On the
Cast of Kings podcast, Joanna Robinson was asked if she still has hope for this show going into season 8.
This is the quote she clings to, assuming that D&D received far more notes about the ending elements that they have bumbled and fumbled towards in Seasons 5 - 7:
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone ? they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.
From GRRM's
interview with Rolling Stones
That above is pretty much what attracted me to the books and the show and is personified in the life of Robert Baratheon: ferocious, inspiring knight; piss-poor ruler.
And to be fair to D&D, they are exceptional adapters of the source material, and really good at executing the vision. Where they've failed now is in creating plausible routes to these new checkpoints beyond the books. The recap that Nik referenced earlier by
Alison Herman nails it right in the title: "The Show Is Conventional Fantasy Now".
Judging by D&D's obsession with blowing their direwolf budget on a wight polar bear (clamouring for it since Season 2), we can really see the seams in the show without GRRM's innumerable revisions and dedication to internal logic to fall back on. Season 7 has been less a cohesive story than a series of vignette set pieces where all the effort and money and time went into doing the best explosions.
Take for example the ending of this episode: Viserion becoming a blue-eyed wight dragon. They wanted the eye opening to be the focus to mirror Drogon meeting Jon, and echoing the much earlier scene in the series when we first meet the Night King turning a baby into a White Walker. But with Viserion stuck in the bottom of the lake (a tragically beautiful bit of CGI, btw), the only way they could get that dragon into contact with the Night King was to... suddenly have ship chains North of the Wall and somehow get them around Viserion's neck, and then have thousands of wights with next to zero remaining muscle/tendon drudge it out onto land. Instead of being struck by how much of a game changer the Night King having a dragon is, now I'm stuck on where the hell the chains came from.
Alternative:
- Hardhome homage: NK, standing by the water, raises a hand, crane shot over NK to over the lake (and billows of blood in the water), and two bright blue lights pierce through the murk as the water begins to churn