The Lannisters definitely got all the best actors - Lena Healey, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage and Charles Dance

Baddies are usually played by the better actors. Alan Rickman v Bruce Willis is an old and obvious example. I'll add to the Lena Heady love - she's been fantastic throughout. One of the most tense moments I had was being genuinely scared for Jamie - I thought he might have been a goner. But as someone else on here said they're keeping all the main characters for the final season.

@[deleted] - I totally didn't see the Littlefinger twist coming, and I loved it. It was a bit sneaky just to have Bran suddenly start telling everyone all the stuff he knows, I mean why hasn't he done this before, but it was still great.

Gazza - you're right about season 4 - I'd forgotten some of that stuff. I think I need to go back and binge watch the entire show before the final season.

And Flob should be here any minute to tell Claudius he know's nothing. Dead dragons do indeed breathe blue-hot fire.

Finally - Jon Snow rooted his aunt. Hmmmm.

Year Cercei was fantastic. Even the way she delivered the 'we've been waiting' line had me in stiches 😆

So Jon is the rightful heir, I wonder how Dany will react to that. Wasn't a gripping episode but had som good scenes, feel like the Dragonpit summit could have had a lot more drama. The end was awesome though. Cleganebowl seems a bit irrelevant with Dragonbowl coming up.

How did Euron and Cercei plot to bring the armies via sea when they did not even believe the night walkers? The scene is poorly written

Why did they bring Theon to the meeting? That made no sense at all.

Enjoyed the episode despite a lot of problems.

goon wrote:

Year Cercei was fantastic. Even the way she delivered the 'we've been waiting' line had me in stiches 😆

So Jon is the rightful heir, I wonder how Dany will react to that. Wasn't a gripping episode but had som good scenes, feel like the Dragonpit summit could have had a lot more drama. The end was awesome though. Cleganebowl seems a bit irrelevant with Dragonbowl coming up.

Cleganebowl is a load of shit since the Mountain is a monster now. There's nothing to it beyond pure fan service. I really hope it doesn't happen. Isn't the Mountain still on Aryas list?

Qwiss! wrote:

Cleganebowl is a load of shit since the Mountain is a monster now. There's nothing to it beyond pure fan service. I really hope it doesn't happen. Isn't the Mountain still on Aryas list?

The Mountain is an all around terrible character on the show. He has been played by three different actors at this stage. He has had like two speaking lines. There are no scenes that reveal any character. No fights where he's painted as the perhaps greatest living swordsman in the world, like he is in the books. The only big fight scene he had made him look like Hodor's clumsier brother compared to Oberyn; a giant fat oaf who was stupid enough to bring a sword to a spear fight. The only reason people remember him at all is because of the brutal way he dispersed of Oberyn before he died himself. And now he's a zombie who can't speak.

Speaking of zombies, this whole plot where they have to capture a wight to prove to Cersei (who has a 7 ft 2 undead bodyguard) that the dead can reanimate has to be the most ridiculous nonsense the show has ever pulled.

Just saw it. Loved it. Tension palpable throughout. Glad to see the end of the finger. Night Dragon changes the equation quite a bit, doesn't it.

Wonderfully set up for the final season. Loved it!

The bloke who plays Sam has a future doing really shitty broad British sit coms. I'm thinking of stuff like When the Whistle Blows on Extras.

Can't believe HBO are gonna drag this out for 2 more years.

One more year? Or do you mean we have to wait 2 years for the final series?

mohan wrote:

How did Euron and Cercei plot to bring the armies via sea when they did not even believe the night walkers? The scene is poorly written

the scene was close to perfectly written, actually. cersei had no intention of helping dany/jon. the entire thing was a ruse. cersei and euron had presumably agreed that he was leaving either way to go and get the golden company in essos, him walking out like he was scared was meant to sell the deception. her coming back and agreeing to stand down and help fight was the last part of the con game.

Klaus wrote:

Speaking of zombies, this whole plot where they have to capture a wight to prove to Cersei (who has a 7 ft 2 undead bodyguard) that the dead can reanimate has to be the most ridiculous nonsense the show has ever pulled.

here is the question i pose to you and everyone else who has complained about the plot arc this season: how would you write it differently? they clearly only have an outline with bullet points right now. presumably, 3 of those bullet points are "jamie turns on cersei, the wall comes down, jon and dany form an alliance"...given that, given where everyone was at the end of season 6, and given you have about 14 hours to finish the rest of the show, how would you have moved the pieces into place? the plan (which was tyrion's plan, btw, lots of people blame jon) wasn't only meant to convince cersei, it was meant to convince dany. she didn't believe jon about what was north of the wall, she was singularly focused on defeating cersei. if he doesn't get dany's help, they have no chance against the white walkers/night king. the group seemed to doubt whether cersei would listen to reason anyway, but after viserion was killed and jon apologized, dany said "i had to see it for myself"...so, the plan wasn't great, but what was the alternative? just fly a dragon over the wall and look at what was happening from 5,000 feet? maybe, but then you leave 10+ major characters scattered all over the map and no way to bring them together.

