by William Moon

NOTE: This article originally ran on scifigangstas.com in April 2021

This coming Saturday (April 17th), we’ll have somehow reached the ten-year anniversary of the premiere of Game of Thrones‘ pilot episode, “Winter Is Coming”. A friend of mine found out via an ad from HBO pushing people to dive back into the series on HBO Max to honor the anniversary. You may or may not see a similar ad this week, and perhaps this won’t be the only thinkpiece about the series that pops up in your newsfeed over the coming days. I mean, maybe that’ll happen. Also maybe it won’t. It’s entirely possible that this anniversary passes by with virtually no fanfare at all, which is remarkable for a series that so dominated the proverbial water coolers of the world for so many years. And even if you do see something (other than this very article) that pulls you back into Game of Thrones‘ orbit, are you really interested in giving that show any more of your time?

The ten-year thing is weird, as many pop culture anniversaries are becoming for me, since it both feels insane to think it’s been that long, but then when I remember who/where I was when I watched the pilot (the night it aired, which is especially rare for me), I don’t even feel like I remember that guy or that house or that world at all. But that’s all beside the point (I’ll go be increasingly, distressingly old somewhere else and spare you the grief). The point is – what the hell happened? I mean, we all saw what happened, and pretty much to a man, we didn’t like it. But the true scope of GoT‘s late-season failure shows up in just how little anyone anywhere talks about it. Very unscientific evidence suggests that 99% of the show’s mentions are either, A – HBO trying to drum up interest in any of a litany of spinoff shows that no one gives two s***s about or, B – someone griping about it on social media and then several other people getting visibly annoyed that it was even brought up. (This article accounts for the other 1%.) It’s virtually unprecedented for a show/movie franchise/anything to be so incredibly, overwhelmingly relevant culturally and then just…stop being that. Maybe The Matrix movies are a fair comparison, with how much the lousiness of the sequels detracted from the experience of watching the first one, but I’m not sure even that series, successful as it was in its time, wielded the kind of cultural clout Game of Thrones did. Very few things have or ever will, and I can’t imagine any of them disappearing so completely so quickly.

So, how did we get here? Well, it’s hard to pinpoint any one thing. Aside from the generally poor quality of the final seasons, I think the most frustrating problem with the show’s endgame was just how many different things felt wrong with it, so many that it’s hard to point at any one of them and say, “That’s it, Officer. That’s the crappy plot twist or weak character development that hurt me. Take it away.” I could be here all day going on about it, and even though going on about things is mostly what I do around here, I’m going to try to just hit a few points and then let everyone get in their feelings afterward.

These F***ing Guys

Easily public enemies numbers 1 and 1A in this whole fiasco are the two sharply-dressed gentlemen pictured above, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. In a geek entertainment tale as old as time, these two are the main reason the show ever got made in the first place, but also now have to shoulder much of the blame for its severe decline. (Think Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Chris Carter.) In a world where geek culture can be ridiculously pissy and demanding, the worst thing these guys did was give lots of ammo to the kind of fans who scream and shout things like “they just don’t GET these characters”. That’s usually the rallying cry of someone who has a very narrow view of some book or comic character or whatever, and then can’t stand any adaptation of that story/character that doesn’t adhere to that view. Here it’s more or less an observable fact, something sadly backed up over and over again every time Benioff and Weiss tried to explain themselves. A general sentiment among the media and the show’s fanbase has been that they just ran out of gas and rushed through the ending, which no one involved with the show has made much effort to deny, especially since they had multiple now scuttled future projects in the works at the time. But however you want to explain it, narratively speaking, there were always aspects of the source material they felt more comfortable with and other aspects they seemed to shy away from, and not being able to reconcile all of George R.R. Martin’s many divergences likely doomed the series’ endgame from the start. (You can’t get weird about depicting magic in the show and then have the character whose storyline is most defined by magic end up on the throne, for one thing.) And speaking of Martin’s divergences…

Also This Guy

Let’s set aside the usual discussions about whether he’s ever gonna finish the books and instead look at what’s already out there. The world-building is obviously incredibly strong. When I think back to my original interest in the franchise, I think back to how enamored I was with the depth and detail of the lands, the histories, and the societies he’d created. You can get lost in it all. The remixing of real historical touchstones with fantasy elements works incredibly well, and as elaborate as it all is, it also has the feel of something real and tangible, even the parts with things like dragons and ice zombies. Real history is often a mix of fact and convenient fiction anyway, and it’s only relatively recently that we’ve become better able to separate history from out-and-out mythology (which is where your dragons and ice zombies come in). He also did a great job of establishing that this isn’t a world of narrative conveniences. The good guys don’t get saved by somebody riding up at the last minute to rescue them or some other deus ex machina. If an ostensible hero is in what appears to be a no-win situation, then he or she is about to lose violently and the audience will be left to think back on all the mistakes that put our deceased hero in that position. (Looking at you, Robb Stark.) Combine that with a faithful depiction of how long it actually took for people to travel across a continent on foot, horseback, or sailboat and you wind up with a very admirable commitment to narrative verisimilitude.

