A Game of Thrones: Episodes Eight, Nine, and Ten (and Final Thoughts)
I’ve decided to review the last three episodes of HBO’s A Game of Thrones together in order to avoid repeating the same praises over and over. The cast of the show, as I’ve already said, is practically perfect, and that doesn’t changed in the final three hours worth of show. Most of what I’ll relay below are my final thoughts about the last three episodes, somewhat disconnected from any formal review structure and episodic order. A lot of these final thoughts will be focused on my issues with the series. I will say that the following things are still some of the greatest strengths of the series: Cast/Acting (as I just noted): almost every single actor/actress in this series is superb. Peter Dinklage better damn well get an award for playing Tyrion. Maisie Williams is still one of my favorite child actors in GoT; if she does not have a great career ahead of her, I will be pissed. Lena Headey is still brilliant and loathsome (in a good way). Emilia Clarke is also quite amazing in this series; she gets stronger and stronger as an actress (and as a character) with every episode. And Sean Bean is, well, Sean Bean; what more can I say? I don’t think there’s been a TV series where I have loved the cast as much as I do in GoT. I will come back to the series based on the actors alone (though Sean Bean will be sorely missed, of course). Sets/Costumes: To put it briefly — gorgeous sets, gorgeous scenery, and gorgeous costumes and design. CG: The producers of GoT were intelligent enough to limit their use of CG, which means the few times when we do see something put together by computer, they are properly budgeted and look decent enough for a TV series. No more of that SyFy cheap cheese garbage. Beyond that, the series moves back and forth between good and bad. I’ll talk about some of those issues below. (Note: I’m not going to offer any synopses for the episodes. You should watch the show. There may be some spoilers, though; if you haven’t watched the show, then don’t read beyond this point.) Now to the reviews: Episode Eight — “The Pointy End” “The Pointy End” is a product of wasted time. I’ve mentioned many times before that the writers for Game of Thrones have taken significant detours, often for no other purpose than to present breasts or, as in episode seven, to tell us what is going to happen later, thus spoiling the surprise. Sadly, this means that significant moments in the story or shortened to make room for all that extra stuff (more often than not extra scenes involving male chest shaving, women fingering one another, random penis shots, or four or more naked breasts in the same shot). “The Pointy End” opens with what should be a major sequence (i.e., the fall of Eddard Stark and his House in King’s Landing) and takes a lot of the power out of it by removing a good deal of the death that is supposed to take place there. It’s fortunate that the writers decided to keep the final showdown between Syrio and the Lannister’s guard, but that doesn’t change the fact that the entire sequence ends so quickly that it’s hard to feel the impact it has on the characters (not just Arya and Sansa, but the dozens of guards and the like who, we are to assume, have been slaughtered). A similar reduction takes place later in the episode when Tyrion tries to convince the hill people to join him, which suffers from the poor establishment of the Vale earlier in the series. The absence of narrative fulfillment in both these instances does a great disservice to the consistency of the writing and the strength of the character arcs, though I’ll admit that at least the fall of House Stark is better handled than Tyrion’s “rise to power.” Things simply “happen” without much in the way of explaining how; when explanation is offered, it is without development (i.e., “do this” “okay” “done”). The problem is that “The Pointy End” is such a good episode if you ignore these two problem areas. It draws out all of the established plotlines and shows how everything is tangled together, and the episode avoids many of the pitfalls that killed the earlier parts of the series (pointless nudity, etc.). It’s fortunate that the aforementioned problems are less egregious than those in other episodes I have reviewed, but they also expose the fundamental flaw in HBO’s adaptation: narrative direction and space. The fact of the matter is that 10 episodes is not enough to meet HBO’s tit quota and fully develop all the plotlines they’ve tried to insert throughout the series. I understand that the writers are anticipating A Clash of Kings, but that doesn’t give them an excuse to wander away from internal consistency in this season. While the second season was ordered before A Game of Thrones even aired, such things are never sure things. We have no guarantee that a second season will ever be filmed until the season is over and all the ratings are in. If A Game of Thrones lost 50% of its viewers after episode five, I doubt HBO would spend millions on producing a second season. Having said all this, I do want to reiterate that “The Pointy End” is a good episode. Much of what is great about A Game of Thrones can be found here in good order. Here the story finally gets back to, well, the story, without spending inordinate amounts of time playing around with other nonsense. If not for the inability of the series as a whole to deliver the promise it set up in the first half, I think “The Pointy End” would be in my top three episodes for the entire show. P.S.: Momoa is bloody awesome…still. The cast is just so wonderful in this