“John le Carre, but with dragons.”
“The ill-fated Robb Stark put it well back in season three when he noted, “I’ve won every battle, yet somehow I’m losing the war.” The great warriors at the heads of noble houses displayed a profound tendency to find themselves dead—Ned Stark (and later his son Robb), Robert Baratheon (and later his brother Stannis)—or at the very least unmanned (Jaime Lannister).”
“The strongest fighters who remain on the show at this point are not noble knights but cunning swords for hire (Bronn, Daario Naharis) or fallen giants who have been literally or figuratively raised from the dead (the brothers Clegane).”
“From the beginning it was the plotters and connivers who held the true power: Tywin, Tyrion, Cersei (even if she was not as good at the game as she presumed), Varys, the Queen of Thorns, Margaery, and above all, Littlefinger.”
“It was Littlefinger who essentially created the Westeros we know, sowing the seeds of the War of the Five Kings by having Jon Arryn killed and persuading the Starks that the Lannisters were behind it.”
“But what have these plotters accomplished in the last two seasons? With one notable exception—boom!—remarkably little.”
“Cersei, at least—and at last!—brought us a satisfying and dramatic conspiracy in the finale, when she and Qyburn went all Guy Fawkes on the Sept of Baelor. It was a great moment, even if a heavily foreshadowed one. But to some degree, the thrill it provided was a reminder of just how rare such moments have become.”
“Martin’s novels are extremely careful about character motivation, and that’s another area where the show has skimped of late.”
“Which is all another long way of saying that over the last two seasons, Game of Thrones has become a different show from the one it was over the previous four: more careless in its plotting and motivation, hinging on major developments that are inadequately set up or explained, tending to favor dramatic shock over internal logic, and so on.”
“But—and please read the rest before flaying me in comments—this was almost certainly inevitable. Why does Game of Thrones lately feel as though it’s made up of crucial plot twists without all the details filled in precisely? Because that’s exactly what it is. For the show’s first four-plus seasons, Benioff and Weiss could pick and choose from the very best of Martin’s extensive plots and scenes and dialogue. Now, they are working off of a rudimentary blueprint—and unsurprisingly, it shows.”
“Moreover, the question of whether Game of Thrones is as good as it used to be isn’t even the right question. A better question is: “Is it better than Martin’s relevant source material”? And here the answer is far less clear, and will remain so until Martin finishes his oeuvre—if in fact he ever does so. The author’s fourth novel and (especially) his fifth were sprawling messes, introducing new and frequently dull characters by the fistful and sending them on peregrinations across Westeros and Essos so pointless and interminable that it almost seemed as though they were trying to Google-Map the two continents, city by city and block by block. Even if Benioff and Weiss were still working from Martin’s direct text, it’s likely they’d have to alter much of it—as they already did a great deal last season.”
“And so in place of Martin’s aimless wanderings, we get Benioff and Weiss’s reckless velocity. Say what you will about this season’s flaws—and obviously I have, at length—it moved.”
“Which is why, to my mind, “The Winds of Winter” was not only a tremendously satisfying episode, but more importantly a paradigm for what Game of Thrones can be at its best moving forward: thrilling, vivid, and proceeding with determination toward its ultimate climax.”
“This will probably entail further narrative corner-cutting and occasional lapses in logic. But so be it. If you weren’t stunned when Tommen went out the window, or moved when Dany made Tyrion her Hand, or thrilled at the sight of her finally(!) leading a fleet back toward Westeros, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.”
“Game of Thrones may be a different show now, and in meaningful ways a less rich one. But it has an urgency that has been missing from the books (and sometimes the show, too) for a long while. I confess that I’m as excited about the next season as I have been in years.”