Yes, the Show That Shall Not Be Named. Season 8 of Game of Thrones did something that seemed impossible in 2014: it scrubbed one of the greatest pieces of television fiction out of pop culture. Now, the only remnants of the show are autopsy pieces like this one, and angry flare-ups when you’re walking down the street and remember all the world-building and character development that was thrown away.
Season 8 was widely panned by the fans of the show, but yet broke the record of the most nominations received by a regular TV show in a single year, with 32 nominations. It received 14 Emmy nominations, including outstanding directing for the episode nobody could see (The Long Night), and outstanding writing, if you can believe it, for the series finale. So, the question naturally is, how bad was the final season?
I’m gonna start with the petty shit and work my way up. So, first off, we have the lack of care from the set designers shown in the final season. Not once, but twice, there were clearly visible Styrofoam cups with the Starbucks logo in shot, during scenes set in Winterfell. Now, I know that a time period was never specified, but I find it hard to believe that a society that doesn’t have running water, somehow has a local Starbucks.
Following from this is the lack of care shown by the directors of the aforementioned episodes. How are you standing behind a camera and not notice something like that? This season had a budget of $90 million; that’s more than some feature films. And you expect me to believe that nobody involved in production saw that and thought “Hey, that shouldn’t be there.” Honestly, I’m not sure which is worse, that they saw it and chose to ignore it, or that they didn’t see it. It just shows a complete disregard for the finished product, like they didn’t care, this was the final season anyway, the plebs will watch whatever we put out.
Moving on to some of the more serious stuff, we come to the Emmy nominated third episode, The Long Night, aka The Battle of Winterfell. This was it. The conflict 8 years in the making. The physical embodiment of the Stark Words, “Winter Is Coming”, and now winter was here. And we couldn’t see a goddamn thing. I had the brightness on my laptop turned all the way up and I was in the darkest room I could find, and still I could barely make out the characters. If a fire wasn’t burning right next to them, you couldn’t see them, and even then it was faint. D&D have “defended” the low-no visibility of that episode by saying that if we couldn’t see it, it was our fault. And honestly, after hurting my eyes squinting, I wish I hadn’t seen it.
Anyone will tell you that the writing in the show got worse after the 4th season. It wasn’t so bad that it was immediately noticeable, that is until we get to season 7. By season 7 you could tell that D&D had no idea what they were doing. The story holes and logical inconsistencies became glaring. Along with the dilution of practically all the characters; Tyrion, once the smartest man in all the Seven Kingdoms, seemed like a floundering fish. Olenna Tyrell conveniently forgets the military might that House Tyrell offered to the Crown in what amounted to nothing but a “gotcha” moment. All these things happened but Season 7 was still survivable. Then the next season happened. Any and all logic, common sense, or tact was completely abandoned. And there is a laundry list of examples: we can start with Daenerys “forgetting about Euron’s fleet” (direct quote from Benioff), to the Iron Fleet going from being able to snipe a full grown and alert dragon in one episode to turning to full-blown Stormtroopers the next, to Lord Varys (one of the most brilliant characters in that entire world) writing down his master plan for Dany to read and burn him for, to the complete devolution of Dany’s entire character (I have not come to be Queen of the Ashes quickly becomes “Burn all of King’s Landing), to whatever daft and asinine logic led Tyrion to claim that the best person to be King was the boy who had done nothing all series, a boy who told him that he doesn’t want things anymore. Finally we have the crimes committed to my boys Jon Snow, and Jamie Lannister.
Jon Snow was a bastard who fought and struggled to become the King In The North, mainly by accident. Here is a man who would never stand to see injustice perpetrated. A man who risked his own life for wildlings. A man who was brought back from the dead, and who we were told was the true King of Westeros. And for what? For him to play the part of the highest-paid extra in TV history. His face as he watches Dany burn down King’s Landing is emblematic of his character throughout that season: fricking useless. Then we have Ser Jamie Lannister. Former Knight of the Kingsguard, former prisoner of Robb Stark, and de facto “protector” of Brienne of Tarth. A man who left the sister he loved because he didn’t feel like he knew her again. A man whose redemption arc was among the best ever seen on screen, comparable to Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender. And what happens? One night, he decides “fuck it, I wanna die with my sister.” What?! Words cannot describe the anger I felt at that scene, and that whole entire sequence.
In all instances, D&D showed that they gave no fucks about the years of story that had come before, story and setup that led to these moments. They just tossed them out of the window for a quick end to the series. After all, that sweet, sweet Star Wars money is coming. It feels like a beautiful piece of karma that their shitty job on GOT, which was caused in part by the impending Star Wars gig, cost them the Star Wars gig. Maybe there is justice, after all.
In all this, only one person escaped with their reputation intact: Ramin Djawadi. Like John Williams during the Prequels, Ramin was composing masterpieces over a dead carcass. His score was the only thing that made that final season almost bearable.
Season 8 of Game of Thrones was so bad that in a year halted by a pandemic and global shutdowns, people with noting better to do could not find it in themselves to rewatch that show. I have never seen a show murder itself quite as spectacularly as Game of Thrones did.
