Like many people I was dissatisfied with the finale of Game of Thrones and – like most – I levelled the blame utterly at the feet of David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. I also decided that I would nerdily do a “fix-it” like all the cool kids are doing. As an introduction to the quick fix and well as an “idealised” version, I decided to go over some of the major problems that came up during my watch through of season 8 as well as the numerous tweets and memes that helped get me through the Long Night.
When fans look back over the last eight years of Game of Thrones television, what will they think? Unlike those of us who lived to see the show release week-by-week, the fans of tomorrow will be able to binge and see the story as a whole. The question is – will they want to? Game of Thrones has the reputation to have been the “greatest show of all times” and the fact that it was a medieval-style fantasy show is nothing short of a miracle in my books.
Yet, many of the “book-fans” have been noticing chinks in the armour of the money-making machine headed by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (i.e. Dan and Dave, D&D) for a while now – some say it started with Season 7, others with Season 5 — and some even argue that the cracks were showing as early as Season 2 (though George R. R. Martin’s participation and writing was able to keep people’s minds off the flaws). Season 8, however, was the season when the so-called “casuals” even started to query what was happening, largely because the damned-thing was rushing at breakneck speed.
Incidentally, I’m going to cover the whole Bran storyline in another dedicated post as it ties back into my theories on where his book plot is going. The notion that Bran is following the archetypal hero’s journey is no coincidence and its parallels to Jon’s. For now, however, let’s have a proper look at the final showing of Game of Thrones, whether it was any good and what could have been done to improve the final lot.
Problem #1: It’s rushed i.e. the shrinking of the world.
Let’s get the most obvious issue with Game of Thrones Season 8 (and 7 for that matter) out of the way now; it was rushed.
Horribly, so.
First, there is the horrendous “fast travel” system that has been creeping its way into the show. Littlefinger’s jetpack has been a running joke since seasons 5 and 6. While it is true that people could travel quickly from one point to another at times, (such as Cat leaving the Eyrie and finding Robb’s encampment in ‘The Pointy End’ Season 1, Episode 8), there was always a sense of the passage of time. Moreover, it is far easier to believe that a pair of riders, travelling downhill from the Eyrie towards Robb’s position around the Neck and poised to cross into the the Riverlands, can achieve this feat within a week or even a few days not least because the Vale of Arryn shares a border with both Riverlands and Neck. (Note that it is also intercut with Tyrion and Bronn’s own journey through the Vale, showing through day-night cycles that it takes them several days at least to reach Tywin’s camp.)
It is certainly a far cry from Littlefinger shooting from King’s Landing, to the Vale, to the North, to the Vale, to the Wall and so on within seemingly no time whatsoever. So, the steadily shrinking of the landmass known as Westeros has been going on for some time now, long before the major issues with S7-8 occurred.
Once we reached this point, it suddenly became apparent that Daenerys’s khaleesar could teleport from Dragonstone to the south-west of the Reach to catch Jaime Lannister’s army and the loot train from the sacking of Highgarden; that Jaime could then get back to King’s Landing within the space of a few scenes; that Tyrion Lannister and Davos Seaworth could sail between Dragonstone and King’s Landing in a jump cut; that Jon Snow could sail from Dragonstone to Eastwatch within the space of one episode (a journey that would in reality take weeks); and that a raven can fly from Eastwatch to Dragonstone and then a trio of dragons can fly back to Eastwatch and beyond all in the space of 24-48 hours.
FedEx/Amazon Prime raven, indeed.
Problem #2: It’s (still) rushed, i.e. the shrinking of the cast
This part ties into the rushed nature of Game of Thrones, so consider this part 2 — though ranked as a problem in its own right.
This new fangled ability of the characters to rush back-and-forth, to-and-fro, and hither-and-thither was indicative of the speeding up of the story. As the world shrunk, so did the cast of active characters in the distant locations. I respect that the nature of the story meant that eventually storylines would dovetail and converge – or at least I thought it would considering I thought the endgame would be, y’know, clubbing together to push back the White Walkers – the fact that D&D dropped so many characters from the books meant that they were obligated to “double-up” storylines. The most infamous of these was Sansa being shoehorned into the Jeyne Poole plot. A lesser known example is the chopping up of the Young Griff plot between three different characters: Daenerys got the support of Varys and the Dornish (the latter of whom will likely spur her forever once they learn Rhaegal burned one of their princes), Cersei got the Golden Company (and Tarly support man fans speculate will go to Young Griff in the books), and Jon got the heavily-implied backlash Young Griff will receive from Dany when she finds out her supposed nephew with a better claim to the Iron Throne beat her to Seven Kingdoms.
