May 20, 2019
I Could Hear the Bells From Miles Away (Game of Thrones series critique)
AKA The writing on Game of Thrones has been declining for a while now and that’s what lead to the mass disappointment of Season 8.
SPOILERS ahead for the entire book and TV series, including the finale that aired a few hours ago.
This isn’t meant as a critique of the last episode, which I thought was passable as series endings go since those rarely are great. Nor is it meant to portray me as a greenseer/Drowned god prophet screaming “I KNEW IT ALL ALONG” or a “THE SEPT OF BAELOR WAS AN INSIDE JOB” kind of guy.
It’s just me venting my frustrations over what could have been my favorite show of all times by looking at the ever-increasing nihilism of the plot, and taking a look at the development of two of my favorite characters.
It was seven years ago, while watching the second episode of season two of Game of Thrones when I felt like something was off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it felt like it was becoming a different show to season one. Some people online shared my sentiment, and were able to better put it to words than me. Each episode featured virtually all available characters, but only for a few moments, instead of letting characters disappear for an episode (or more) so they can better focus on the storytelling and the characters each episode was actually meant to focus on. We didn’t need to see Jack on a Kate episode. Come to think of it, we didn’t need to watch a Kate episode, period.
Moreover, little character moments that showed us what made them tick were omitted in favor of good ol’ Tits n’ Dicks (TM), lordly kisses, Rose scenes and Hollywood one-liners. These weren’t enough to make the show bad, of course. This is why when I tried to voice my concerns to my friends, especially during the early seasons when the hype was astronomical, I was met with colorful comments as “You’re such a nitpicker, George” and “That’s why you’ll never be happy, George!”
Because despite these flaws, GoT was still a good show. A really damn good show. And the fan bandwagon was only getting started, so there was no standing up to it. But its soul was rapidly eroding in front of us. As an example, in the books, the Mountain is poisoned by Oberyn in their fight, and he’s heard screaming accross the Red Keep for days after he won that duel. It’s a modicum of catharsis after the gruelling murder of Oberyn; it’s not much but you get to see that even the bad guys suffer in this world. In the TV show, he just dies peacefully. It’s all rather nihilistic, and ASOIAF was never about nihilism. In all its bleakness, little moments of hope always existed in the pages of the books, and the bad guys were just as fallible, and likely to pay for that as the good guys.
But this was in the books, and not the TV show. The TV show slowly started embracing the nihilism, it slowly started worshipping its villains, and given that I knew that GRRM would never finish the books on time (c’mon, we all knew it), I knew that there would be at least a couple of seasons where the showrunners would have to improvise.
And what they had improvised while they were still working off the books wasn’t much.
This was a scary thought, and I was afraid they wouldn’t be able to stick the proverbial landing.
As I mentioned in my previous GoT-related post, I don’t claim to know exactly how a show like this is created. A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that Game of Thrones the TV show is based on, is characterized by a byzantine plot of betrayal and counter-betrayal, with a backstory rich enough to have 3 spin-off TV shows about. It could never be adapted as a TV show without losing a lot in the process. Thus plots get abandoned, characters get merged and Tom Bombadil keeps his stupid song to himself.
I know this, as I also knew that there was a limit to what you could lose before this became a different story altogether. But for a while there it seemed that the show was doing a great job with the story, and if you criticized the show, the only explanation was that you were a hater.
Nowadays, with season eight being so universally panned, people will nitpick everything, and there’s just no way that anything will stand up to such scrutiny. I’ve seen YouTube comments (a low bar, of course) where people claim that if you enjoy season eight you must have a low IQ. Utter idiocy, to be sure, but the bandwagon effect cuts both ways it seems, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it a bit.
I’m petty like that, and I love it.
The thing is, though, I always tried to be objective as a viewer of GoT. I tried to let go of my Ser Fanboy of the Books obsessions, and tried to enjoy it for what it was; a somewhat shallow some times, grandiose at all times, recreation of a unique and interesting story, one that always nailed the big moments.
Thus I kept going, since it felt like this was the only ending we’d get aside from GRRM publishing a Word document with his notes on the story’s ending, the same one he had given B&W in case the show surpassed the books.
Truth be told, however, it has been years since I gave up on being a fan of GoT. I kinda tried defending it, as late as episode two of season eight which I maintain was a very good episode. The writing kept getting worse, and most episodes in a season felt like a waste of time to me, with characters and their arcs becoming mere plot points to move the story forward. Still, every season had a crowning moment, one single episode that rivaled anything seen on TV. Ned’s beheading, the Battle of Blackwater Bay, the Red Wedding, the Battle at the Wall, Hardhome, NotTheDoorThatEpisodeSuckedAndI’llGladlyDieOnThisHill, the Battle of the Bastards purely on visuals, and the Light of the Seven which I thought was a masterpiece.
Yet all along the way you had Ser Twenty Goodmen who could destroy an entire armed camp manned by the best defender on the entire roster of Westeros, you had the best killers in the Iron “We Do Not Sow, Motherfuckers” Islands get scared by a pack of dogs and one rabid idiot, you had Ser Barristan “I went through the Golden Company while it still meant something, killed legends one-on-one as a teen and out-dueled the entire Seven Kingdoms” Selmy stumble into a street fight like a geriatric Power Ranger, getting himself shanked in the process like a fookin’ redshirt… And don’t even get me started on Sansa’s rape.
Hell, even going back to the second season’s finale you had Sam Tarly, who is as stealth-adverse a character as there’s ever been, run into the entire Others army, with one Other staring right at him, but then they all moved on, ignoring him. The official explanation? THEY DIDN’T SEE HIM.
I can get behind the idea that said scene was an homage to this scene in Lord of the Rings:
In this context, I find it plausible that the Others didn’t see Sam because poetic license is still a thing.