season 7 wasn't flawless. but DB and DW were given a pretty impossible task. when they started developing this show in 2006, they assumed they would be adapting a series of books to tv, they didn't think they would be adapting 4.5 seasons and then writing 3.5 seasons of george martin fan fiction. and the fact that he basically only gave them an outline with bullet points makes their job even harder. he'll take 3,000 pages to explain how the characters fall into place. he can take another 20 years to write them. DB and DW have been working on this show for 11 years and clearly wanted to move on to something else. im sure HBO would have loved for them to keep cranking out seasons forever, but it wasn't going to happen.

lets also remember that there were weak episodes in season 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, not just this season. even the episodes where they had all the source material sometimes fell flat. this was never a perfect show which has now been corrupted. the scope of the universe, all of the characters, all of the locations, it honestly was almost an impossible series to adapt. they've gotten a lot more right than they got wrong. but running out of source material, having to get someone from point C to point Z with no guideposts in between, it must really suck. one of the strangest things though, and i see this a lot from critics now, is how they nitpick every single detail, minor and major, and try to outline the plausibility of how things could work. yet this is a show where a woman walked into a burning fire and came out with 3 living dragons (in season 1) and a witch gave birth to a shadow demon (in season 2) and the default method of communication in the fictional world is fucking ravens. if you cant suspend disbelief watching a show like this, i sort of wonder why you ever started watching it in the first place.

they are supposedly going to start shooting season 8 in october 2017. it will take 4-5 months to shoot it, probably. another 3-4 months of editing/post. i could see august 2018 for its airing.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

here is the question i pose to you and everyone else who has complained about the plot arc this season: how would you write it differently? they clearly only have an outline with bullet points right now. presumably, 3 of those bullet points are "jamie turns on cersei, the wall comes down, jon and dany form an alliance"...given that, given where everyone was at the end of season 6, and given you have about 14 hours to finish the rest of the show, how would you have moved the pieces into place?

I wouldn't have written the last few seasons like this, and I'm pretty confident that Martin won't either. HBO have spent 11 years working on this show, developing it in a close relationship with GRRM; they've known for a very long while that there were no more books, and they've known where the major characters are heading since day one. Yet they can't produce 8-10 scripts per year that can stand on their own as a story. It's no one but their own fault if they paint themselves into a corner. It's not like they were forced into adapting a story that wasn't finished. Nobody expects their version to play out exactly the same way as the books. What they're asking for is a little competent storytelling.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

if you cant suspend disbelief watching a show like this, i sort of wonder why you ever started watching it in the first place.

This is the biggest nonsense. Stories aren't measured against the real world; they're measured against the standards of their own fiction. They still have internal logic and a need for consistency. Suspending disbelief means that you're accepting that the fiction doesn't adhere to our reality. It doesn't mean that anything goes because dragons.

Yep, I heard Christmas 2018 last night from someone - second half of next year sounds right.

Klaus wrote:

I wouldn't have written the last few seasons like this, and I'm pretty confident that Martin won't either. HBO have spent 11 years working on this show, developing it in a close relationship with GRRM; they've known for a very long while that there were no more books, and they've known where the major characters are heading since day one. Yet they can't produce 8-10 scripts per year that can stand on their own as a story. It's no one but their own fault if they paint themselves into a corner. Nobody expects an adaptation to play out exactly the same way as the books. What they're asking for is competent storytelling.

okay, so lets continue this thought exercise. i havent read the books, but from my understanding, tyrion hasn't met dany yet in the books. no one knows if jon snow is alive for sure. how would you have gotten from the end of season 4 to the end of season 8? you have to operate under the same assumptions the show has shown us in terms of how many episodes there have been since and how many there will be. everyone agrees the dorne storyline sucked. how would you have done it differently? just ignore dorne all together? what do you do about jon? how do you develop the white walkers differently? how do they get through the wall unless they get a dragon? how do they get a dragon if dany never goes north of the wall?

and it appears the relationship between DB/DW and GRRM soured a long time ago. he hasn't released a book since 2011. i have to imagine that when they sat down in 2006/2007, DB and DW were told that at least one more book was coming in the next 3-4 years. its 2017 and still no new books, and now martin doesn't even engage with the show. if i remember right, the hotel meeting they had where he sketched things out at a very high level happened years ago. he hasn't written an episode since, what, season 3? you can say "jon and dany have to meet and do X, Y and Z", but if he told them that in season 3, and there are no new books and we don't even know if jon is alive, that puts the writers in a tough spot. from my assessment of the show, DB and DW are not the best writers on television. but they aren't hacks either. they didn't create this world. this wasn't their vision. they are trying to adapt this sprawling world and do it quickly, while martin may or may not release 2 more books that tie everything up before he dies. and hes even admitted that hes written himself into corners with some of his writing decisions. expecting two people who dont have the same knowledge or vision of this fantasy world to neatly tie up all the loose ends is unrealistic.