On the one hand, bringing these plots together on a tight storyline is practical when adapting a very expansive book into a television show; the problem lies in the fact that suddenly character motivations become illogical as they are crammed into an arc that is ill-suited to them. The notion that the Cersei Lannister of season 1 who, at the end of season 6 blew up the equivalent of the Vatican or Westminster Abbey in our world, could possibly take the crown and hold the capital is almost as illogical as Prince Doran Nymeros Martell being assassinated and succeeded by his dead younger brother’s mistress.
What appears to be clear now is that D&D did not especially care how they reached their predetermined endpoint, only that they reached it by the end of 13-episodes from 6×10. Equally, they also seem to have been heavily influenced by the desire to keep certain actors in the roles as long as possible. Presumably because they “test well”. Indeed, Lena Headey is a remarkably talented actress and her portrayal of Cersei was excellent, especially when she conformed to George’s vision of her.
But, pray tell, can anyone tell me what point there was to Cersei even being included in season 8? What did Cersei actually do? She served as the penultimate boss of the series, drank wine and stared out of window. The reality is that we could probably write down every line Lena spoke and every stage direction she completed (ignoring the fact that D&D like the write stage directions in run-on sentences) throughout S8 on the back of a napkin and still have space to add more.
Looking over how unnecessary Cersei was in the grander scheme of things, how the destruction of King’s Landing became such a rushed mess with no time to build up Daenerys’s dilemma with taking the city and ending the war quickly, and then the fallout of when she does it could not be felt over the space of three-bloody-episodes, the only conclusion I can come to was that D&D were stuck on this notion: Lena Headey looking out a window horrified as Mad Queen Daenerys burns down King’s Landing.
The only conclusion I can draw is that Cersei should have been defeated and killed at the end of season 7, with Daenerys taking King’s Landing through sacking it with the foreign army Tyrion was desperate to avoid – and dragonfire. I was waiting for people to do this.
As for “Daenerysgate” itself and whether what she did was “in-character” or not is a reasonable debate. I would argue that her ultimately burning King’s Landing – or being responsible for its destruction – is likely to happen in the books, and might be the last big reveal that GRRM gave D&D.
The backlash was born out of the fact that Daenerys’s heel turn back out of left field. Without the proper groundwork, and by having her essentially fall into despair in the space of two episodes was too jarring for any attentive watcher to accept easily. Even D&D seemed to realise this as they plonk their justification for it none-too-subtly into Tyrion’s mouth in the final episode as he, for some reason, has to explain to Jon why Dany is the new evil and why she needs to be removed.
I might have posted this somewhere before but they really missed a trick by not having Tyrion point out that Daenerys killed more people in a single day than even the supposed greatest evil they ever faced – the Night King. 1 million burned versus roughly 100,000 undead men.
The next few sections are essentially hangovers from the rushed and Frankenstein-eque nature of D&D’s handling of Game of Thrones at least since the end of S6, though in reality much earlier, from how rushed it was to how poorly they used the little time they had set themselves.
Problem #3: Wasting time.
It seems odd that is a show where the story was so horribly rushed in many places that Dan and Dave would still find time to grind the action to a halt in order to have Tyrion deliver cock-jokes or Bronn be randomly given yet another dead-end plot. Why even bother to include Cersei’s attempt to assassinate Jaime and Tyrion if the former just goes back to her anyway and she doesn’t even try to kill the latter when he is standing right in front of her. Twice.
Instead of giving us meaningful dialogue between characters, plot development, backstory of the white walkers, or an attempt to conceive of a better battleplan than what happened in ‘The Long Night’ — the story grinds to a complete halt to waste time with Cersei in King’s Landing or give Bronn a plan that goes nowhere.
Problem #4: Leaps in Logic, i.e. “kinda forgetting”
“Dany kinda forgot about the Iron Fleet” goes down in infamy as the purest example of stupid, lazy writing and leaps in logic this season. It is the meme that shall stand the test of time. How could Dany have forgotten about the Iron Fleet when it was mentioned during the war council meeting and she has suffered significant losses to it already?
Jaime is a casualty of this, too. His budding relationship with Brienne is over and done with in the space of a few scenes. All aboard the good ship Jaime-Brienne– only for it to sink seconds before pulling out of the habour.
Later that night…
I don’t even ship Braime or whatever it’s called but it gave me whiplash how rushed it was. (Incidentally, the above Twitter feed still has be laughing-until-I’m-crying even weeks after first setting eyes upon it. It’s funny because of how ridiculous it was.) What isn’t funny, however, is how the result is how the term “wasting time” takes on an entirely different form when it comes to the destruction of a character’s story arc.
Jaime Lannister’s entire plot up until the moment he goes crawling back to Cersei ultimately became an 8-season-long waste of time. Everything that had led up to the point where Jaime joined the battle for the living and cemented his relationship with Brienne, breaking his own metaphorical wheel, it was all undone within the space of an hour and thirty minutes.
