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shadowkat1. Co-worker: I've been hearing discussions here and there about Game of Thrones. I don't want any spoilers. I haven't watched Season 8 yet. Did you see the finale?
Me: Yes.
Co-worker: Did you like it?
Me: No. (Pause)
Co-worker: Okay -- hmmm, no spoilers.
Me: Eh, I should tell you one thing. If you are a fan of Dany? Don't watch Season 8. Skip it.
Co-worker (who is a huge fan of Dany -looks at me): Oh?
Me: Yeah. It's a warning. I know you love that character -- trust me on this -- skip Season 8.
I told my mother, who'd been watching but had to stop at S5, what happened. She also loved Dany. I sort of did, although when I realized the show was going to jump the shark and become a different show entirely, I stopped caring. Was deeply disappointed in some respects, it started out as a brilliant discourse on political machinations and how we are our own worst enemies...only to turn into well...
For the record, I didn't like the finale for a lot of reasons.
Reviews...that articulate my difficulties better than I can:
* Finale Review of GOT by Julie Berman, Time's film and television critic
In its heyday, Game of Thrones was a political thriller more than a fantasy epic. Its struggle between would-be monarchs had depth because it was also a struggle between conflicting ideas about freedom, justice and leadership. Do good ends justify cruel means? Or should we, like Ned Stark, feel obligated to do the right thing even when it’s suicidal? When someone wrongs you, do you turn the other cheek or do you add their name to the kill list? Can any person be trusted with absolute power? It would’ve been nice if the show had followed these quandaries through to the end.
Yet still mixed feelings..as this review conveys from the Washington Post:
Finale While Lacking Goes Out on an Important Note - Stories Matter
Like most of this eighth and final season, it played as though creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had finally surrendered to the size of the story they set out to tell in 2011. Sailing bravely but blindly past the material laid out for them in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels, the last six episodes mostly acknowledged that “Game of Thrones” might never be entirely, perfectly wrapped up — unless by the books’ author himself. In one bit from Sunday’s episode that was so corny it ought to have been buttered, some of the characters marveled at how a contemporaneous account of their travails, written in calligraphy and bound in leather, still couldn’t quite sum up all they had endured.
It’s likely you’re already aware of the dissatisfaction with the conclusion tweeted hither and yon — six weeks of nitpicking complaints, first-class nerd whining and an ungodly amount of postgame analyses. Consider all those hastily posted diatribes or that pointless online petition with a million deluded signatures on it, demanding (demanding!) to have Season 8 scrubbed and remade. In some ways, “Game of Thrones” had grown so popular that it made its viewers look embarrassingly out of touch with life itself.
This can only happen when we love our popular culture a little too hard, crossing some line of personal investment, forgetting when a TV show is only just that. It was our fault for coming to regard the show as the apogee of the medium itself. It’s also why I’m glad some unnamed, unwitting hero left a coffee cup in the camera shot in the episode that aired May 5. That one coffee cup humanized the whole endeavor. It reminded us that a TV show, no matter how absorbing, is a folly, a fake, a job that someone is hired to do, so that an HBO subscription can be sold to you. The coffee cup will be scrubbed away with a quick flick of magic technology; but before it’s entirely gone, I hope they give it an Emmy.
[And apparently they left a water bottle out in the finale episode -- I didn't notice it. Whoever is noticing these things, has better eyes and is more observant than I am.]
And.. CBS This Morning Discusses the Difficulty of Sticking the Ending for Television Series -- and how the Internet Affects that.
Vox Review of Game of Thrones
Huh.
That’s my take on Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne.” Huh. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t really like it either. I watched it, and it entered my brain, and I thought about it to some degree. But I don’t know that I have any feelings about it at all. Anticlimactic might be the best way to describe it.
And...
Game of Thrones pulled a reverse Lost! Everything was accounted for, and the writers certainly had a plan. But to put that plan in motion, they had to twist and contort the characters so heavily that the whole show became a warped, funhouse mirror version of itself.
Most of the time, that was fine. The spectacle was enough, and the actors were fun. But now it feels ever more like so much of what Game of Thrones made us care about for all of those years was worth very little.
In the end, Game of Thrones — a show about the illusory nature of power and how difficult it is to govern, much less lead — was undone by its commitment to the most obviously awesome elements in its text.
