I am patiently awaiting a Taiso post about this season.
The elements that made season 1 great, which was so fresh for TV, are all gone by now.
Dude, the time jump bullshit is fucking killing me this season.
This season needed 10 episodes, if ever a season of this show did.
There is SO MUCH travelling going on in this season, and people are practically teleporting all over the place.
There is no sense of establishing pace.
Also, the entire ice lake battle was fucking stupid. They totally tease the cracking ice but when it counts, there are hundreds of zombies running everywhere recklessly, without any concern for their safety or for falling through the ice. If the ice were capable of supporting all that weight, why the fuck did they tease the ice cracking to begin with? Why the hell didn't they just run across at the start? The tension was all artificial because when it came time for the payoff, the stalling tactic was a pointless narrative conceit.
Also, I love how the Night's King just happens to have ice javelins that can kill a dragon. They're just there. I mean for fuck's sake, at least summon them with ice magic or something. Plot convenience ahoy.
And speaking of plot convenience, I love how the undead army just happened to have anchor chains fit for a man-o-war to haul the dragon's carcass out of the water.
Gendry running to Eastwatch, ravens flying to Dragonstone, Dani flying to the North and Jon Snow's adventuring party somehow enduring the cold with no heat for all that time? Suck my dick, HBO. And I don't wanna hear no 'well, dragons and zombies, yo' because fuck off if anybody thinks that's an argument. Dragons and zombies do NOT mean people, even hardened warriors, can suddenly survive the cold for that long of a stretch. That's one of the narrative elements of the North to begin with; it's a harsh environment and you have to be hearty AND intelligent to survive the elements. For fuck's sake, they didn't even stand around the dude's body when they burned it to get a little heat.
Bottom line is that this episode broke immersion all over the fucking place and was shit.
Arya and Sansa arguing and feuding is artificial drama because the show runners still think Littlefinger serves a purpose on the TV show. That character stopped mattering in the TV show a long time ago. The only reason Arya and Sansa are fighting is because the showrunners lack imagination. They've deviated so hard from the source material that they don't know how to play off the rule of unintended consequences. Based on how they've decided to evolve those characters, this should NOT be the result. Neither of them could possibly be this stupid. Also, why can't Arya tell that Sansa is telling the truth about the letter and is beinjg sincere? That's what the game of faces (or whatever) is supposed to be about.
Let me tell you what this episode was:
The showrunners, who are proving they're terrible hacks now that they don't have Martin's novels to adapt and are working off of whatever sparing cliff's notes he gave them, wanted to get this 'magnificent seven together to tidily advance or resolve subplots. Rather than killing Thoros (which they ALSO could have done), they should have had Barric tell Jon about killing the head of the snake and then, when everyone else was escaping, he foolishly tries to hold back the enemy in a desperate high risk solution of charging the Night's King, who kills him effortlessly but in doing so, gives everyone else a chance to escape. This plants the seed in Jon's head about how to solve the problem, but the means of implementing that solution are not quite so easy. Barric (and maybe Thoros) are both dead now, as those characters are essentially useless time wasters, but they helped to advance the plot by dropping knowledge dynamically.
This should have been two parts. This scenario needed to be paced way better and the action beats needed to be smarter than this. Trapping them in the middle of a sheet of ice over a lake that, in the end amounted to no real environmental challenge at all, was the wrong way to go about doing it. This episode should have ended with the group on the run from the undead army. Then the entire next episode, you move between the group moving and hiding in the North while Gendry runs back to Eastwatch, and then while ravens are flying to Dragonstone, have some character bits and so forth, then Dani gets the letter and decides to fly North to help out. Then the second of the two parter ends with the dragon getting killed and everyone gets away. The only survivors should have been Jon, Sandor and Jorah, but at least they get away with the zombie. You could argue that Tormund has a subplot to resolve with Brienne, but that's a fucking dumb subplot that doesn't matter at all, so in my edit, there is no attraction there because it doesn't matter.
This episode had a few good moments. Vyserion getting killed was, visually, a spectacle (although the circumstances leading up to it were dumb). I like seeing Jon and Dani develop a relationship but we need to see more of it. I liked Jon approaching Jorah about Longclaw because that scene sort of had to happen-if Jon didn't offer it back to Jorah, then it would have been inconsistent with his character to that point. Jorah refusing it makes all the sense in the world, given everything that's happened. The zombie bear was an unnecessary beat, but at least it was an entertaining spectacle and something we hadn't seen yet that felt organic to some degree.
Bottom line is that this is the worst episode of the entire series so far. This is the GoT equivalent of the episode where Tara gets kidnapped by the hidden village of women and children in TWD.
This was a catastrophically bad episode, one I'm fairly certain the series won't recover from. I'll go down with the ship, but I really hope Martin gets the next book out soon because without him at the helm, even with his sometimes bloated narrative wanderings, this ship is lost.
