Thoughts on Game of Thrones Season 8 (With Spoilers of Course)

Well, it's finally over. Season 8 of Game of Thrones has come and gone. Tonight there is going to be some kind of wrap up special (which I'm not going to watch) so I figure I should write about MY final thoughts about this season. Of course it will contain spoilers for this one and maybe previous seasons as well.

Going in to the first episode of this last season I was pretty pumped. The showrunners had almost two years to write and refine everything to get it perfect. They had hyped it as 6 feature length movies so I was expecting them to go all out with the spectacle and special effects and choreography. And could you have had more of a cliffhanger the season before than the Night King destroying the Wall with an undead dragon blowing blue fire? The army of the dead started politely shuffling through the breach...in no hurry at all.

So 7 weeks ago I was at fever pitch, and also excited that Benioff and Weiss had been put in charge of a new Star Wars trilogy. My reaction was THANK GOD! Finally they put someone in charge that can handle an epic storyline rather than that weasel Rian Johnson!

As Episode 1 started I was ready for the 6 episodes to be filled with wall to wall action and great battles. So it started and...….characters talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they...… characters talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they...…  talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they...… characters talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they......

HUGGED. And reunited.....and nothing really happened.

So then I was like ok, they had to get all that out of the way in the first episode....but then I was like why couldn't you have done this in the LAST episode of season 7? You only have 6 episodes and NOTHING happened here.

So then I was primed for episode 2.....

So it started and...….characters talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they...… characters talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they...…  talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they...… characters talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked...and then they......

HUGGED. And reunited.....and nothing really happened. I was pretty disappointed. You wasted now TWO episodes out of 6 with NOTHING happening. 

So then I was like ok, the battle with the Night King is gonna happen. Surely, they're not going to build up this over 8 years and then it be over in one episode.....well, it was. What little you could make out through the choppy cutting and lighting that made it seem like they were filming the episode inside of Moby Dick's asshole. 

Lots of people have also commented how the strategies employed in fighting the White Walkers was a LITTLE flawed. And the naysayers reply to that that "its just a tv show!". That's fine. But the strategies were pretty dumb. Full on run into them? Just send the Dothraki at them and hope for the best? And they all die (except for half of them?)

THEN you put a fire wall around the castle within about 6 feet of the walls and that wall is about 6 feet wide? And then you don't even light it until the last minute? And all the undead have to do is just LAY across it?

Hell, I couldn't even tell which dragon was which in the air battle with the Night King. I couldn't tell which dragon was biting which, was one dead? Whatever...no idea. 

To digress, the whole season I am wondering WHY do the forces of "good" keep getting surprised by the Night King, Cersei, and the like when they have Big Little Brother Bran that can see everything? Can't he send out some raven scouts? Or warg into some other animal and scout a LITTLE ahead of the armies looking for ambushes etc? Cersei is NOT that smart! They lost TWO fleets to Mr. Horny Lambchops Euron. And let's not even think about Dany's SECOND dragon going down like a little bitch. 

And the whole all the main characters fighting to the last in Winterfell was REALLY inane. EVERYONE has been killed except those encased in plot armor. How much effort would it have taken the dead to overrun ALL of them? Probably a few seconds. And oh yeah, place people in the TOMBS for safety. Surely they're safe there from a creature that can raise the dead?

And yeah, the Night King was killed by a sleight of hand Penn and Teller magic trick. Oooo, I just dropped the dagger into my OTHER hand Night King! MIND BLOWN! DIE SNOKE! Just like that. 

By the end of Episode 4, Dany has lost everyone she truly trusted except for Jon Snow, but in her mind even he has mixed motives because he might want to take the throne for himself. I did love the homage to earlier seasons at the gate of King's Landing....well, I assume it was King's Landing...it just looked like a wall in the middle of a desert. I always loved in early GOT seasons when "armies" were comprised of like 5-6 soldiers. And that's in full deja vu when Dany shows up to talk to Cersei. There's this giant barren plain and she's got like maybe 20 Unsullied with her. I felt like they just forgot to CG in thousands of Dothraki and Unsullied. They did have her last dragon playing with himself in the background. 