When the show needed more and more subtext, it kept leaning into the biggest, most spectacular things possible, and all subtlety was lost. That worked for a while. But it couldn’t work forever.
Also...
Danerys Tells All - New Yorker Interview
When this scene was filmed, do you now remember, “Oh, my God, I remember that coffee cup sitting in front of me?”
No, I really don’t. You’ve got a lot of cast, and you’ve got two-hundred-odd extras in that room. But you know who I could actually quite happily blame? Did you notice some quite familiar-looking extras in that particular scene?
No, who? Ed Sheeran?
No. When Kit is having his kind of “Cheers,” and he’s downing all the booze, there are two people who look slightly like a Metallica tribute band, and they are our showrunners and writers, David Benioff and Mr. Dan Weiss. They are in the shot. Most people were laughing at their terrible handlebar mustaches rather than looking at anything that was on the table. When I was watching it, I was too busy laughing at their hilarious return to acting. So there are many excuses for the coffee cup for you. Pick whichever one you’d like.
I had no idea what to expect for this last season. I hoped for some juicy things to get into, as I always do for each season, but I didn’t see this coming. Throughout the show, there have been these glorious moments of Daenerys taking on a very strong role in a battle or in a decision to be made. There were these wonderful moments when she takes control, and it’s really liberating and beautiful. She frees people, she kills the baddies, and it feels good.
And, I must admit, I was sitting tentatively on that chair thinking, How long is this going to last? Everyone was saying, “Isn’t she great? She’s our savior, Mhysa.” It’s been beautiful and amazing, but I’ve been looking over my shoulder the entire time while everyone else gets a more human—for want of a better word—story line. They do good things. They do bad things. They do silly things. They do brilliant things. They fall in love. They break hearts. Daenerys has quite consistently had this road to salvation, and she’s been sitting atop a very safe mountain.
I remember the boys—our writers and showrunners—telling me that Daenerys’s arc is that of Lawrence of Arabia. I watched “Lawrence of Arabia,” and I was, like, “Great, cool. He’s brilliant. He survived, and it’s wonderful.” But then you remember how that movie ended, with Lawrence’s disintegration. I didn’t quite put those two things together. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it coming because I care about Daenerys too much.
Ah, found another one, courtesy of beer_good_foamy, this is Chuck Wendig...who I don't always agree with..I've read one of his books. Don't remember which one. It was a while ago.
Endings are not stoppings on Game of Thrones and how we conclude our stories
Ahem. So. Endings are fucking hard.
They just are. It’s hard enough with one book, much less seven or eight books (or seasons of television, or movies, or what-have-you). The more epic the tale, the tougher it is to conclude that journey, because you’re not just concluding a “plotline,” you’re trying to tie dozens of threads — character, primarily — off in pleasing and appropriate knots. Some are tied together, others more grand than others, some get no knots or bows at all and are snipped cruelly with a pair of scissors. The larger the story, the more threads you have to deal with, and the goal is to have woven them into some kind of tapestry — not just a bundle of loose, untied threads that dangle in a waterfall of unfinished narrative. And Game of Thrones was a very large story, indeed. To its credit, it was both epic and intimate, beautiful and harrowing, twisty and entangling. I say with no small appreciation that the existence of this show is genuinely astonishing, and it is due credit to George R.R. Martin and the showrunners that it not only got to happen, but happened in a way that made it one of the biggest, most satisfying, and routinely most upsetting television show of the last decade, if not of all damn time. Big show. Big audience. Lotta meaty, chewy stuff.
It is therefore worth noting that no matter what Game of Thrones did last night, its ending would’ve been disappointing to someone. There is no way to satisfactorily end such an epic undertaking — especially such a morally and emotionally complicated undertaking — in a way that values every viewer and every fan. Everyone had their favorite characters, their pet theories, the questions they hoped would be answered. Who will be king, why did the White Walkers arrange things in a mysterious spiral, why did Bran just Warg off from the Battle of Winterfell in a bunch of fucking crows I mean was he trying to poop on something or just get some sweet sweet berries or what.
