Yeah, I didn’t hate S8 but it was disappointing; especially the third episode where you couldn’t see a damn thing.
Thankfully we have the books. According to Mr Martin he is currently making progress on "Wind of Winter". Given his age and health he may not finish his series. I would anticipate ( hope) the 'Winds of Winter" by next Spring. I gave up on the series being great once they went off script, ( since there was none to follow). Plot holes, instant time travel, and stupid writing devolved a great show into a cluster f**k of "let's wrap this up". They killed off Stannis on TV, he is still a main character in the books. Jon Snow comes back to life without any changes in his character. Lazy writing IMO. Plus they killed the greatest character in the series....HODOR.
I know that it is impossible to satisfy everybody (talking now about the last season). If I had to reduce my disappointment to just one issue is that of Jon killing Dany so quickly, without any effort whatsoever to steer her in a better direction or to counsel and influence her to be a different queen. And for a series that has established that killing a king or queen is the greatest sin of all, relatively little blowback comes from it. No way that Dany's followers wouldn't have started yet another war to avenge their liberator and queen. Much less allowed Jon Snow to live on. There was a cognitive dissonance there that took me out of the show.
That was so cheaply done, Dany’s killing .. like there was budget constraints.. but there wasn’t. I think it was deliberate decision to knock the series on the head early from the producers. Wonder if they had conflict with actors or something. Nasty, what ever way you look at it.
Yeah, I agree with that. I didn't like that about the finale. For one, Dany deserved a better death scene, and for two, no way was Greyworm going to just arrest Jon. He was shown killing soldiers left and right during the war and then post-war on the street, but he takes it easy on Jon who just killed his queen? No way. He would have killed Jon the second he found out he was responsibly for killing Daenerys. And how did they find out Jon actually killed her? By seeing Drogon fly off with her dead body? A lot of disconnect there in that whole sequence, which has always bothered me about the finale. I still love the ending sequence and seeing the Starks ultimately win the Game of Thrones, but there were definitely certain things that were either glossed over or didn't make a whole lot of sense. I also thought it was odd that when Tyrion quit as Hand, he was merely arrested. And then they let Jon go see him and talk to him for 10 minutes? Given how quick Dany was on the trigger at times, in a manner of speaking, Tyrion should have been executed on the spot after quitting.
If Jaime Lannister got away with it, why not Jon Snow? And she had just laid waste to tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, there was no steering her in a better direction from there. She was a monster and had to be destroyed.
That’ was the best episode should have been finale. Arya killing the Night King. The 4K UHD is supposed to be clearer.
But she was not a monster for seven and a half seasons. Sometimes indecisive, sometimes too quick to pull the trigger, imperfect but not unlike somebody who is learning her way up the ladder. The show goes to great lengths to show that she truly has the best intentions towards her subjects. That she is, at heart, a benevolent queen. Also, it is a war, she is killing the people in King's Landing, her enemies. Nobody, but nobody, in this show ever showed any mercy or concern over collateral damage. But a monster, no. To have the massacre of King's Landing be the sole measure of her, after all we have seen of her benevolence (and all the killing that everybody else did), she got cut too little slag at the end. She wanted Jon to marry her (IIRC), that would have been his chance to turn things around, logically speaking. OMG, she had one bad day!
He's never going to finish the book. Year after year he keeps hinting that he's getting close, only to make excuses and keep pushing the date back.
Agreed. He has no real need to put it out anymore. He lost the plot (literally) years ago. He has no drive to continue. It’ll never come out. After the series, most fans (myself included) don’t care anymore. “A Dance With Dragons” was primarily a placeholder and that was nine years ago. Too much fluff and no content, no advancement of the narrative. Nobody has time for that.