This is the biggest nonsense. Stories aren't measured against the real world; they're measured against the standards of their own fiction. They still have internal logic and a need for consistency. Suspending disbelief means that you're accepting that the fiction doesn't adhere to our reality. It doesn't mean that anything goes because dragons.

i could provide semi-logical explanations for everything that everyone bitched about this season. martin himself told people not to read the books or watch the show with a stopwatch trying to figure out how long it takes to get from point A to point B. the frozen lake thing has already been dissected. they show the passing of time by making the characters look completely exhausted/weak. its obvious at least 2 days pass. could they have had beric say "we've been stuck on this rock for 3 days, we need to do something?"...sure, then people would have bitched and said "ugh, they have to spell everything to everyone, that is so fucking weak"....they never made it appear that they were more than 1 day from eastwatch. is it convenient that gendry just barely made it back, that a raven got to dragonstone in a day, and that dany got north of the wall in a day? yeah, everything worked out perfectly, but if they had prolonged it over 2 episodes instead of 1, people would have complained about the pacing for that reason instead. then people bitch about the chains. where did they get the chains???? well, the wildlings had chains when they tried to get through the tunnel at the wall in season 4. there were ships (with chains) at hardhome. and the night king is a greenseer, so there is also a pretty decent chance that he foresaw the whole thing happening, especially because in the episode before north of the wall, in bran's scouting vision, the night king and the white walkers are standing on the exact rock that jon and crew ended up on. the night king knew they were coming. he knew dany would come. he was ready. it was the only way he could get a dragon, and a dragon seems like the only way he'd be able to get past the wall.

is it perfectly written? no. is it how i'd have written it? maybe not. but im not a writer. season 7 was entertaining. it had one of the best episodes of the entire series. there was a lot of good dialog throughout the season. there were a bunch of great reunions. the show isn't perfect. but no show is perfect. the greatest show of all time (the wire) had a very problematic final season with a lot of really shaky writing and plot points. its still the greatest show ever. the last season of the sopranos had some comically bad episodes, especially near the end of the series and right before some of the best episodes of the entire series. and in both of those shows, the universe wasn't nearly as big as westeros, both in terms of actual key characters and all of the ongoing arcs and plotlines. realistically, they could have done 3 more seasons and it still wouldn't have ended perfectly. there would have been things that didn't work as well, character arcs that fell flat, etc. i guess maybe my expectations are just different from everyone else's. cinematically and just in a visual sense, this is the best show ive ever seen. its not the most well written or emotionally impactful, but its still gripping entertainment.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

okay, so lets continue this thought exercise. i havent read the books, but from my understanding, tyrion hasn't met dany yet in the books. no one knows if jon snow is alive for sure. how would you have gotten from the end of season 4 to the end of season 8?

Look, I neither have the time nor the inclination to sit here and rewrite every single plotline the show has spewn out in the last few years. When it comes to Game of Thones my biggest issue isn't fast travel or even the fact that they still haven't figured out multi-POV storytelling in 11 years. All those things point to limited writers, sure. They bear the distinct marks of amateurishness and mediocrity that I reckon people who have ever written anything themselves will easily recognise.

My greatest regret though is how it took a complex story about female empowerment and the monstrous nature of war and turned it into this misogynistic, exploatation-heavy bullshit with a nice budget that year after year is being wasted on depictions of gratuitous violence while everything else is barely spared a thought. Winterfell looks like it's being filmed on a playground, if you want to talk about great cinematic scope. Casterly Rock, perhaps the most iconic location in Westeros, looked like a little ruin on a small hill. The thematic poverty meanwhile is probably one of the main reasons that Martin no longer is involved much, and that he keeps making sly digs against GoT in interviews and on his website.

At the end of the day no one held a gun to D&D's heads and forced them to adapt this story before it was done. Game of Thrones has singlehandedly (and, one can argue, undeservedly) turned them into two of the biggest names in entertainment. Forgive me for not feeling particularly sorry for them when this is all they've got to show for the biggest budget in tv history.

Hmm. I think the TV show has turned into enjoyable rubbish, the books on the other hand turned into insufferably boring rubbish a while ago.

I don't think the books were ever particularly thematically interesting, Klaus—though I'd love to hear the argument they were. What the first few books were was intricate, tense and surprising.

The main scaffolding of the narrative as it now stands in the TV show has been being predicted for over ten years, so the element of surprise is gone for me. Characters like Tyrion, who were once praised for their nuance, now seem rather hackneyed and stuck on the railroad.

I give props to the showrunners for delivering a conclusion on schedule. I used to read a blog called "Finish The Book, George" as far back as about 2004. In my opinion, Martin has turned out not to have the chops to hold together his creative ambitions. Once the show concludes whatever he may write will have become a curiosity. 

That last episode was great by the way, I was held throughout and I enjoyed all the playoffs and payoffs hugely.

Final episode was good but I felt that the presentation of the wall coming down was somewhat poor.