The upshot of all that is you eventually get reminded why narrative conveniences exist. In real life, everything unfolds messily and without much in the way of satisfying resolution. We tend to avoid that in our popular fiction, often to a ridiculous degree, and while the twisty nature of the series is what drew in a lot of viewers over the first few seasons, there was always going to be a piper to pay at the end. Jon Snow’s true parentage was guessed pretty soon after the first book was released back in 1996, and whatever else Martin was/is planning for the book series’ final act seems either to have been spoiled by now (R+L=J) or may just not be realistically able to happen without Martin beginning to cut corners the way the TV show did. (Martin himself has referred to this quagmire as the Meereenese knot.) As much as you maybe don’t want to, think about how differently the last four seasons would’ve played out if several characters didn’t suddenly develop the ability to teleport across Westeros whenever the plot required it. (More on this later.) I don’t think I’m far out on a limb suggesting that Martin may have written himself into a corner. Combine that with TV writers who basically admit they were in over their heads and you get what we got.

The Laundry List

And now we confront the show itself. The final season takes most of the grief, but the show began to decline in season five and I think a lot of us kicked the can down the road, hoping for a satisfying ending to make it all worth it. When we didn’t get that, all hell broke loose. (I made some similar points in this article, which was written late in season seven.) For the forthcoming list, I’ll attempt to be somewhat objective (as much as one can be in an article like this) and not include personal gripes like how I really wanted to see a kraken in the show. (Don’t @ me, I’m a kraken man.) Anyway, let’s reopen some wounds.

• One of the clear themes of the story is the generational transfer of power and responsibility. As most of the esteemed older cast members’ characters were killed off, the dramatic weight of the series shifted to the show’s younger stars, with decidedly mixed results. This was compounded when the quality of the writing dipped.

• As mentioned above, the sharp change starting around season five where characters just showed up wherever they had to be whenever they had to be there. The show was never perfect in this regard, even in the early seasons. (The Night’s Watchmen ride out of Castle Black at the end of season one and are just stuck out in the cold for multiple seasons while what seems like a huge amount of time passes in the other storylines.) But some truly jarring stuff happens in the later years, like Sansa’s completely unheralded return to Winterfell early in season five (she goes from the Vale to Winterfell in the span of a day or so when that journey took weeks in the early years), to Gendry’s much mocked slow-rowing and fast-running skills.

• The magic thing. I linked to the tweet above, and it was part of that long talk Benioff and Weiss gave in Austin where they faced up to some things, but this one is particularly damaging. Editing out stuff like Lady Stoneheart (don’t worry, guys, I’m sure they’re still building up to her) made a kind of sense, but short-changing the magic really cut the show off at the knees. Bran becoming king could’ve worked if the series hadn’t spent years making him into Westeros’ version of that kid who smokes pot once and then starts talking like a Jaden Smith tweet. The powers of the Three-Eyed Raven are said to be very important, but Bran never appears to do anything particularly important. And Arya’s magic-adjacent training with the Faceless Men didn’t do that character any favors either. (Note to Benioff/Weiss/et al. – having someone constantly talk in riddles ≠ cool.)

• Telling and not showing – kind of following along from the Three-Eyed Raven point, the show does a lot of telling us something meaningful in the later seasons and not a lot of showing us what’s meaningful about it. This comes up with Bran, but even more so with Sansa. The rise of the eldest Stark from repeated victim to genius power player is a major storyline in the final four seasons, and it doesn’t really work. Characters constantly talk about how smart she’s become (Littlefinger, Jon, Tyrion), but we mostly just see her benefit from inconsistent storytelling (not telling Jon about the Knights of the Vale before the Battle of the Bastards, her and Arya’s weird “let’s act like we hate each other even when no one else is around” plot against Littlefinger in season seven, her pointing out things like the lack of food at Winterfell for Daenerys’ army in season eight only for that legitimate concern to then be completely ignored afterward). Basically she does a lot of things that manufacture TV drama, but don’t make sense in the context of the character’s world.

