The pivotal moment that captured the public’s attention and transformed HBO’s Game of Thrones from “just another fantasy show for nerds” into the default topic of water cooler conversation for millions was the shock death of Ned Stark - who had hitherto been presented as the show’s lead protaganist - in the penultimate episode of season one, “Baelor”.
It further solidified its capricious and callous reputation with episodes like “The Rains of Castamere” - featuring the infamous Red Wedding (the scene which motivated the showrunners to adapt the books in the first place) - or the explosive “The Winds of Winter”. But while fans made endless jokes imagining George R.R. Martin cackling away gleefully at their suffering, this wasn’t mere sadism - there was a profound honesty and integrity there that most writers shy away from, in choosing to show the horrors of war without any sugar coating.
Good people die. Honourable people die. People you care about die. It doesn’t matter if everybody thinks you’re the appointed Chosen One, it doesn’t matter if you have the strongest bloodline and the best claim to power in the whole damned world, it doesn’t matter if you have a vendetta to repay or a prophesied destiny to fulfil - if you make stupid decisions, if you put yourself up against the odds, or if you’re just plain unlucky - you’ll likely end up just as dead as anyone else. The universe isn’t on anybody’s side.
The gritty socio-political realism of Game of Thrones and its willingness to take a very light touch when it came to its supernatural elements made those elements all the more.. well, super-natural for it, despite being the staple of countless other fantasy stories. Dragons, wights, white walkers, magic, nobody in this world had seen or heard hide nor hair of any of these things for centuries; they occupied the liminal zone between history and myth, existing primarily in some kind of dreamtime into which the show occasionally, thrillingly, dipped. Of course, it was always obvious that those elements would necessarily come to the fore as the story progressed towards its conclusion - it’s just a shame that the show-runners have so heavy-handedly thrown the realism against which those fantastical elements shone under the bus in the process.
The turn started in season seven, the show-runners having run out of book material to worth with - the pace quickening to breakneck speed, characters communicating or travelling over distances that would previously taken multiple episodes to cross in what seemed like mere hours, making increasingly irrational and out-of-character decisions all to get the chess pieces in place for the endgame, to hell with the rules.
Knowing that season eight only had six episodes left in which to wrap up the story, I’d resigned myself to enjoying spectacle even if it came at the expense of plotting. Episodes one and two pleasantly surprised me, with their focus on character and wrapping up arcs. With the Battle of Winterfell bearing down in episode three, I figured, well.. maybe they’re going to be bold after all.
And yet, at the climax of the show’s mythic arc, the show-runners seem to have lost their nerve completely, showing not a shadow of the boldness they once had, swaddling the show’s Beloved Heroes in plot armour so thick and obvious as to strain credulity, allowing them to put themselves in harm’s way again and again, making idiotic decision after idiotic decision (looking at you Jon Snow), only to be spared “Just In Time” by the sudden appearance of some other Beloved Hero from off-screen. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not in it for the death count, and this trope isn’t a mortal sin in and of itself. But it’s exactly the kind of trope that’s most effective when used sparingly, and should be particularly effective in a show like Game of Thrones which has set up an audience expectation that it just might actually drop the dangling sword of Damocles on your Beloved Hero’s head. But this episode at times feels like no more than an endless chain of these “Just in Time” moments - including repeated, dramatic, slow-motion scenes where they show several Beloved Heroes fighting to what seems at any moment could be their last breath against endless hordes of enemies, while literally everyone else on screen who is not a Beloved Hero lies dead.
No, really. By the time credits roll, as far as I can tell, pretty much every unnamed peasant in Winterfell has been slaughtered. With our noble, Beloved Heroes seemingly invincible, their victory feels hollow. Unearned. Cheapened. We didn’t spend seven seasons watching these characters grow and learn and struggle only to see them win by deus ex machina.
Sure - a smattering of named characters die, all relatively minor ones who’ve been flaunting their red shirts since at least the beginning of the season. But with expectations and anticipations riding so high, there are just so many ways in which Game of Thrones could have shocked us, surprised us, taken things in a direction we didn’t expect, elevated itself once more over its screen rivals. Instead, it played it oh-so-safe, and diminished itself. So much spectacle, so many amazing visual effects.. so little emotional payoff.
And to be very clear - this episode is spectacular. It’s probably among the most astonishingly well-directed and choreographed battle scenes I’ve ever seen, with some brilliant moments of dramatic tension scattered throughout. It was a rather stressful and unsettling viewing experience, and that’s exactly as it should be. I just wish it hadn’t also been so extremely frustrating from a plotting perspective.
Ultimately the show’s declining quality in its final seasons is not a reflection on the show-runners’ abilities - after all, they’ve brought GRRM’s work to life unlike almost any other screen adaptation, playing to the strengths of the medium while still showing incredible attention to detail around characters and world-building - the first season in particular manages to be an almost perfect facsimile of the book from which it’s drawn. It’s a reflection on the brilliance of GRRM’s imagination and the skill of his word-craft. Once the show-runners no longer had that inspiration to draw on, Game of Thrones became a victim of its own success - they could not live up to the expectations they’d set. It is still extremely watchable, it is still beautiful, it still has an astoundingly talented cast, it is still exciting, it is still the greatest high fantasy tale I’ve yet seen committed to screen. But it has lost that something special which once allowed it to transcend its genre; content instead to settle near its pinnacle.
