GAME OF THRONES SEASON 8--Final Run-- Part 5

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Gladius Legis said:

This episode is below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment. I'm far from the only one who noticed this episode is awful.

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Some friendly advice: citing RT percentages is good way to sabotage any critical argument you're trying to make. I believe the name for the fallacy is "argumentum ad populum sui-selectum et neckbarbatum"

Apparently, however, this is the thread where all the Dumb & Dumber apologists decided to crawl out of the woodwork and attack me for speaking the cold hard truth.

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Truth? What is truth? Sorry, feeling a bit Pilate-y today.

On the strength of the direction & cinematography alone "The Bells" deserves an Emmy. As the penultimate episode of Got... well, I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it today. While I was watching it my responses were: gripping, beautiful, awful, kinda... appropriate. It's amazing how the show can make its audience forget it's at the heart a subversion of epic fantasy. Again and again. And then provoke such a response when it flies its true colors.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed CleganeBowl. I wasn't really invested in it. But the way they shot it, placing the emotional core of the fight prior to it happening -- ie Sandor convincing Arya to 'choose life' -- and then the combat itself as heroically beautiful futility was pretty bold and interesting.

I do wish the show-runners would have gone with one more season. They could have gotten to the same place by a more satisfying route.

MarkB said:

So, basically, at some point Dany snuck into the Iron Fleet and stole all their plot armour. Suddenly the Scorpions go from being turn-on-a-dime railguns that can snipe a dragon out of the air in three high-precision shots and rapid-fire their way through an entire fleet to cumbersome things that take ten seconds to aim at anything and 30 seconds to reload. Okay, this version is more realistic, but seriously, why didn't Dany just burn Euron's fleet to cinders last episode?

And then there followed around an hour of gratuitous dragonning, none of which I can bring myself to give a damn about. What fun is a battle without any good guys?

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I don't think that was portrayed perfectly....they likely could have established the situations more clearly. But I do think there's a difference between ships striking from hiding against an enemy that was unaware of them. The dragons were just floating along at that point. Then Rhaegon got hit, and thrashed a bit, and was vulnerable to more hits.

Dany sees him go down and begins to fly right at the boats, but realizes she's being hasty, and turns away.

Then, in last night's episode, she dives from the sun, ready for their attacks, moving quickly to minimize how useful the scorpions are, and unleashes the dragon's fire. The ships couldn't react fast enough, and that was it.

Again, probably could have been portrayed better, but I think it works.

If anything my criticism is how the dragonfire causes everything to explode! But I don't know if that contradicts what we've already seen.

I think it’s reasonable to assume Dany went up in level right before last nights episode and she put all her skill points in Aerial Combat!

MarkB said:

So, basically, at some point Dany snuck into the Iron Fleet and stole all their plot armour. Suddenly the Scorpions go from being turn-on-a-dime railguns that can snipe a dragon out of the air in three high-precision shots and rapid-fire their way through an entire fleet to cumbersome things that take ten seconds to aim at anything and 30 seconds to reload. Okay, this version is more realistic, but seriously, why didn't Dany just burn Euron's fleet to cinders last episode?

And then there followed around an hour of gratuitous dragonning, none of which I can bring myself to give a damn about. What fun is a battle without any good guys?

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Yeah. I smirked at that as well. Suddenly the Scorpions behaved as you'd expect them to.

All in all though, I was pretty happy with the way the episode went. Made for some awesome Dragoning.

hawkeyefan said:

I don't think that was portrayed perfectly....they likely could have established the situations more clearly. But I do think there's a difference between ships striking from hiding against an enemy that was unaware of them. The dragons were just floating along at that point. Then Rhaegon got hit, and thrashed a bit, and was vulnerable to more hits.

Dany sees him go down and begins to fly right at the boats, but realizes she's being hasty, and turns away.

Then, in last night's episode, she dives from the sun, ready for their attacks, moving quickly to minimize how useful the scorpions are, and unleashes the dragon's fire. The ships couldn't react fast enough, and that was it.

Again, probably could have been portrayed better, but I think it works.

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Every single Scorpion crew in the bay and on the walls was ready and waiting for an attack. And while Dany was diving at any one cluster, the rest had all the time in the world to line up their shots. Barring one initial volley, the tactical situation for Dany was worse in this episode than the last one, because her targets weren't all clustered together. And yet this time she doesn't take a scratch.

If anything my criticism is how the dragonfire causes everything to explode! But I don't know if that contradicts what we've already seen.

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We haven't really seen it unleashed full force against a structure before now - but it's certainly no more powerful than when the Night King blew up the Wall with an undead dragon. The only thing that got to me was the sheer volume. Apparently the dragons can breathe fire forever, more or less.

lowkey13 said:

Simply put, I'd argue that when D&D (heh) decided that they'd end it in 13 episodes, despite HBO wanting more, they didn't give themselves enough room to breathe. That's been the biggest problem- too much plot, too little time, so a show that has previously focused on the payout from the long game now feels like it's rushing through unearned plot points (not to mention the discombobulation of the time the last two seasons; how long does it take things to happen, where are people in relation to each other, how much time is passing etc.).

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See, this is interesting to me (and one of the reasons I brought up gaming as a corollary or coincidental reference-point if you'd like).

I've enjoyed the ramped-up pacing. If there is one complaint I've had about Game of Thrones and other modern media (Avengers Endgame, The Last Jedi, and Black Panther come to mind), its a combination of pacing and (mostly related) poor cutting (including adjacent scenes that were tonally jarring or momentum damaging or overwhelmingly gratuitous setting/character tourism).

"Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit" is a good documentary for any fantasy-based media specifically (and plenty of other non-fantasy-based media).

Something like "There Will Be Blood" or "The Murder of the Outlaw Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford" is a different animal. I suppose if people feel like Thrones is, or should be, closer to either of these than the inevitable Grim to High Fantasy drift inherent to its tropes...then, personally, the complaint would carry more weight with me.

I don't know where I'd put McCarthy's No Country For Old Men or The Road on that continuum. Given his brilliant, minimalist prose and the potency of every sentence, I feel it is an amazing combination of the heft and weight of the latter with the pacing and organization of the former. But Thrones is not that (and could never hope to achieve it because GRRM is more King than McCarthy).

Coming back full circle to my initial statement, my gaming preferences follows suit; economy of time and action with a ceaseless deluge of hard choices + an onslaught of conflict as it snowballs then crescendos into climax and denouement...no "wasted" motion.

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Sadras said:

In other news there is a youtube vid going around by actor Ian McElhinney (Ser Barristan Selmy) at a 2019 russian con where he states that GRRM finished books 6+7 but cut a deal to release them soon after season 8.

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Ugh. On the one hand, why would he make that up? On the other, who told him that?

We've been burned far too many times by GRRM himself regarding book releases. I'm wary of believing anything about asoiaf until it happens.

Mallus said:

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed CleganeBowl. I wasn't really invested in it. But the way they shot it, placing the emotional core of the fight prior to it happening -- ie Sandor convincing Arya to 'choose life' -- and then the combat itself as heroically beautiful futility was pretty bold and interesting.

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That was surprisingly good. Even after all the seasons, all the actor swaps for Gregor, and all the hype placed upon it.

Morrus said:

So it turns out that it just takes one dragon to win everything. Dany could have flown to Westeros at any time in the last few years with just one of her three dragons and burned Kings Landing to the ground, and anywhere else she wanted to.

All that political chess, all those armies, the Dothraki, the North, the Unsullied, none of it mattered in the end. Just one dragon beats everything. It’s a nuclear weapon.

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The dragons had to grow up, but they've always been likened to weapons of mass destruction.