Allow me to leave this here:
I urged him to surrender peacefully. But the king didn’t listen to me. He didn’t listen to Varys who tried to warn him. But he did listen to Grand Maester Pycelle, that grey, sunken cunt. “You can trust the Lannisters,” he said. “The Lannisters have always been true friends of the crown.” So we opened the gates and my father sacked the city. Once again, I came to the king, begging him to surrender. He told me to… bring him my father’s head. Then he… turned to his pyromancer. “Burn them all,” he said. “Burn them in their homes. Burn them in their beds.” Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women, and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then? Jaime, Game of Thrones – 3×05 ‘Kissed By Fire’.
Honestly, this isn’t just a case of Jaime regressing back to Season 1 — he has been reduced to a character he never was. All in the space of no time at all. There really needed to be stakes to Jaime’s redemption and Cersei’s death. If they wanted him to regress, it should have taken longer.
Don’t get me started on Jon Snow, either. His only lines this season were: “She’s our queen”, “I love you” and “Muh queen”.
Problem #5: The One-Night Stand Arc
No, we’re not still talking about Brienne and Jaime.
I took this harder than Dany burning King’s Landing, honestly.
The first three episodes, or at least the second and third episodes, are dedicated to the war against the white walkers. The first episode was a reasonably decent episode; the second one with undoubtedly the best in the season. However, the moment the Night King was killed in 8×03 it solidified my belief that D&D had completely dropped the ball and missed the point of the white walkers.
Arguably, it was the easy dispatch of the Night King that officially broke the fandom. The White Walkers, known more commonly as the ‘Others’ in the book series, were set up as the main existential crisis of the series – always looming in the background while the humans play their petty ‘game of thrones’ and distract themselves with war mongering. So, to see the leader of this looming doom destroyed within one episode by a character who categorically had no stakes in the war for the dawn nor deserved such a high profile kill felt like an insult to many fans.
Arya is perhaps one of the worst choices. There are so many more characters who would have made more sense to kill the Night King if D&D really, really didn’t want it to be Jon. It’s not enough to subvert expectations, to pick someone the audience “isn’t thinking about” in that moment; it had to make narrative sense. It had to be someone who had a tie to the white walker arc.
Heck, even Bran pulling the dagger out of his sleeve and stabbing him his sense would have subverted expectations and made more narrative sense.
But the slaughter – yes, slaughter– of the Night King (and his story) after he had barely made a splash on the map felt like an insult. The lack of logic behind how he was defeated was the icing on the cake. It is not that I can’t understand the appeal of the final ‘Great Evil’ being a human character (and one of the purported “heroes” of the story), but the idea that the Night King was that easy to dispatch makes it completely unbelievable that he wouldn’t have been killed thousands of years ago.
Ultimately it is hard not to see the dispatch of the White Walkers in the manner it happened as proof of how limited D&D minds have become. They didn’t know how to propel the story forward, so they swept it under the rug. Yes, swept climate change personified under the rug. By sticking it with a pointy end.
Much like how I feel season 7 should have ended with Cersei dying, I feel season 8 should have ended with the struggle to get the humans to band together against the threat of the white walkers, the (eventual) push back and the re-build effort at the end.
Conclusion
The above problems listed are just a highlight of the major concerns that I can think of right now. I could probably keep listing every single little details that ticked me off – but I assure you plenty of people have likely already said it all.
I decided to tell this journey in memes and tweets is because that is what many of us were reduced to in order to make the disappointment with the end of Game of Thrones and how lacklustre it was.
Being a nerd and reimagining things
Yes, yes, I know!
It is cheesy for any fan to declare they could have done better from the comfort of their armchairs, fingers poised over their keyboards. However, I look around and see other fans doing it – and trying their best to take into consideration any limitations that have already been laid down.
That’s why I decided I’d do a mini-fix it for Seasons 7 and 8, which I think should be treated more as a single season rather than two separate ones, and well as an idealised reimagining of what might have happened. Since I know George R. R. Martin hates fanfiction, I’m not going to write it as such per se but instead just do an overview of how scenes could have been set up instead, framing it exclusively through the lense of GoT rather than ASoIaF. Though of course I’d do my best to take nods from it.
Heck, look at my Sansa reimaging notes:
It goes onto a third page, too. Then goes into the Jon Snow notes.
I have already completed Season 1 and still found myself crying during 1×10 ‘Fire and Blood’ when the Starks grieved over the death of Ned or Daenerys grieved over the loss of Khal Drogo. I still find myself immersed in the political talk and the strategy. Heck, Robb and Tywin spend half their lives staring at maps! I miss that greatly. It reminded me of exactly the sorts of things our characters *should* have been doing in the last few seasons but was heavily dumbed down and lacking in military sense.
The quick fix will just be a plaster over an already wounded Game of Thrones; the reimagining will be trying to get to a similar end point as D&D while pulling in the bulk of book material they dropped. Including two alternate paths for Jaime depending on whether we try to work in their stupid Dornish plot or not.
See you on the flip-side!
Scarlettpeony Writes 