No need to beat a dead horse - and here's where I'd make a joke about the Dothraki horsemen having an apparently unlimited number of lives this season if I were beating a dead horse - but the final season of Game of Thrones was underwhelming, to say the least.
Criticism is all over the Internet, and I agree with, broadly, most of it, but it doesn't really matter, because entering its eighth and final season Game of Thrones was way past the point of being affected one way or another by criticism. The concept of the "water cooler show" was supposed to die when Netflix and streaming services really took over the television market, yet here we all are in 2019, able to talk about this one show with family members and friends and coworkers alike. A show with such mass appeal, and with late stage ambitions of being more or less a series of summer blockbuster movies - how do you even criticize that? Everyone's watching this thing, all of them for different reasons, and they all want different outcomes. You can be a white feminist shaking with rage over Daenerys's heel turn, you can be a Jon Snow homer who's pissed about his final status, you can ship Jaime and Brienne and be devastated by the way their relationship ended up, you can be one of those people who just wanted this show to be a medieval The Wire (guilty!) and lament that actions stopped having consequences on this show long ago. You can attack this show form any angle at all for any reason at all! That's the pop culture limelight, baby!
But as so often is the case when a show gets pretty bad pretty late in its run, I think Game of Thrones has been pretty bad for a while. Or at least I think it's a little too charitable to, say, Seasons 5-7 to say that this season was when the writing really fell apart.
A big part of the early seasons, and books, as the ever-expanding nature of the world and the characters and the conflicts. Kill Ned Stark? Ah, now the North is in full blown rebellion, declaring itself independent. The king is dead? Here comes a succession crisis, wherein his two brothers are fighting with each other and with their Lannister nephew. The show's conflicts and vengeance cycles were like a hydra - cut one character or plot off and three more appear. What's Dorne, in Season 4? It's a place we've heard about, and where this one badass guy called the Red Viper comes from. Once he's killed - fairly, legally, in trial by combat, let's add - what is Dorne in Season 5? It's a new location for the show, full of its own politics and characters and infighting and, you know, stories in general. Collapsing all of these sprawling narratives back into a satisfying conclusion was always going to be extremely challenging - there's a reason George R.R. Martin has written just two books (originally envisioned as one book) in the last nineteen years - but the show had plenty of time to plan how it was going to do so. But the approach Benioff and Weiss took was just to make everything a big and bombastic spectacle, obliterating entire families and plotlines in single explosions, leaving us with a final stage setting that just felt... empty? I dunno. This whole season just needed some time to breathe! We all laughed in Season 7 when Gendry and a raven somehow relay-raced a message some 700 miles in the span of like, an afternoon, but those kind of plot-hastenings barely even registered in Season 8, where in the span of two episodes (two!) the entirety of the war between the living and the dead was fought and the surviving members of said war both mourned their dead and then besieged King's Landing and lost several more people in the process of doing so.
Like I said, we don't need to beat a dead horse, and I feel like that's already what I've started doing here, so instead let's just go out on a positive note and recognize Game of Thrones for what it was: one of the best shows of the goddamn decade, all things considered! I mean really, that was such a cool thing, to have this high fantasy series the general public had never heard of, and to turn it into the biggest thing on television for close to ten years.
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