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[nongotfan]

S8E5: The Bells

2 Furious 2 Fast. ★★☆☆☆

It’s a story as old as time. A woman has her dream job all lined up, but apparently she’s “too emotional” so behind her back the hiring committee decides they should offer it to a much less qualified man.

And when she gets pissed off about it, it’s just proof they made the right decision.

Not even the younglings survived.

Way back when, one of my snarks about Revenge of the Sith was how Anakin Skywalker went, in just a couple of scenes, from mostly well-intentioned guy with a bit of a temper and a tortured soul to literally chopping children into pieces with a lightsaber. Everyone knew Anakin had to become Darth Vader at some point, but none of that made how it happened any less jarring.

Daenerys’ descent has been heavily telegraphed, right down to the “do you remember that her family is totes mad?” montage before the opening credits of this episode. With only two hours remaining, if Dany was going to turn heel it had to be now.

And… for a moment I thought they were actually going to pull it off.

Executing Varys was consistent with how Daenerys has behaved all along, and having her decide the human shields inside the Red Keep were what we now call “acceptable collateral damage” would have been within the bounds of plausibility.

But no, she had to burninate all the peasants.

A waste of some great television.

It’s a pity because so much else about the episode was amazing. The cinematography was stunning, the effects were great, and the actors put everything into their scenes, even those scenes that didn’t deserve such dedication. 

Sadly though, I’m rating these on a scale of “would I want to watch it again?” and wanting to throw things at my television isn’t a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Cleganebowl (Leaked Rehearsal Footage)

Other Stuff

The Plot Device Weapon went from “rapid-fire pinpoint accuracy from a mile away” to “couldn’t hit the side of a barn at point blank range” rather quickly don’t you think?

The invading army seemed remarkably sanguine about their glorious leader indiscriminately firebombing friend and foe. I’d have GTFO’d pretty fast after it became obvious she didn’t care who she was aiming at.

The Hound’s scene with Arya was a great payoff for all the time those two characters have spent together, at least the bits that I watched.

Cleganebowl itself, on the other hand, felt vestigial, as did Jaime and Euron. Neither fight held any weight beyond wanting to get the characters done with before episode six.

A belated addition to the review, but can we pour one out for how fucking amazing Lena Headey has been as Cersei Lannister? Consistently head and shoulders the best character giving the best performance.

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” — Rev 6:8

They are really, really trying to sell Arya coming to kill Dany, but just like with her and Cersei, I can’t see it happening. Maybe they’ll reverse the fake-out from the Winterfell battle, swapping Arya and Jon.

Or maybe Bran’s warged into that horse, and he does it.

[nongotfan]

S8E4: The Last of the Starks

Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to happen. ★★★½☆

Scratch the surface of any Game of Thrones fandom these days, and you’ll find discussions about how things have gone downhill since they “ran out of book”. These range from complaints about the show’s compression of time and space since season 7, to straight up “how it would have gone if George had written it” fan-fiction.

What these commentators all gloss over is the fact that George hasn’t written it, and not for lack of trying.

When I was a lad, Fantasy authors either wrote stand-alone novels or they wrote trilogies. Sometimes the stand-alone novels shared a world and built on each others stories as they went, and sometimes the trilogies were stretched over five books, but the general rule was you got a complete story with a beginning, middle and most importantly an end, in somewhere around 500,000 words.

Then the 90s happened, and somehow in the course of a decade we got not one but two hugely successful series of books that put the “sprawl” in “sprawling fantasy epic.” The second of those series was by George R. R. Martin and is now a ground-breaking TV series, the first was from Robert Jordan and they’re threatening to inflict an adaptation of that on us next, braid-tugging and all.

What each of these series demonstrated in their own special ways was that if you get a million words into your fantasy story and still can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you’re in trouble.

Martin has spent the best part of the last decade wrestling with the beast he created. Books have been delayed, reworked, split in two, distracted with prequels and then delayed again. This is not the picture of an author who knows how to get his complex plot and demanding characters to whatever ends he has planned for them.