I’d like to say I’m still processing the episode, but really, I’m not. I was mostly bored by it — it contained a great deal of pontificating and mumbling and walking around, and not to a whole lot of effect. It had a few good moments, and one or two truly beautiful moments, and for me, as is my way, I like to unpack what I didn’t like in a sort of grander, storytelling way. Like, what does this mean for other storytellers and writers? Are there lessons to be learned? The answer to that is, only if you want, of course. Because as is my constant refrain: this shit ain’t math. What one person finds boring and unsatisfying, another will find invigorating and perfect in all that it concludes. So I do this for me more than I do it for you. You, of course, will come along for the ride as I try to figure it out, and maybe you’ll find something in here, too — to agree with, to think about, to stir your agita so badly that it causes you to make ten angry YouTube videos.
A good ending, as noted, ties up a lot of threads — character threads, ideally, but of course plot threads too — but an ending is also usually something that surprises us, and it does so in a way that while we are surprised, we aren’t shocked. In other words, it’s like a surprise party on or around our birthday — we didn’t know it was coming, but it’s also not completely bizarre. That’s how surprise parties work. It’s not a surprise birthday party four months after our birthday, because what the fuck is this, Dave, my birthday was four months ago, Dave, you tremendous piece-of-shit, maybe if you didn’t get high all the time on the couch we could pay attention to other people. Fucking Dave.
A bad ending fails to negotiate with or render those threads and surprises in a satisfying way. And I’d argue that’s what happened here, at least for me — and again, the way I look at this is mostly through the lens of characters, because let us repeat the motto: Characters Are Why We Care.
For me, if the character moments don't feel earned, I'll dislike it or be disappointed. And for me, none of the character moments were earned. But read his review for a better analysis.
2. If you are over Game of Thrones and ready to move on to a really promising adaptation of a cool series of fantasy novels?
HBO's Trailer is already giving us the best adaptation of His Dark Materials that we deserve
His Dark Materials is a series of fantasy novels by Phillip K. Pullman, which were written in response to CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, which Pullman had issues with. They are insightful works -- with a young female heroine, and introduce the idea of daemons -- your soul takes on the form of animal that is a daemon and is attached to you. Although it's a bit more complicated than that. And it has a good cast.
I'm really looking forward to it. I loved His Dark Materials.
Me: Yes.
Co-worker: Did you like it?
Me: No. (Pause)
Co-worker: Okay -- hmmm, no spoilers.
Me: Eh, I should tell you one thing. If you are a fan of Dany? Don't watch Season 8. Skip it.
Co-worker (who is a huge fan of Dany -looks at me): Oh?
Me: Yeah. It's a warning. I know you love that character -- trust me on this -- skip Season 8.
I told my mother, who'd been watching but had to stop at S5, what happened. She also loved Dany. I sort of did, although when I realized the show was going to jump the shark and become a different show entirely, I stopped caring. Was deeply disappointed in some respects, it started out as a brilliant discourse on political machinations and how we are our own worst enemies...only to turn into well...
For the record, I didn't like the finale for a lot of reasons.
Reviews...that articulate my difficulties better than I can:
* Finale Review of GOT by Julie Berman, Time's film and television critic
In its heyday, Game of Thrones was a political thriller more than a fantasy epic. Its struggle between would-be monarchs had depth because it was also a struggle between conflicting ideas about freedom, justice and leadership. Do good ends justify cruel means? Or should we, like Ned Stark, feel obligated to do the right thing even when it’s suicidal? When someone wrongs you, do you turn the other cheek or do you add their name to the kill list? Can any person be trusted with absolute power? It would’ve been nice if the show had followed these quandaries through to the end.
Yet still mixed feelings..as this review conveys from the Washington Post:
Finale While Lacking Goes Out on an Important Note - Stories Matter
Like most of this eighth and final season, it played as though creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had finally surrendered to the size of the story they set out to tell in 2011. Sailing bravely but blindly past the material laid out for them in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels, the last six episodes mostly acknowledged that “Game of Thrones” might never be entirely, perfectly wrapped up — unless by the books’ author himself. In one bit from Sunday’s episode that was so corny it ought to have been buttered, some of the characters marveled at how a contemporaneous account of their travails, written in calligraphy and bound in leather, still couldn’t quite sum up all they had endured.