Daenerys always had that "I wanna go scorched earth" mentality, but no one was left to check her worst impulses. Missandei and Jorah were dead, and she had zero faith left in Tyrion as an adviser. And once Jon shunned her when she tried to be intimate with him following Missandei's death, that was the last straw. Her attitude was basically then to rule with fear, not mercy. What I find interesting is that despite the perceived heel turn, we never saw a different Daenerys. Aside from the pure anger and rage we saw on her face for about five seconds as she stared down the Red Keep and decided to burn it all down, the Daenerys we saw following the destruction on King's Landing was the same Daenerys we had always seen. I still think it was a brilliant decision to never show her up close once and she and Drogon destroyed the city. Seeing the destruction from the ground was far more impactful, if nothing else.
so sue me! not a fan.... although I do like Michael Richards! I saw him in the Soup Nazi episode...and the comedies he's been in are great! "Take A Pill"
I have it on good authority that it is real Dolby Vision and it is at least 25% brighter overall. They supervised the writing, watched the dailies, supervised the dailies, and controlled all the final post. What you saw is what the producers wanted.
I’m puzzled (and amused) by the intensity of the reactions to how the series ended. Consider that, for all practical purposes, George Martin halted the major plotlines at the end of the third book in 2000. The fourth book, in which a bunch of new characters were introduced while the original plots stood still, was published five years later and the fifth book, which inched the plots along, was published six years after that, leaving Stannis wandering offstage, Jon Snow ambushed for no good reason, Dany and Tyrion continuing to waste away, etc. And nothing (other than good natured empty promises and long, long ancillary pseudo-history volumes) more has been heard from Martin in the nearly ten years since. (There are comments on this thread claiming that Martin provided detailed outlines post-Dance of Dragons. I find this hard to believe, given that there was no sense of a plot outline in the last two books, but I’m willing to be convinced if there is documentary evidence.) Now imagine if Lord of the Rings had ended after Gandalf fell, or Harry Potter after the Tri-Wizard tournament and the producers and writers of a massively popular film version had to continue the story while retaining the increasingly popular cast and working under a demanding network schedule. I sincerely doubt anyone could have done better than was done with GOT, which was infinitely longer and more complicated than Rings or Potter. It’s clear from the stories told by the cast and crew that the huge battle scenes were exhausting and keep in mind that Martin basically fluffed the major battles that were the centerpieces of the show. If they were that hard to write, imagine how hard they must have been to film. There is a human element here. The actors and crew were not conscripted. I would have loved to see several more seasons of the same complexity and quality of those produced from the novels, but if the creator couldn’t put the words on paper, I’m not sure it’s fair to criticize the HBO producers for bringing it, finally, to at least as satisfying a conclusion as Harry Potter. (And if you want to talk about a massively popular fantasy series whose conclusion sucked on both page and screen, let’s talk about Hunger Games.)
Yes, it's odd that the first few books came out every 3-5 years, and then suddenly Martin drastically slowed down in 2011 and released very little since then. My guess is that he's got a lot of anxiety with the pressure of meeting audience expectations, and is being cautious about putting out a new installment that doesn't measure up to what's come before. Not the first time this has happened in the literary world. The producers have said many times that they had long conferences and meeting with Martin to make sure that what they were doing wasn't straying too far from his universe and was at least in the ballpark of possibility. But Martin has said there were characters killed in the TV show that live on in the books (and vice-versa), and that he will go into different directions for some plot issues. I believe J.K. Rowling was even more closely involved with the Harry Potter movies and was actually on set and actively advised actors and writers on certain key issues. For example, she told Alan Rickman several years before the final two books came out that Snape was not a villain, but ultimately was a hero who dies protecting the school and Harry. Fantasy is a weird thing to handle, and from my perspective -- speaking as a guy who watched all the Game of Thrones shows at once and has yet to read the books -- it all made perfect sense to me. I never had a problem believing that Khaleesi would go nuts and be very dangerous in the end, and they foreshadowed this quite a bit, particularly in that her father was "The Mad King." Let's assume insanity is in her bloodline, and it eventually caught up with her. A happy ending was never going to happen for that character.
