Peter Dinklage
Tyrion Lannister
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Episode Guide
- 1. Winter Is Coming Apr 17, 2011
- Ned Stark learns that his mentor has died; Viserys Targaryen plots to win back the throne.
- 2. The Kingsroad Apr 24, 2011
- Bran's fate remains in doubt; Ned leaves Westeros with his daughters; Jon Snow heads north.
- 3. Lord Snow May 1, 2011
- Ned learns of the Crown's profligacy; Jon Snow impresses Tyrion; Catelyn follows her husband.
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Game of Thrones' final season shortchanges the women of Westeros, sacrificing satisfying character arcs for spectacular set-pieces in its mad dash to the finish line. Read Critics...
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- 5. The Bells
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- The Iron Throne
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- 2. a Knight of The Seven Kingdoms
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- Verdict
- Game of Thrones Sn 8 Review
- More Reviews by Laura Prudom
By Laura Prudom
Updated: May 23, 2019 8:39 pm
Posted: May 23, 2019 7:30 pm
And now our watch has ended. Whether you loved Game of Thrones Season 8, hated it, or, like me, felt ambivalent about the whole thing, it’s hard to deny that it was one hell of a ride.
Compared to the narrative feasts of Seasons 1-4, which were stuffed full of meaty character interplay, political maneuvering, and a sprawling canvas of fascinating cities and cultures, the shortened Season 8 feels a lot like candy - in the immediate sugar high, it’s frequently entertaining, often hilarious, and certainly dazzling to look at (which is probably why I scored some episodes too highly in hindsight -- looking at you, "The Long Night") but when that rush wears off, you might be left feeling empty, or even a little sick.
I discussed my issues with Daenerys’s convenient heel turn at great length after “The Bells” and “The Iron Throne” (although if you want to beat a dead dragon, we unpack it from pretty much every conceivable angle in the final episode of Dragons on the Wall above, or download the audio version of the episode here), but when looking back at Season 8 as a whole, it becomes clear how deeply all of our “POV” characters suffered from being stripped of their point of view in these final six chapters.
As I touched upon in my episode 5 review, David Benioff and Dan Weiss have purposefully kept the audience at a distance from the characters for the past couple of seasons, placing more value on shocking us than building a coherent narrative structure. Part of that could be because, once they passed George R. R. Martin’s novels (which literally spelled out Jon, Daenerys, Cersei, Arya, Sansa, and Tyrion’s internal monologues in black and white), perhaps they didn’t have Martin’s insight into exactly what our heroes were thinking - just the endpoint the author wanted them to get to, without the full context behind it.
But even if they didn’t have Martin’s blueprint to follow, Benioff and Weiss have still been in these characters’ heads for the past 73 episodes, so it’s hard to buy that they simply forgot how to believably explain our protagonists’ motives and inner turmoil - even though it often felt that way when we were watching Jon fumble every opportunity to have an honest conversation with Dany or act strategically against the Night King, and seeing Tyrion make mistake after mistake in his schemes against Cersei, despite having been keenly aware of his sister’s vindictive and destructive streak all of his life. (These are the same writers who did such a thoughtful and poignant job of fleshing out relationships we didn’t get to explore much in the books, like Robert and Cersei’s, or Tywin and Arya’s, but they're also the ones who completely mishandled Dorne and the Sand Snakes, some of the most interesting characters in the novels.)
The totality of Game of Thrones Season 8 isn’t a failure by any means; on a technical level, it’s one of the most impressively constructed TV seasons of all time, demonstrating the kind of visual artistry that you could previously only see in a multiplex. The machinery around it, from the global publicity and marketing blitz to the actual production on the show itself - which spanned multiple continents, created thousands of jobs, and necessitated the kind of security and secrecy previously only required for transporting royalty, was unprecedented and unparalleled, and in that way, it’s a towering achievement, one that the cast, creatives, and crew should be rightly proud of.
Whether they ultimately agreed with their characters’ fates or not (or got the material they deserved, which many of them didn’t), for the most part the entire cast delivered powerful, nuanced, engaging performances, reminding us of the humanity of these characters even when they were sidelined in favor of visual effects or shocking plot twists.