The producers of Game of Thrones, on the other hand, had to come up with solutions now, and where Martin can ask for whatever page count his plot demands, rising production costs forced the TV show’s last two seasons to be cut from twenty episodes to thirteen.

In Season Seven, this meant teleporting armies from one side of the continent to the other to fit all the battles in. In Season Eight, this means making use (a second time) of the Strangely Invisible Fleet to (for the second time) motivate Danaerys to rash action while cutting down her advantage in a way that reminds you that Game of Thrones doesn’t care about your feelings.

But I Digress

It’s easy to overlook, given the problems the show has fitting everything that needs to be done in a shortened series, how brave a decision it was to change the pace so drastically this episode and just sit at Winterfell watching the aftermath. There are a hundred reasons and ways the show could have skipped this, and would have been lesser for the decision.

80% of this episode was vintage Game of Thrones: moving the plot forward steadily just by having well fleshed-out and motivated characters all trying to advance their own interests either with, over, or against each other. Nothing flashy, just strong scenes that give them space to do their thing.

Which I guess is why the remaining fifth was so jarring. This week we are here, next week we need to be there, and we just can’t get there in time unless something drastic happens.

Other Stuff

The seven Harry Potter books clock in at just over a million words, the equivalent of reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and then winding down with the Dragonlance Chronicles. The same word-count would get you just about to the end of the third volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, or a little way into book four of Wheel of Time, but only two thirds through Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.

I can’t remember who pointed this out on Twitter, but Missandei could have solved an awful lot of problems by grabbing Cersei and jumping off the wall.

I don’t really feel qualified to discuss That Line From Sansa, except to say that one aspect of the TV adaptation you can’t blame on pacing or plot complexity is “they put in a lot more rape”.

Similarly, maybe you shouldn’t ▉▉▉▉ your show’s only ▉▉▉▉▉▉ ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉?

Watching The Hound and Arya ride off together was a great moment, and you kind of have to assume they’re in the castle already, but I really can’t see them giving Cersei’s scalp to Arya on top of everything else.

Bronn still has a part to play in how this turns out, because otherwise including his scenes at all makes no sense

If I was forced to sum up the theme of Game of Thrones, it would be, to quote Dark Helmet:

“Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.”

[nongotfan]

S8E3: The Long Night

So that happened. ★★★☆☆

(I live in that weird state of being where Game of Thrones is just a TV show. I mostly watch it because my wife loves it, and being able to talk to me about it makes her happy. As such, these reviews are from the perspective of someone who likes good television, but isn’t particularly invested in this television. Heavy spoilers.)

I’m no Sun Tzu, but sending a third of your army without backup in a head-on charge out of your fortified position into a massively superior force that can raise your dead to fight against you seems like a poorly thought out way to start a battle.

I know it’s silly to nitpick wartime strategy in a show that’s “just tits and dragons”, but literally no decision of the defenders of Winterfell in this episode made any sense. I read somewhere that the directors were heavily inspired by the battle of Helms Deep, but I think they missed the bit where that only happened because Théoden was an idiot.

The Bigger Picture

The original version of my previous review had a bullet-point to the effect of: “If things turn out the way I expect, this exposes a big structural problem with the show, which I’ll talk about next week if and when it happens.”

Game of Thrones always had two intertwined through-lines. Who is going to come out ahead in the incessant deadly politicking, and given humanity’s inability to work together, how are they ever going to deal with the extinction-level event gathering behind the wall?

With time running out, and with the Iron Throne still to be seen to, it made sense the White Walkers needed to be cleaned up in Episode 3. Meaning that after seven and a half seasons of building up the show’s Big Bad, increasing their stakes as a potentially civilization-ending force, when that threat finally materialises they get wiped out in a single battle, in a single episode. Final score between the armies of the living and the dead: 1-0, to the living, no best of three.

“No way is that going to happen”, I thought on proof-reading my review. If episode 3 is the first big confrontation, humanity has to lose. The big bad needs to be a real threat. The stakes must be raised. Winterfell must fall, and fall hard. There have to be serious casualties. 

So I deleted that line, and spent a week coming up with clever ways the plots could be resolved together, and asking myself if Winterfell does fall, who would be left and where does that leave them?

