Game of thrones thread go! [ S8 ]

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pneuma wrote:

The show is definitely getting more awful at an increasing rate like a hockeystick graph. Thank god it's only got one more episode.

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Here's a good question for y'all: When did it jump the shark? What was "the moment" when the show hit the inflection point?

For a while I thought that the moment Jon was brought back, the show lost its point. Resurrection just screws up way too much of the setting, but that was at the start of E6 and there were certainly signs before then.

"Bad poosey" and the whole Dorne-plot-mangling in S5 was certainly bad, and that was even earlier.

Yara's hilarious "Theon rescue attempt" in S4E6 was surreal at the time. Maybe that was the moment, because I can't think of anything truly inexcusably bad before then. Most of Dany's plotline (starting from S1) was somewhere between bad and "meh", but nothing that completely took me out of immersion and made me think I watched the wrong show like that did.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Late last night, I had a super cynical thought: this would be a *great* way to sell even more copies of Martin's 'true ending' -- give people a shitty one in another format first. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen it done, but then I realised D and D just aren't that smart and Martin probably doesn't care.

To answer previous question: the red wedding was the show's peak. I don't remember much past that, and I remember most leading up to it. But I don't think it ever jumped the shark, if 'jump the shark' means when a show does something outrageously out of character to retain or gain viewers. I think it was always going to go this way -- see aforementioned comparisons to HBO's other big budget attempt at spec fic, True Blood. They just don't know how to stick it out or, maybe more importantly, develop and evolve it. Started as sex, swords and political skullduggery, and it'll end that way. What didn't change was the lack of meat under all the boning.

I would be very surprised to learn if any truly successful 'finished' TV show didn't have a sense of its ending from the start. Sure, writers need to get creative on the fly (especially when they're told they're being cancelled before they're done), but you really shouldn't be at the 'airing' stage if you don't have some vision of how it'll all end.

D and D claim they could have had more episodes but wanted to wrap it up in 6. I can't tell if that was them trying to convince everyone it could be done that economically after seasons of very little narrative economy (and yet with some seriously rushed game pieces being moved around), or if they were just sick of it all and just want it out of the way. Given how many flubs and weird decisions they've made with s8, I'm inclined to think the latter. The fatigue seems to have set in at every functional level of the show's production.

Anyway, I'm genuinely sad it went this way. Mainstream big budget fantasy doesn't happen more than once or twice in a person's lifetime, and you really want it to succeed. I find it grimly ironic that when GoT was announced, when that first season broke all sorts of records, we had a SLEW of copycat shows. None of them could even begin to compete and they all died not long after popping up...but in the end, not even GoT could live up to its own standards.

I look forward to reading the synopsis for Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring on wikipedia someday.

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鬼殺し wrote:

I think Sopranos ended *magnificently*. I benefited from the usual 'wait and see', especially after all the hubbub about that last scene, but hindsight and analysis caught up and revealed just how perfectly crafted it was. That show is supremely marathonable.