The totality of Game of Thrones Season 8 isn’t a failure by any means.
“
And with the increasing dominance of streaming services and the shift away from weekly, linear TV viewing, it’s becoming less and less likely that we’ll ever see a show that can truly dominate a cultural conversation the way Game of Thrones has on a sustained basis, basically encouraging the entire internet to discuss and dissect every episode in real-time. It has connected people in different countries, smashed viewership records for HBO, and won an astonishing number of awards, but ultimately, none of that would matter if we hadn’t fallen in love with these characters back in Season 1.
For me, the failure of the final season was that I didn’t feel much when we said goodbye to the people we’ve followed for the better part of a decade. I went from loathing Jaime Lannister in Season 1 to rooting for his redemption, and yet his demise alongside Cersei barely registered with me, because of how rushed his abandonment of Brienne felt and the fact that we hadn’t had any insight into Cersei’s mental state all season. While I was relieved that all of the remaining Starks made it out alive, everything felt far too clean, too easy (even for Jon) - mostly because everything was decided by committee, probably the least dramatic method of conveying information. (Give Jon a trial by combat against Grey Worm, you cowards!)
By cutting away from pivotal scenes that would’ve shed some light on how our characters were feeling about each new twist - like Arya and Sansa’s reaction to Jon’s identity - the show was theoretically trying to avoid repetition, without realizing that the most interesting part of a secret revealed isn’t the secret itself, but the impact it has on those who hear it. Instead of allowing the Starks to digest such a seismic reconfiguration of everything they were raised to believe in a later scene, we got Sansa stirring the pot with Tyrion, fully justifying Daenerys’s paranoia and feelings of alienation.
The writers aren’t paying attention to the emotional trajectory of their characters.
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Many characters reference pivotal conversations the audience never had the benefit of seeing, with the expectation that we would be able to connect the dots of character motivations without the show doing the heavy lifting of portraying them. Those continuity gaps are even more egregious than stray coffee cups and water bottles in shots, because it means the writers aren’t paying attention to the emotional trajectory of their characters, and they’re just hoping we’ll infer their meaning based on our existing attachment to these people, rather than actually earning those moments with careful plotting.
Daenerys’s trajectory was likely intended to be tragic, but she wasn’t even permitted a final word, barely even a realization of Jon’s ultimate betrayal - it was Cersei who was given the “romantic” ending, dying in the arms of a man who loved her in spite of her darkest impulses, who wasn’t willing to let the world burn, but still chose to leave it with her, rather than face the prospect of living in it without her. Both women were shortchanged by the truncated season and Benioff and Weiss’s inexplicable rush to the finish line, but Cersei at least had years of nuanced character development before Season 8 to make her an understandable villain, if not always a sympathetic one.
But that narrative shortcutting is indicative of a larger issue - that Benioff and Weiss didn’t seem all that interested in the actual mythology of this world, despite having leaned so heavily into it for multiple seasons, to the point where viewers can be forgiven for feeling underwhelmed by the Night King’s tidy defeat, the sidelining of the Stark family’s direwolves (and by extension, the power to warg), the mysteries surrounding Azor Ahai, and Arya’s forgotten face-stealing skills.
Battles and explosions are fine, but they only have stakes for the audience if we’re invested in the people on the ground and believe that they’re truly in peril. Yes, all fantasy storytelling requires some suspension of disbelief, but we have to buy into the rules of a fictional world in order to follow it. The series still needs to adhere to its own internal logic to avoid undermining its story - something that Game of Thrones frequently forgot in Seasons 7 and 8 between Jaime’s miraculous survival after seemingly drowning in “The Spoils of War,” to pretty much every POV character’s plot armor in “The Long Night.” Rather than asking if a character could believably survive certain situations or would behave in a specific way according to their previous experiences, at a certain point the writers seemingly just settled for asking whether it would look cool. (And sure, it frequently did.)
And although it previously seemed as though Bran had knowledge of the past and occasional insight into the present as the Three-Eyed Raven, in the finale, he basically admitted that he could see the future by telling Tyrion, “Why do you think I came all this way?” when asked if he wanted to be king. Leaving aside the fact that it’s just a smarmy, needlessly condescending response, it also opens up some disturbing implications about Bran, and, as my colleague Dan Stapleton points out, basically turns Westeros into a surveillance state.