• Stannis – the ultimate middle child likely isn’t a popular pick for favorite character. He’s cold, harsh, and distant, and even the actor who played him, Stephen Dillane, didn’t like the character or his role in the show. But Stannis served an important narrative purpose, and the poor way the show handled his exit from the story at the end of season five now looks like perhaps the clearest harbinger of impending doom. He wasn’t really a hero or a villain, and after three seasons of mostly existing in the show’s margins (Battle of Blackwater aside), he suddenly became a prime mover at the end of season four (his and Davos’ arrival at the Wall is one of the show’s greatest narrative turns). Then the show seemingly bent over backwards to get him out of the way. It didn’t satisfy anybody then, and it certainly doesn’t now.

• Everybody becomes stupid – this follows along with the last couple of points, but the increasingly clumsy plotting had a habit of making once smart characters do really stupid things. A full list of examples would be very long, but some brief examples include…
  • established military genius Stannis being waylaid largely offscreen by Ramsay Bolton and a raiding party.
  • the previously all-knowing Littlefinger not knowing anything about Ramsay before setting him up with Sansa.
  • Varys committing repeated acts of treason to support Daenerys’ claim, all while purporting to serve the realm, and then Daenerys immediately showing that she’s not worth the support he pretty much blindly gave her.
  • several others, but let’s just focus on Tyrion, the show’s clear breakout character, who drinks wine and knows things. After an arduous journey to Meereen, he earns Daenerys’ trust and then proceeds to make mistake after mistake after mistake, both in Essos and in Westeros, yet she still makes him her Hand and he still gets to basically choose who the next king will be at the end. Peter Dinklage is great, and Tyrion Lannister once was great, but season 6-8 Tyrion is one of the dumbest characters on the show. He biffs things terribly in Meereen while Dany is gone, and she has to bail him out with her dragons. Then he gets strategically crushed by Cersei, Jaime, and Euron right away in the war for the throne, costing his queen the Dornish and loyal Greyjoy fleets and the Tyrell army all in the span of a few days. Then he has the genius idea to put all the civilians in Winterfell into the underground crypts to protect them from an army that can raise the dead.
  • Don’t get me wrong – mistakes were made by characters in the early years. Robert drinks and parties away the kingdom’s money. Ned accepts Robert’s offer to be Hand and later trusts Littlefinger. Cat impulsively takes Tyrion prisoner and then later lets Jaime go. Cersei can’t recognize Joffrey for the monster he is, then later gets hoisted by her own Sparrow petard. Everything Robb does in season three. (And there are several others.) But all these mistakes were rooted in established character traits – Ned’s overdeveloped sense of honor, Cat and Cersei’s overriding desire to protect their children, Robb being too much like his father and possessing the Starks’ general inability to navigate the political machinations of the south. For later seasons, I don’t really include errors made by characters like Jon and Daenerys, since their mistakes mostly fit with their inexperience and character flaws (Jon is too much like Ned and Robb, Dany is obsessively single-minded). But you notice when blunders stop being based on character traits and start being based solely on what the writers need to move the plot forward.

Now, see, the list is getting long and unwieldy. There’s so much more to gripe about (Dorne was introduced and looked promising, but was hurriedly written out after the Sand Snakes in particular flopped in season five; the super-climactic Battle of Winterfell was dimly lit and featured a raft of weird narrative choices; the long-hyped Clegane Bowl finally happened, but in a setting where it offered no real narrative impact whatsoever). I’m not even going to get to controversial-at-best character resolutions like Jaime’s final return to Cersei (I didn’t like it, but I don’t think it’s out of character), Daenerys’ heel turn (that’s pretty much who she was all along, especially after she reached Meereen in season four), or Arya taking out the Night King (we saw her acquire those skills in previous years, the weird part is how she resolved a major storyline she’d had almost no connection with until that episode).

But when you step back and look at the totality of what went on, it truly is staggering how much the series submarined its own pop culture momentum. I mentioned The Matrix earlier as a possible point of comparison, and perhaps Lost is another (though Lost pariah Damon Lindelof has very successfully grown beyond his association with that series’ awful ending). But in a world where a protracted internet tantrum can lead to the release of a four-hour, $70 million-more-costing version of a movie that had already lost money in its original release and you can find numerous articles and videos trying to sell you on the idea that the Star Wars prequels are actually good (they aren’t), I’m not seeing much momentum for more Thrones. Its watch has ended, and we shall never see its like again. And it’s its own stupid, corner-cutting fault. (But I’m sure the last two books are gonna be 🔥.)