'Game of Thrones' Ends with a Whimper
by EG
The many fans who complained about last week's penultimate episode of Game of Thrones were certain to dislike this week's series finale. Accusations of a rushed pace, poor writing, unlikely plot twists, and illogical character development were as true this week as they were last. Read on for details.
Via Thrillist.
This post contains spoilers for all of Game of Thrones Season 8.
The show, initially picked up as a "fantasy Sopranos" that had five novels to work with, eventually had to surpass the source material and make its own ending, for better or worse. With a few scant mile markers provided by Martin on the road to a conclusion, the writers of Game of Thrones had the doomed task of bringing this story to its conclusion for the first time, before Martin got to have his say in the world he created.
It's been three whole seasons of television since the show drastically departed from the books, and in them we saw the development of our favorite characters switch pacing from a novelistic meandering to a "final big-budget season" rush to the finish line. Characters like Sansa, Theon, and Brienne got full and satisfying arcs where their mettle was tested and their trials manifested as personal growth. Corner characters from the novel's narrative, like Jon Snow and Daenerys, had end-points decided by Martin, but written by television writers who were just as concerned with making dragons look cool on screen than what each character was thinking from moment to moment. That's part of the reality of turning a novel into a TV show that becomes the most popular series on the small screen, but unlike other adaptations that are pulling from a finished work, Game of Thrones has to compete with two unwritten novels, and as long as those novels don’t exist, they can be better than the show in the realm of imagination.
This is the weird part about Game of Thrones ending with such a pisive season: Because it's an adaptation of material that might one day exist, qualitative decisions about how "good" the television show is can get bogged down in fan-fiction debates over two unfinished novels. "Daenerys from the book wouldn’t do that" is a valid argument only as much as it's a spin on "Daenerys hasn't done that yet in the books." As the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones moved towards its endgame, it became apparent that the show hadn't been pulling from George R.R. Martin for some time. When we finally had to pivot back to what -- we assume -- will be the actual ending of A Song of Ice and Fire, it felt like a conclusion apart from the show we'd been watching since Season 5.
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