"Non book readers" - Season 8 Episode 5 "The bells" - Spoilers post 2 forward

Hard not to have 'opinions' about that episode.

It's arguably the best made - in a technical and spectacle sense - episode of the series. The way it transitions from the ominous, shadowy build-up of the opening 15 minutes to the brutal chaos that follows is satisfying. The action feels like a riposte to the Battle of Winterfell - no tactical darkness to hide the violence and death. Miguel Sapochnik is one of the show's best directors, and he brings his a-game here.

In the moment, the episode is largely enjoyable, a few raised eyebrows aside. But like much of this season so far, as soon as I started to digest it a bit that sheen wore off. The major problem I have is that I really just don't give a **** about any of the characters at this stage. I feel the writers are forcing them to make weird decisions just to set up certain scenes or payoffs, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. Jamie's perhaps the foremost example: I simply do not think the show remotely sold his decision to go back Cersei, and that whole business rang hollow as a result. I can see how it makes sense on paper, but the writers have rushed through necessary development to get him and Cersei back together. Feel they've been just buying time when it comes to Tyrion as well all season - without question he'll have some key role in the finale (Davos' favour) but they've relegated him to bumbling witness for too long here.

But what of the big character shift, the arrival of the Mad Queen? There's no doubt that's been bubbling as a possibility since very early on in the series, and a few inciting incidents in the last few to push her over the edge. Why does it still ring a bit false? Again there's just an inconsistency in the writing: from scene to scene in the last couple of episodes you simply don't know if Dany will be an empathetic, decent leader or psychopath-in-waiting. The path towards this destination had been paved for sure, but it comes across as unstable and clumsy in the execution. Ditto how those spiked arrows were such a devastating, insurmountable threat last week and destroyed with barely a sweat broken this week. The show's internal rules come across as made up as they go along.

As a piece of action television, there's plenty to like here - the sheer horrid scale of the thing, and the sense of chaos as Jon futilely yelled at his troops to stop. It was at its weakest, though, when it tried to be a last generation action video game. The Arya sequences were the worst offenders - while an admirable attempt to give the audience a POV of the grim scenes on the ground, her constant stumbling from one explosion or collapsing building to another gave the impression of a bad action sequence from an Uncharted game. It really felt like they forced a fan-favourite character into that situation so she'd have something to do this episode. And the show's worst habit this season has been to treat every character death as a big, dramatic showcase or event: every major death here is an emotionally-loaded reunion or long-anticipated confrontation, and that traps GoT in the sort of generic blockbuster storytelling mould that the show at its brutal best avoided.

There's a sense this episode works in the moment because of the efforts of many of the creative players: whether that's Sapochnik's visceral direction, or largely accomplished work from almost all the major cast members. The fall of King's Landing was, crucially, as catastrophic as one could have imagined. In that sense, the episode was a success. But I'm basically tuned out of the broader narrative at this stage: I don't really care about anyone's fate, or whether the impossibly bland Jon Snow and the 'good guys' triumph over the genocidal queen. Game of Thrones is something I enjoy watching on a Monday morning, but even as events barrel forward it leaves surprisingly little impression once those credits have rolled.