And what happened to the music in this show? It seemed like starting with episode 3, it seemed to be all recycled from Westworld? Did they just say Fuck It with that as well? At some points it just devolved into cheesy piano synthesizer music you would hear on an elevator or at Dairy Queen.

Ok, so Episode 5 is going to open with her frying King's Landing after she was seen stomping off the set after the Mountain beheaded Missandei…..NOPE, more planning. 

Let's just cut to the chase. Dany going crazy. I wasn't shocked about it really. She's spent 3 seasons listening to advice from Jon, Varys, Jorah, Tyrion, etc and where had it gotten her? Her closest friends, most powerful allies, and two dragons killed. AND the loss of half her army. So at that point I think she was SICK of listening to the idiot mother fuckers. The WORST advisors and strategists in the history of print and motion picture fantasy. 

I did think at first she was only going to destroy the Red Keep. When she said "Let's do the whole village!", I was taken aback but not very surprised. She decided to go ALL IN. Anakin Skywalker style. Why FLIRT with the dark side? Might as well go over to it completely. Honestly, I don't think she went "mad". What she was showing was just her true self. Rulers aren't always nice people. There are other examples in Westeros where entire Houses were put to death and exterminated as examples. I guess the problem with Dany is that she wasn't just going to do this once and set an example. She would burn EVERY city on the continent if they wouldn't take the knee......

And I guess up to the 5th episode I had kinda been beaten down by the awfulness of the season and was no longer that invested in the characters any longer. I honestly thought I was going to be shedding some tears this year, but that's not how it worked out. Ironically, the 5th episode was the first one I LIKED. Ironic because I think I was already turned against it by the second but for a lot of viewers THIS was the break from it. Dany burning the city. 

To me, the only thing that SAVED this season even partially were the last two episodes. I enjoyed them. I mean, at least, they had clearly visible things HAPPENING in the daylight. Again, I didn't feel sad when the show ended. The first 4 episodes had soured me too much to care anymore. It was almost up to Last Jedi level but not quite. I do own 3 seasons of GOT and am wondering whether I'm going to donate them to my local public library because the show doesn't mean that much to me anymore and I will probably NEVER watch any season of it ever again. 

If I could have anything changed about Season 8, I wish the Night King had won the battle of Winterfell. I wish he had plunged the entire world into darkness and killed every character. That's how dissatisfied I am with this show now. 

Now I am very worried about these showrunners handling Star Wars. They are almost equal to Rian Johnson in terms of bad writing. THIS is what Hollywood has come to. Unimaginative writers who do not know how to write a beginning, a middle, and an end. They seem to be only good at one. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that they don't read any literature. Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Homer, and the like didn't do awful endings. Or someone like Tolkien. Hollywood screenwriting just seems to have a dummy problem. Look at Avengers Endgame. AWFUL movie. But put enough explosions and CG in it and its gonna make billions. 

I know there are lots of people that say shut up, if you didn't like the ending, just deal with, its just a tv show. That's fine. Everybody's always going on that people are never satisfied. Maybe they aren't satisfied because something SUCKS and they want to complain about it? You shouldn't be like Dark Phoenix and say its "disrespectful" if fans sign a petition to redo the last season. It's America, Brit, freedom of speech ya know? They aren't going to redo the season. Nobody that signed that petition believes that. They are just registering their opinion. 

Hollywood hypes up everything so much and then they complain when they can't fulfill expectations? 

Something else that is ironic is that before the season started I was like if the season is really good, I won't have any incentive to finish reading the last two volumes of the book series (IF they ever come out). Now I'm like THIS was so bad, I HOPE the books can make me FORGET how the show ended. I had to do the same thing after The Last Jedi. Started reading the New Jedi Order series to get the bad taste out of my mouth. 

My Season 8 Grade: D