It’s likely you’re already aware of the dissatisfaction with the conclusion tweeted hither and yon — six weeks of nitpicking complaints, first-class nerd whining and an ungodly amount of postgame analyses. Consider all those hastily posted diatribes or that pointless online petition with a million deluded signatures on it, demanding (demanding!) to have Season 8 scrubbed and remade. In some ways, “Game of Thrones” had grown so popular that it made its viewers look embarrassingly out of touch with life itself.
This can only happen when we love our popular culture a little too hard, crossing some line of personal investment, forgetting when a TV show is only just that. It was our fault for coming to regard the show as the apogee of the medium itself. It’s also why I’m glad some unnamed, unwitting hero left a coffee cup in the camera shot in the episode that aired May 5. That one coffee cup humanized the whole endeavor. It reminded us that a TV show, no matter how absorbing, is a folly, a fake, a job that someone is hired to do, so that an HBO subscription can be sold to you. The coffee cup will be scrubbed away with a quick flick of magic technology; but before it’s entirely gone, I hope they give it an Emmy.
[And apparently they left a water bottle out in the finale episode -- I didn't notice it. Whoever is noticing these things, has better eyes and is more observant than I am.]
And.. CBS This Morning Discusses the Difficulty of Sticking the Ending for Television Series -- and how the Internet Affects that.
Vox Review of Game of Thrones
Huh.
That’s my take on Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne.” Huh. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t really like it either. I watched it, and it entered my brain, and I thought about it to some degree. But I don’t know that I have any feelings about it at all. Anticlimactic might be the best way to describe it.
And...
Game of Thrones pulled a reverse Lost! Everything was accounted for, and the writers certainly had a plan. But to put that plan in motion, they had to twist and contort the characters so heavily that the whole show became a warped, funhouse mirror version of itself.
Most of the time, that was fine. The spectacle was enough, and the actors were fun. But now it feels ever more like so much of what Game of Thrones made us care about for all of those years was worth very little.
In the end, Game of Thrones — a show about the illusory nature of power and how difficult it is to govern, much less lead — was undone by its commitment to the most obviously awesome elements in its text.
When the show needed more and more subtext, it kept leaning into the biggest, most spectacular things possible, and all subtlety was lost. That worked for a while. But it couldn’t work forever.
Also...
Danerys Tells All - New Yorker Interview
When this scene was filmed, do you now remember, “Oh, my God, I remember that coffee cup sitting in front of me?”
No, I really don’t. You’ve got a lot of cast, and you’ve got two-hundred-odd extras in that room. But you know who I could actually quite happily blame? Did you notice some quite familiar-looking extras in that particular scene?
No, who? Ed Sheeran?
No. When Kit is having his kind of “Cheers,” and he’s downing all the booze, there are two people who look slightly like a Metallica tribute band, and they are our showrunners and writers, David Benioff and Mr. Dan Weiss. They are in the shot. Most people were laughing at their terrible handlebar mustaches rather than looking at anything that was on the table. When I was watching it, I was too busy laughing at their hilarious return to acting. So there are many excuses for the coffee cup for you. Pick whichever one you’d like.
I had no idea what to expect for this last season. I hoped for some juicy things to get into, as I always do for each season, but I didn’t see this coming. Throughout the show, there have been these glorious moments of Daenerys taking on a very strong role in a battle or in a decision to be made. There were these wonderful moments when she takes control, and it’s really liberating and beautiful. She frees people, she kills the baddies, and it feels good.
And, I must admit, I was sitting tentatively on that chair thinking, How long is this going to last? Everyone was saying, “Isn’t she great? She’s our savior, Mhysa.” It’s been beautiful and amazing, but I’ve been looking over my shoulder the entire time while everyone else gets a more human—for want of a better word—story line. They do good things. They do bad things. They do silly things. They do brilliant things. They fall in love. They break hearts. Daenerys has quite consistently had this road to salvation, and she’s been sitting atop a very safe mountain.
I remember the boys—our writers and showrunners—telling me that Daenerys’s arc is that of Lawrence of Arabia. I watched “Lawrence of Arabia,” and I was, like, “Great, cool. He’s brilliant. He survived, and it’s wonderful.” But then you remember how that movie ended, with Lawrence’s disintegration. I didn’t quite put those two things together. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it coming because I care about Daenerys too much.
