Arkandel Arkandel
Aug 15, 2017, 12:17 PM

Spoiler-free for Game of Thrones.

First of all I love the season - I watch (and in one case, re-watch) episodes immediately as they come out, so this isn't really a complaint per se... but I think a lot of the issues we're perceiving have to do with the limited number of episodes left.

The showrunners decided last season they'd only do 8+6 more. That's it. Maybe they were getting tired or they wanted to go out with a bang or the cast was restless but... either way that's what they set out to do, which put us on an accelerated pace at least compared to what we were used to, which was months of character development and slow build-ups before Big Things happened.

And now big things happen constantly - they have literally years worth of set ups they get to knock down now and in doing so some pretty damn talented people are giving us really great work. The CGI is amazing, we're seeing reunions (or even first time meetings) from characters who hadn't shared a set since season one if ever, and certain kinds of battles we had speculated for are just... getting done. That's amazing stuff. But in the process since they only have so much screen time they are skimming over other character relationships which we only get limited glimpses from.

The way I see it is these episodes are at least an hour, sometimes an hour and a half long. We're still getting a ton of bang for our buck here, that's several full feature movies' worth of stuff we're being served, and they're sparing no expenses. Sure, the relative 'rush' means some things are getting handwaved - people travel across the map in inexplicable ways, for example - but it's to serve the plot and to be entertaining.

I dare anyone to say Game of Thrones is not being entertaining this season.