Yet it’s also about how you present something to the viewer. Ringwraights don’t see like we do, the Hobbits are small and hidden behind a large tree, and something distracts him at just the right moment. The Others are an entire army, Sam’s barely hidden behind a rock that will provide no cover as soon as any Others and Wights move next to him yet still they just move past him. Even if it still made sense at a stretch, it was lazy. It was one of the first signs that this show emphasized cheap spectacle over plot that made sense.
This was still enough to go on for fans of the show, however, and that’s what people did, caring more about the amazing spectacle and ooh-la-la dragons. That’s fine, too. I moved on along them, eager to see what happens at the end.
There was also always the notion that “they’d get it right, somehow”, before the ending came along. People had faith in B&W. All media, all fiction has flaws, and we’re all eager to overlook them. It’s only natural. But there is a Tipping Point, we can only endure so much bullshit before we reach a point where we say “WTF am I watching here?” For me, that point was somewhere in the fifth season. Most people endured far longer than that.
But then the last two seasons happened, and they were beyond. Beyond understanding, beyond defending, beyond redemption, probably. Season seven had one good episode, the one were Daenerys burns the entire Lannister caravan, but even that episode had that god-awful scene where Jaime falls into a lake in full plate, and we’re never shown what happens next, we just have to assume he survived. And “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” which I loved is rendered meaningless after the episodes that succeeded it, especially “The Long Night”.
And this was where the viewers lost it. With so few episodes left in the show, people started realizing that there was not enough time to fix the obvious flaws. The point was tipped, we had reached the other side of the bell curve, people had started hating what they once loved, created memes ridiculing the show’s shortcomings and creators, and someone even made a petition to change the ending -which was allegedly more about voicing their discontent rather than actually expecting B&W to change the ending itself.
Fook me, while writing this I realized that the viewers’ descent into madness was better foreshadowed than Dany’s one. How’s that for ironic?
Growing up, as a little kid in Elementary school, I always had one complaint about most of the stories I was reading or watching. The good guys were always valiant, they always had honor. But they were also weak, often made stupid decisions and they often fucked up obvious things. In direct contrast, the bad guys could do no wrong, they were super smart and super strong. Any conflict between the two should have been an easy win for the bad guys, but the good guys always won, going against all odds and common sense. It always felt cheap, as if the good guys had to use a cheat code to win.
I didn’t like that. I always thought “Why aren’t the good guys strong?”
This is why I love ASOIAF so much. All sides were strong and smart, and whenever somebody lost it was due to a character flaw, or a stupid decision in the moment; Ned by being too honor-bound, Robb by choosing love over duty, Joffrey by being a little shit.
That is why Oberyn Martell is my favorite character. Ostensibly a good guy who has been wronged by the world, he is stronger than the strong and more cunning than the wise. This is a guy that studied as a Maester so he could learn how to better use poisons and then quit because he got bored. The only reason he’s undone is because of his one character flaw; he never got over his sister’s murder, and in the moment that lead him into making a bad decision. This is what grounds Oberyn to reality, what makes him believable, and what makes him such a tragic (in both the classical sense and the sad one) character.
I also maintain that Inigo was the main influence behind Oberyn’s character, but that’s for another post.
In direct contrast to Oberyn you have Jaime, who was also one of my favorite characters. He is arrogant and prideful, but he is also honorable and kind, as we soon learn that he is the reason that King’s Landing was not burned to the ground.
Yet all that Jaime was really known for at the beginning of the story is his skill with a sword (kingslaying and sisterlaying aside), he was seen as one of the best fighters in the Seven Kingdoms but little else besides that.
This is why losing his sword hand was so important to him, this is what made his character arc so interesting. By losing that which people were projecting on him as his one and only quality, he was free to find out what really made him him.
When Jaime became Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, he saw the blank page of his achievements in front of him, and saw an opportunity. An invitation to do great things, things that would make him worthy of his title, worthy of being named alongside the legends of the past.
But at the end of his story after having done fuck all, as he decides to return to Cersei because “fuck reason, let’s have cool scenes!” and he finally reaches King’s Landing, with a suffocating crowd of people all around him, what does he do? How does he decide to literally and figuratively stand out from the crowd?
He raises his golden hand, and waves it around. The same golden hand that had taken the place of his sword hand, because he was too proud, too much of his father’s son to have anything else as a replacement. After eight years of character development, his only crowning achievement, the only thing he has to show for himself is the one thing he had to live without in order to become a real person.
This isn’t just nihilistic, it’s depressing. It’s not what the story of the books and the show is about. It’s also a direct result of the slow decay of the show’s writing. As such, it applies both to Jaime, and the show as a whole. When you omit character development for cool one-liners, and the only idea of how to get the plot moving is a bunch of bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation, then you’re left with no way to close character arcs in a satisfying manner.
That last point I think is the most important one for me here. The last couple of seasons felt like moving from plot point to plot point, like a travelling sequence in an Indiana Jones movie, hurriedly trying to finish up the story.
Thus the greatest irony in my character arc here is that while the reason I kept watching the show long after it jumped the shark was the idea that I wanted to see a fleshed out interpretation of the ending, instead of just plot points on an empty page…
What I and everyone else were treated with in the end was a blatantly lazy and cynical type of storytelling, a sort-of “Throw CGI at them and let God sort them out” approach, where not only was character development abandoned, the entire plot only became a series of traveling from bullet point to bullet point in a very “Careful what you ask for” twist to subvert all expectations.
Fook me, right?
I’d like to close off this post by saying that if movies can show a character’s slow descent into madness in an average of 90 to 120 minutes in a plausible and dramatic way, then six episodes are more than enough to do the same. I guess in the end, Daenerys too was poisoned by our enemies.
Just had to get that out of my chest. See you on the spin-offs.