Ah, found another one, courtesy of beer_good_foamy, this is Chuck Wendig...who I don't always agree with..I've read one of his books. Don't remember which one. It was a while ago.
Endings are not stoppings on Game of Thrones and how we conclude our stories
Ahem. So. Endings are fucking hard.
They just are. It’s hard enough with one book, much less seven or eight books (or seasons of television, or movies, or what-have-you). The more epic the tale, the tougher it is to conclude that journey, because you’re not just concluding a “plotline,” you’re trying to tie dozens of threads — character, primarily — off in pleasing and appropriate knots. Some are tied together, others more grand than others, some get no knots or bows at all and are snipped cruelly with a pair of scissors. The larger the story, the more threads you have to deal with, and the goal is to have woven them into some kind of tapestry — not just a bundle of loose, untied threads that dangle in a waterfall of unfinished narrative. And Game of Thrones was a very large story, indeed. To its credit, it was both epic and intimate, beautiful and harrowing, twisty and entangling. I say with no small appreciation that the existence of this show is genuinely astonishing, and it is due credit to George R.R. Martin and the showrunners that it not only got to happen, but happened in a way that made it one of the biggest, most satisfying, and routinely most upsetting television show of the last decade, if not of all damn time. Big show. Big audience. Lotta meaty, chewy stuff.
It is therefore worth noting that no matter what Game of Thrones did last night, its ending would’ve been disappointing to someone. There is no way to satisfactorily end such an epic undertaking — especially such a morally and emotionally complicated undertaking — in a way that values every viewer and every fan. Everyone had their favorite characters, their pet theories, the questions they hoped would be answered. Who will be king, why did the White Walkers arrange things in a mysterious spiral, why did Bran just Warg off from the Battle of Winterfell in a bunch of fucking crows I mean was he trying to poop on something or just get some sweet sweet berries or what.
I’d like to say I’m still processing the episode, but really, I’m not. I was mostly bored by it — it contained a great deal of pontificating and mumbling and walking around, and not to a whole lot of effect. It had a few good moments, and one or two truly beautiful moments, and for me, as is my way, I like to unpack what I didn’t like in a sort of grander, storytelling way. Like, what does this mean for other storytellers and writers? Are there lessons to be learned? The answer to that is, only if you want, of course. Because as is my constant refrain: this shit ain’t math. What one person finds boring and unsatisfying, another will find invigorating and perfect in all that it concludes. So I do this for me more than I do it for you. You, of course, will come along for the ride as I try to figure it out, and maybe you’ll find something in here, too — to agree with, to think about, to stir your agita so badly that it causes you to make ten angry YouTube videos.
A good ending, as noted, ties up a lot of threads — character threads, ideally, but of course plot threads too — but an ending is also usually something that surprises us, and it does so in a way that while we are surprised, we aren’t shocked. In other words, it’s like a surprise party on or around our birthday — we didn’t know it was coming, but it’s also not completely bizarre. That’s how surprise parties work. It’s not a surprise birthday party four months after our birthday, because what the fuck is this, Dave, my birthday was four months ago, Dave, you tremendous piece-of-shit, maybe if you didn’t get high all the time on the couch we could pay attention to other people. Fucking Dave.
A bad ending fails to negotiate with or render those threads and surprises in a satisfying way. And I’d argue that’s what happened here, at least for me — and again, the way I look at this is mostly through the lens of characters, because let us repeat the motto: Characters Are Why We Care.
For me, if the character moments don't feel earned, I'll dislike it or be disappointed. And for me, none of the character moments were earned. But read his review for a better analysis.
2. If you are over Game of Thrones and ready to move on to a really promising adaptation of a cool series of fantasy novels?
HBO's Trailer is already giving us the best adaptation of His Dark Materials that we deserve
His Dark Materials is a series of fantasy novels by Phillip K. Pullman, which were written in response to CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, which Pullman had issues with. They are insightful works -- with a young female heroine, and introduce the idea of daemons -- your soul takes on the form of animal that is a daemon and is attached to you. Although it's a bit more complicated than that. And it has a good cast.
I'm really looking forward to it. I loved His Dark Materials.