It also seems to implicate Bran as the ultimate mastermind of this game who, whether through callous inaction or purposeful cruelty, allowed thousands to be slaughtered at Winterfell and King’s Landing just to pave the way for his eventual rule (which, as many fans have pointed out, could theoretically last for thousands of years, given the average lifespan of previous Three-Eyed Ravens). That’s not so much breaking the wheel as greasing it to better crush people for millennia to come.
It would’ve been a far stronger message if the series hadn’t chickened out on Sam’s suggestion of democracy in favor of an oligarchy, since there’s no guarantee that the next generation of lords and ladies doing the picking won’t be every bit as corruptible, mercenary, and self-serving as the likes of Joffrey or Euron. Despite the horrors of what she did in pursuit of power, Daenerys ultimately didn’t succeed in changing much of anything, and that’s heartbreaking.
By refusing to ever explain the extent of Bran’s abilities, Benioff and Weiss turned him into the ultimate deus ex machina. Nothing about his brief appearance at the newly formed Small Council meeting gives any indication that he would be a just or wise (or even particularly vocal) ruler - Tyrion is basically king in all but name - and it’s disturbing that his only interest is in tracking down Drogon, basically the Westeros equivalent of a nuke that Bran can maybe or maybe not warg himself into if it suits him.
And considering all the strife and paranoia it caused, and all the years of build up, Jon’s identity as Aegon Targaryen ultimately meant nothing. If the majority of the remaining Lords and Ladies of Westeros are aware of his lineage, they’re certainly not throwing their weight behind him now, and if Jon actually does hold true to his renewed Night’s Watch vows (although why should he, when it doesn’t seem like there are many brothers in black around to check on him?), he’ll die as the last Targaryen - forgotten, like Maester Aemon. There’s something fittingly poetic about that, in line with the destruction of the Iron Throne - blood certainly doesn’t qualify anyone to rule.
Like Westworld and Lost before it, we want to believe that Game of Thrones is as clever as it thinks it is, but for those of us who love to theorize about the stories we love, the collective cultural consciousness will inevitably come up with ideas far more creative and satisfying than one author or two showrunners, because we’re overanalyzing every conceivable angle rather than simply trying to tell a tale.
There was truly no way for Benioff and Weiss to win this game, and I sympathize with them. But they painted themselves into a corner just as much as Cersei did by rushing the most vital part of the story, and while we are responsible for our own high expectations, we also have every right to expect more from shows that never used to talk down to their audience or prioritize spectacle over substance. (Remember when the show used to cut away from its big battles and only show us the aftermath?)
So yes, Season 8 felt underwhelming. But the one thing Game of Thrones has going for it is that even at its worst, it’s generally more ambitious, engaging, and impressive than the majority of other TV shows, and I only hold it to a higher standard because I know it’s capable of greatness. Plenty of TV shows can have disappointing or downright disas...
Review scoring
okay
Though Season 8 was underwhelming, Game of Thrones remains more ambitious and engaging than the majority of other TV shows.
Laura Prudom
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May 20, 2019 · Game of Thrones season 8 review: "Game of Thrones deserved better" Reviews. By Zoe Delahunty-Light. published 20 May 2019. Comments. GamesRadar+ Verdict. Game of...
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Season 8. View All Seasons. Season Premiere: Apr 14, 2019. Metascore Generally Favorable Based on 13 Critic Reviews. 75. User Score Mixed or Average Based on 1,595 User Ratings. 4.1. My Score. Hover and click to give a rating. Add My Review. Where to Watch. Amazon ($2.99) All Watch Options. Season Episodes. View All Seasons.
May 20, 2019 · Game Of Thrones – Full Season 8 Review. 20 May 2019 by Greg Wheeler. Game of Thrones | Season 8 | Official Trailer (HBO) Watch on. Episode Guide. Winterfell – | Review Score – 3/5. A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms – | Review Score – 3.5/5. The Long Night – | Review Score – 4/5. The Last Of The Starks – | Review Score – 2.5/5.