Turns out, MacGuffin’s gonna MacGuffin. The army of the dead was the distraction all along, a long-winded pretext to get Jon and Dany on the same side.

Which is silly, because the real distraction has always been the Iron Throne. From the Mad King to whoever ends up with the crown at the end of this series we’ll have seen half a dozen different Kings and Queens of the Andals and the First Men, and no plausible reason to believe the next one is going to have any more stable a career than any that came before.

It’s Always Darkest Before its Pitch Black

To call this episode cinematic would be an understatement. Here I’m using the word “cinematic” in the sense of “meant to be projected on a screen in an unlit windowless room, not, say, on an LCD panel in an Australian living room around lunchtime.”

The whole thing was dark as hell. Half the time I couldn’t work out what was going on in a scene because I don’t live in a cave. I sympathise with the artistic vision of the show’s creators, but I’m put in mind of the story of the music producer who would always test out the mix on a pair of cheap speakers because that’s how most of the people buying the album would experience it.

The chaos and darkness of battle was used to repeatedly tease the almost-deaths of a lot of people, which I was cool with until the seventy-fifth time they pulled the same trick on the same bloody character.

Ultimately, the episode was a confused mess that falls apart if you think about it too hard at any level, redeemed only by Arya’s crowning moment of awesome, which was telegraphed in that one scene and then you forgot it was coming, then kind of remembered then forgot about again right before it blew your mind.

Other Stuff:

Lyanna Mormont, amirite?

Melisandre was shoe-horned into the episode like nobody’s business. They did a great job of making it look like she was contributing without her really contributing.

That whole scene with Arya hiding behind the bookshelves while the mother of all battles raged outside, all I could think was “Wow, how sound-proof is Winterfell?”

While I’m on the subject, after being overrun three times in the course of the show, I’m awarding Winterfell the medal for Most Shit Castle in Westeros.

The writers seem to be setting up Tyrion and Sansa, because in the world of Game of Thrones, “at least he didn’t rape me” is a high bar.

Jon Snow has obviously never played a video game. You wait in cover, learn the dragon’s attack pattern THEN run through its legs to get to the next screen!

[nongotfan]

Winterfell Deadpool

(Heavy Spoilers)

On the eve of what is hyped to be the bloodiest episode for main character death since the Red Wedding, I feel oddly compelled to offer my opinion on who will live and who will die.

Keep in mind that Game of Thrones is a show based on a series of books whose author openly revels in killing characters purely for the sake of shocking readers and subverting expectations:

George R.R. Martin: I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. I killed Ned in the first book and it shocked a lot of people. I killed Ned because everybody thinks he's the hero and that, sure, he's going to get into trouble, but then he'll somehow get out of it. The next predictable thing is to think his eldest son is going to rise up and avenge his father. And everybody is going to expect that. So immediately [killing Robb] became the next thing I had to do.

So while I’ve tried to put some logical thought into my analysis, we must keep in mind that there is no logic, there is no god, and it’s quite possible, and even plausible, that every character’s fate was decided by the writers pulling names out of a hat and doing a shot whenever they drew a Stark, Lannister or Targaryen.

Tyrion: Alive

Far too much screen time last week went into redeeming Tyrion in his role as Dany's advisor. This might all be misdirection, but it seems like a waste of too many pages of dialogue. Also, why go to all that effort setting up Bronn for a big arc-defining confrontation if Tyrion's just going to buy it from a White Walker.

If I'm wrong, it'll be because just when you think Tyrion's escaped, last scene before the episode credits roll, Bronn shows up in the escape tunnel with Chekhov's Crossbow.

Dany: Alive

Sansa doesn't give two fucks about the Iron Throne, so without at least one of the heirs surviving, there goes 8 seasons of plot.

If only one of them's going to survive, my odds would be on Dany just because "is she going to go mad at the last minute" makes for a more interesting series than "that kind of dumb, boring guy might be king."

Jon: Unsure

On one hand, building Jon Snow up as the lost Targaryen heir over multiple seasons only to kill him a day after he finds out is a huge anticlimax, cock-blocking the show's most anticipated reveal (and, as inscribed in the show's origin myth, the thing the show-runners had to guess before they were given the rights).

