but muh dragons!
It's been a few weeks now since the finale, and the general fan consensus is that the final season was a huge let down.
This wasn't like with other shows with bad endings. The ending made some sort of sense... well. I should probably stop to announce a spoiler warning.
SPOILERS.
Yeah, so Dany goes mad queen, kills everyone in King's Landing. After which, Jon kills her and they pick Bran to be the "king" for some reason. Also, Drogon melts down the Iron Throne without anyone having a chance to sit on it.
This string of events was foretold in earlier episodes, and so makes sense from that perspective. You can imagine that Dan and Dave (D&D, the showrunners) thought they were quite clever in checking off these boxes. And, if you take it as such, and try to elevate yourself to the clouds, looking down at it all, it does make some sense. It is a somewhat satisfying and sensible ending to the narrative.
Somewhat.
That's the problem. Clearly, they could have taken more time with this. Done a full 10 episode final season, or even another entire season. But they didn't, and so I blame D&D, and their eagerness to move on, to get to Star Wars.
But they don't get all the blame.
What, me worry?
Yeah, GRRM has a great deal of fault here as well. Think about it... the first 4 or 5 seasons of GoT were spectacular. They were very true to the novels, and were enriched as a result. GRRM is a very capable writer afterall, and D&D were able to lean heavily on that as they went about adapting the novels to television.
This worked well up until the point that GRRM didn't come through with his side of the bargain. This is, of course, that he actually finished the books in pace with the television series. Oh, he complains of his own twisted web that he wrought, but the fact remains that he failed to deliver anything better than a series of bullet points to D&D.
Who can blame them for trying to tie this decade long project up so that they could move on to the wonders of Star Wars, and of Disney?
Feel the weirwood, Bran
So yeah, in summary, GRRM dropped the ball and D&D/the GoT writers used their less capable talents to write-up and finish-up the series. Undoubtedly many of the cast and crew were ready to move on to other projects (once again, a TV series 10 years in the making), and so they did it as quickly and correctly as they could.
And that's the best we got. For GoT. Best be forgot.
It'll be remade eventually anyhow, maybe once the books are actually finished.
In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to the Wheel of Time adaptation :D
