It’s been over a week since we all saw the final episode of the TV series of the decade, and we had time enough to calmly discuss how we feel about it. We’re not too impressed by the last season, but mostly happy with how the story ended. What resulted from that is a short, story-focused two-shot.

Piotrek: Season 8 has some fans, but it’s been widely criticized, not only on the social media and genre pages, but also in such venerable papers as The Guardian and Polityka. There’s a petition on change.org, with 1.5 million supporters, to remake the entire season! And even if I’m not ready to go that far, I’m not happy with these 6 episodes. The Benioff/Weiss duo stumbled when they had no more source material to refer to, and now they simply failed. Good things were inherited from earlier years, or clearly part of the general outline they got years ago from GRRM, but how did they go to the endpoint? With a story clearly rushed, full of plot-holes and characters going against their nature.

Wimpy Jon, foolish Tyrion, passive Cersei… Dany suddenly losing her mind just because that’s what was needed for the final confrontation. GoT stopped developing organically, around its many strong protagonists, and started running a short hurdle race, to quickly tick off all the major plot points.

Ola: Agreed. Benioff and Weiss knew their destination, but not the road to it. They chose too many shortcuts along the way, and even though I can relate to the problems of such a big and lengthy production, spanning a decade, and I understand why the mechanisms of group thinking might have entered into this situation, so bound up in secrecy and the necessity to keep the story development to a very limited team of people, I still think it all had a detrimental effect which could have been easily avoided.

Continue reading “Game of Thrones finale – reflections” →