dead.

Tyrion discovering the bodies of Jaime and Cersei was so sloppy as to defy belief. In 'The Bells', we see the Red Keep completely collapses on top of them; the finale shows the crypts are not only still entirely intact, but arches, walls and ceilings that we literally saw crumble to dust under the crushing weight of the collapsing keep are magically restored.

That one really angers me; the writers wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted Jaime and Cersei to die in high, dramatic and emotional fashion, but also wanted to provide Tyrion with an element of closure by easily discovering their bodies....while clearly not giving the remotest **** whatsoever about blatant inconsistency.

The means by which Bran came to sit on the throne was almost offensively lazy, utterly daft and completely unearned.

Don't really have an issue with Bran in principle, but that scene almost like bad comedy. Bran becomes King...just because.

The future of Westeros placed in the hands of a crippled boy without as much as a token discussion, not even the faintest facade of plot intelligence, because the writers are in a rush and just want to wrap everything up while expending as little brain power as possible.

Hard to believe this is actually the same show I started watching in 2011.

Yeah, we'll devote 10 minutes to a completely unnecessary scene where Tyrion, for some absurd reason, needs to actually explain to Jon why Daenery's has to go.

It's grand, we'll make up the time by just rushing through the bit where they chose a ruler to ultimately sit on the Iron Throne...you know, the bit these past 8 seasons have been building towards.

Apart from a load of other bits we carefully built up over the same time and then sort of pushed aside because we got tired of spinning so many plates and decided to fling most of them out the window rather than make any effort to set them down.

In the end, absolutely nothing is earned this season - and certainly not in this episode - and pretty much nothing carries any weight as a consequence.

This show used to be about the complex 'game' that everyone, in all walks of life, had to play, no matter what their ultimate objective. This season has been an insult to that premise and what GoT used to be, but this episode is particularly exposed as being utterly braindead when Benioff and Weiss have no major spectacle to mask their scripting.

This episode fails to really connect on any level emotionally and just feels like a box-ticking exercise; an hour the writers devoted to lazily tying up the remaining threads with as little effort as possible once they'd achieved all their big battle set-pieces.

Looking back on the season, 'A Knight of Seven Kingdoms' was a genuinely strong episode and head-and-shoulders above the rest in terms of character interaction and dialogue, tellingly not written by Benioff and Weiss. The only episode I got a true 'Game of Thrones' vibe when watching.

First episode was OK, and without revisiting my thoughts on E3-5, there's no denying that there was tremendous and seriously impressive spectacle on offer at least.

And to think that Benioff and Weiss openly talked about how they hoped the finale would be compared with that of Breaking Bad and go down as one of the best finales in television history. It almost defies belief that they would say such a thing.

As an ending on paper the finale - and the fate determined for most of the characters - is perfectly fine and there's a nice level of closure to it that can often be missing from shows. I like that aspect of it.

It's just executed extremely badly and my impression as we leave Westeros behind us is that I feel like I'm still waiting for the "real" Game of Thrones.

Goes down in my books anyway with the likes of Dexter and Lost for letdowns. It's not a direct comparison before anyone takes issue with parallels being drawn with either.

Stop moaning ffs wrote: »

I’ll just never understand people that take the time to rate things on any of those sites but worse, who use those kinds of sites as a guide as to whether they’ll watch whatever film or series it is. It’s just so lazy. Make up your own mind after you’ve seen it.

Game of Thrones episodes on IMDB garner hundreds of thousands of votes. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic draw their scores from what they consider to be established critics (we can debate the veracity of that separately), who, in my experience, are less reactionary than the huge swathes of people who passionately weigh in on the subject after an episode airs.

I think both types, i.e. a pool of critics and a popular vote, are useful tools for checking the pulse of a TV show and far more informative than the opinions of a handful of people in a forum, myself included.

Just to repeat (for a third time in case you missed it), I'm not trying to demonstrate the quality of anything. I was speaking specifically about how the purported drop in quality of each show was perceived by critics and fans, and I've done that by referring to, you guessed it, critics and fans.