Oh, gotcha, that’s completely different. Knowing that this is what the garbage-fire that is Rotten Tomato readership is rating the show lets me know to ignore it completely.
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Even in the last season it was obvious that to get the real ending you’re going to need to read the books, which is doubly tragic since it seems like the final book will never come out. Even the next book is perpetually delayed.
I don’t know how GRRM is planning to end the series, but I’m pretty confident he’s not going to turn Tyrion into an idiot and make all of the characters carry around idiot balls all the time so he can make the most obvious and cliche conclusions to all of the major story arcs.
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[[I assume everybody still reading this thread is caught up, but if not:
SPOILERS AHOY IN THIS POST
Not only that, the whole thing was such a dumb miscalculation from a plotting perspective. D&D could have solved the “we need to even the odds” issue very easily and much less WTF-ily in the previous episode, just by having the Night King fire his javelin, point blank, out of the fire at the dragon that failed to kill him. If for some reason D&D needed it to be Rhaegal instead of Drogon, just have Jon do the burning instead of Dany. Since it wasn’t going to be effective anyway, it didn’t matter from a character-arc perspective who did it.
It would have given the Battle of Winterfell at least a little more heft, evened the odds, avoided the completely inexplicable failure to notice AN ENTIRE FLEET that the dragons NECESSARILY had in view, and as an added bonus, kept away from Walking Plot Hole Euron fucking Greyjoy.
The showrunners have made numerous choices that are at least as far as we can tell at this point without knowing how the story ties up, at best inexplicable and more likely just bad.
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No, these are the ratings derived from critics’ reviews. (And, frankly, they’re being generous. This season is capital-T Trash.)
This isn’t the first time Euron has teleported his ships halfway around the continent and right into the middle of battle without anybody seeing them. Dude is a legit wizard.
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Euro[mula]n?
Because it`s sucking!
They spent two episodes on chit chat and reconnecting with the characters but only one episode on the single biggest conflict we’ve been waiting the entire series to finally get to. For eight+ years we’ve been told that winter was coming and all we got was a single battle. And a stupid poorly planned battle at that.
And, really, it`s amazing they have any dragons left. They seem stupidly easy to defeat.
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Gosh, in that case I suppose I should watch the older seasons. This is my first one and I think it’s ok so far. I mean, it’s TV. You sit there and passively absorb entertainment that someone else made for you (when they didn’t have to) and then there is stuff aferwards to talk about, what do you want?
I read the books and was so sick of Martin not even starting to wrap the damn thing up, that I swore I wouldn’t read any more when (if?) he writes them. The fact that I know an end is coming is pretty satisfying in itself.
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Ah, gotcha, understood. And I hugely disagree, but thank you.
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No worries. I’m curious what you think is going right with these episodes? Obviously I get that this is a matter of personal taste (and there are some critics who are at least somewhat on board with what Benioff and Weiss are doing). I’ve been looking for reasons not to be disappointed with this season, beyond the game actors, but have (just as obviously) had trouble finding any.
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Tormund.
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The Knighting of Brienne of Tarth was lovely.
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The show’s been many things through the years, but that might have been one of the first scenes to make me tear up.
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Fair points.
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That was basically Peter Dinklage’s summary :
“Stabby-stabby-stabby-stabby, sexy-sexy-sexy, stabby-stabby-stabby … and a couple of jokes.”
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Because it was based on books, which themselves were purposely designed to subvert the expectations of medieval, magical fantasy tropes, this show often managed to transcend what one would expect from the predictable, easy-to-digest world of television entertainment, which I appreciated quite a bit even though I didn’t find it consistently great. This created higher expectations than I would have for say, a superhero movie. Once it ran out of book, it just became a regular tv show with zombies and dragons, plot-armored characters, and unnecessary-to-the-story crowd-pleasing elements. The internal logic of the narrative has been broken and over-simplified to the point that it’s insulting to some viewers, even casual viewers with very little investment in the story. If it had always been this dumb, then it wouldn’t matter really. Since you have already read the books, I’m not sure that the previous seasons will be as effective as they were for people who had no idea what was going to happen, but they were, on the whole, much better before they ran out of books, if not, as I said, consistently great.
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Flawed or no, TV Tyrion is a much more compelling and sympathetic character than book Tyrion. For example, there was a scene in the book where Tyrion decides to compel one of Ilyrio’s servants to have sex with him just because he didn’t like how obviously relieved she was when she thought she wouldn’t have to. Nobody would like Peter Dinklage’s portrayal as much if he did anything that rapey.
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Nice little post here.
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SPOILER
Maybe the overconfidence and brazenness that Khaleesi was showing by attacking head-on led to having the dragons approach the cliffs more quickly than they should have, and not much ahead of the fleet, and the moment they were within LoS one of them got taken out by mega-crossbows almost instantly? Cuz that’s how I read it.
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Well, it was a double-length episode, essentially. Should the battle against the white walkers have lasted more than two episodes worth of screen time? I feel it was sufficient — and a pretty gnarly battle, honestly.