On the other hand, killing off the guy you think is going to be the hero right when you think it's time for them to be the hero is literally game-of-thrones.txt.

Sansa: Not Looking Good

There's some juicy conflict left to play out between Dany and Sansa, clearly set up and left unresolved in the previous episode.

On the other hand, chances are that after the big battle there's not really a "North" left to fight over, so it may be narratively more convenient to have her go down with the ship.

Bran: (Un)dead

How awesome would it be if after all the hours and hours of screen time spent on developing the Three-Eyed Raven (in my eyes, the most excruciatingly boring extended subplot of the series), he dies with his only significant contribution being the Jon Snow reveal, something the writers could have just easily have given to Gilly?

So yeah, Bran and the Night King have their "Neo Merges With Agent Smith" moment, which either kills them both (BUT AT WHAT COST??????), or turns Bran into the new Night King, or both.

The Hound: Alive

Cleganebowl. He’s done fuck all since he was resurrected, why bring him back at all if he didn’t have something left to do?

Jaime: Probably dead

He's effectively redeemed himself by leaving Circe and knighting Brienne. What's he got left to do except die nobly? Maybe kill Circe? It’s a stretch.

And, speaking of completed character arcs,

Brienne: Dead

Probably in the same scene as Jaime.

Sam and Gilly: It Depends

If Jon Snow dies, there's no reason to keep Sam around. If Jon survives it could go either way: Sam can play the role of Jon's conscience just as well as a memory as he can alive. In the end, there’s no compelling reason to kill them or to keep them alive. It comes down to how big a cascade of misery the writers want. Jon sad about Sam? Sam sad about Gilly? Sam and Gilly sad about Little Sam? Little Sam turned into a white walker and feasting on the flesh of his parents?

Ser Friendzone: Alive

…the series didn't put him (or us) out of his misery any other time it had the chance, why start now?

Lyanna Mormont: Alive

With all the Starks doomed, someone has to end up rebuilding the North when the show is over.

OK, OK, this is 100% headcanon but I can hope.

Arya: Dead

She made up with the Hound and boinked that nice wholesome blacksmith, what's left for her to do? Circe's still on her list, but there's a long enough queue for that particular scalp that I can't see her being the one who collects it.

The Internet is full of clever theories about how Arya could survive the battle, and how she could be useful to the plot later, but it all comes down to "she's a fan favourite, they can't kill her!" which if history tells us anything, is a bad reason to be attached to a character in Game of Thrones.

Sorry, she's my favourite too, but she's cactus.

Everyone else:

Toss a coin, that's what the writers did.

[nongotfan]

S8E2: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The Calm Before the Storm (Extended Mix) ★★★½☆

(I live in that weird state of being where Game of Thrones is just a TV show. I mostly watch it because my wife loves it, and being able to talk to me about it makes her happy. As such, these reviews are from the perspective of someone who likes good television, but isn’t particularly invested in this television. Mild spoilers.)

Nothing says “one of these characters is about to die” quite as much as a scene where two lovers discuss the peaceful, idyllic place they will run away to together when the war is over.

On one hand, this episode is like its predecessor but more so. For the first time since Season One there is only one plot-line to follow. And since every character you see is a part of it, and that plot won’t actually advance until next week, all we can really do is watch the characters wait for it.

What elevates this episode is what we, and the characters, know is about to happen: a lot of people are about to die. This lends its scenes a weight that was missing last week, and they each serve to move things forward into a place where this might be the last character moment we get from someone that isn’t “about to be stabbed in the face/torn limb-from-limb/burnt by ice-dragon-fire”, where last week mostly just reintroduced players after the long break and situated them in space.

Even for a non-fan there were some genuinely touching scenes, especially the one given to the titular Knight, which on its own earns that extra half-star. The episode stretches a little… OK, it stretches a lot, but at the same time there’s no scene you can point to and say it was superfluous and should have been cut. The problem is simply that there are too many characters we needed to cover.

By this time next week, this is less likely to be a problem.

Other Stuff:

After (now) two seasons of him giving disastrously bad advice, the writers have penned themselves into a corner with Tyrion and have resorted to telling us to camera that he’s really smart.

To quote Mikki Kendall on Twitter, this episode’s sex scene was one of the few in the history of the series between named characters “that didn’t involve coercion, manipulation, the recently undead, or incest.”

This almost makes up for levels of “no what… wait… oh yeah, that was a long time ago now… but still…” not seen since Anna Paquin got her kit off in True Blood.

In her scene with Sansa, Danaerys shows why she’s not yet fit to rule: she clearly sees ascending the Iron Throne as an ending, not a beginning.

Jon Snow continues to be mind-blowingly stupid. You’re all facing death, your dragon game needs to be on point tomorrow, why not save the truth bomb until after?

…and seriously, maybe open with “I didn’t know until today”? Surely that’s something you need to be really, really clear about from the outset?

This review’s opening gag was shamelessly stolen from Jeannie Cool on Facebook, who I totally forgot I was stealing from until it was too late to credit her properly.

Finally, a personal apology to Lyanna, a fantastic character who is almost certainly doomed, but whose name I am so bad at remembering that in my head I’ve just taken to calling her Ethel Mormont.

[nongotfan]

Star Ratings Explained

★☆☆☆☆: I want to go back in time and unwatch this episode.

★★☆☆☆: If you were binge-rewatching you’d probably skip it.

★★★☆☆: Watching this episode was better than not watching it.

★★★★☆: Hey, I really liked this one.

★★★★★: Holy shit, that was good television.

[nongotfan]

S8E1: Winterfell

A whole lot of not much. ★★☆☆☆

(I live in that weird state of being where Game of Thrones is just a TV show. I mostly watch it because my wife loves it, and being able to talk to me about it makes her happy. As such, these reviews are from the perspective of someone who likes good television, but isn’t particularly invested in this television. Mild spoilers.)

I think the most positive thing I can say about this episode is that it was an hour long, and I only wandered off once or twice to get a drink and feed the cats.

The problem, ironically for a show that for so long wrestled with managing so many characters scattered off to non-intersecting sub-plots, is that now all the characters are finally gathered together in Winterfell and Kings Landing, two places where nothing is happening.

As a result you get an episode of situating the roster of characters in their current locations. There are a lot of reunions (fan service), a lot of callbacks to previous episodes (ditto), a lot of explaining where all the pieces are now on the chess board in relation to all the other pieces, none of which moves the story appreciably anywhere.

The weird part is what gets pushed aside. The sequence where Theon rescues Yara, which could have been quite good if it had been given space to breathe, comes almost out of nowhere, and is shunted aside just as quickly to make room for Jon Snow riding a dragon, a scene that seemed to want to be Harry Potter’s first broomstick-ride without any of the exhilaration or joy, and that left me feeling that rather than jumping straight off afterwards for sexy time with Daenerys, he shouldn’t have been able to walk for a week.

On a similar note, there were scenes where characters learned things the audience have known for ages, like the fate of the Tarleys, or Jon Snow’s parentage. The only interesting part of new characters finding these things out is to see how the knowledge changes them, but in both cases we get rushed to the next thing before they’ve even processed the information, better luck next episode I guess.

(Edit: OK, I was a bit too harsh here. The one scene does inform the other in an interesting way, but everything still feels so rushed that nothing has time to land.)

The end result is an episode where a lot happens — there was definitely an hour of stuff in there — but nothing happens. You could read the recap and not regret missing anything.

Other Stuff:

Sansa being the only person left in the entire show with two functioning brain cells is a nice touch.

Tyrion making “lol you got no balls” jokes to Varys while being escorted by an army of ruthless eunuch killing-machines struck me as odd.

The reunion between Arya and Jon was such a genuinely touching, humanising moment it almost felt out of place in the show.

The scene with Bronn was a welcome return of the GoT staple, “We need tits somewhere in this episode and we have no idea where else to put them.”

Dragons in fiction are 100% modelled on cats, don’t @ me.

Oh, and there was some burning kid in a spiral of arms stuck to a wall somewhere discovered by C-tier characters and why did they even?