'House of the Dragon' Season 3 Review - George R.R. Martin May Have Been Proven Right
4 days ago by Skavau to c/television
I never really understood the hate for the ending of Game of Thrones. It was very rushed, yes, with the final season combining three distinct plot arcs...but I got the distinct feeling it was the result of them planning on ten seasons and execs deciding to stop at eight.
It all pretty much made sense within the arc of the show otherwise.
By all accounts it was the showrunners who wanted to stop and not the HBO executives. Now a show running that long does have a large financial component and actors are going to want a big pay bump.
But also the show in the earlier seasons took the time to tell their story. The Red Wedding takes three seasons to tell, so we see it play out over three seasons. I'm the final seasons we also need three full seasons to tell a story, but instead we get two short seasons.
In general the ending we got mostly makes sense. The speed and why usually do not.
Let's pick on Bran for example. Him being King makes sense. Bran is our first chapter in the series (after the prologue). He is full of knowledge and wisdom. He is transformed into a being that can view the past and potentially control events. By all accounts he may have orchestrated every major event in the series.
But he doesn't "have the best story". Hell he's missing for a whole season. Other than "Hold the Door" we never see him use his powers to do anything particularly useful. He's weird and standoffish in a way that no one should support him.
Take that and apply it to pretty much every other character and you end up with a mess of a finale. I can make it work. I can see how maybe the story ends up where it did. But Game of Thrones used to be good at telling that story. By the end it wasn't.
Hmm. Didn't know that, I never actually looked into the background of what happened to the show.
Otherwise, I think we agree. Very much rushed storylines. The way I saw it, season 8 should have been the fight against the white walkers, season 9 should have been the war between Daenerys and Cersei, with Daenerys going full mad king at the end, and season 10 should have been Bran pulling together a crew to depose Daenerys and establish himself as king.
Instead, that all happened in season 8, and Bran's season was reduced down to one block of expository dialogue.
If I remember correctly, the writers got a deal with Disney after they finished the show. They had originally had a deal with HBO to adapt A Song of Ice and Fire, but GRRM wrote himself into a problem and took longer and longer as he kept adding characters to his story. He had promised to be done before the show caught up, but I think by season 5 in the show there was no new book so the writers had to finish GRRM's story for him with just the general story arc for the big 3(john Snow, Deanerys, Tyrion).
Since it wasn't what they are good at and wanted to move on, they rushed to finish and the last 2 maybe 3 seasons of the show are all the two writers work. Which are the worst seasons and made Disney cancel their deal. So they rushed for nothing and fucked their careers.
So ultimately you're right, we're on the same page. We needed more seasons to tell the story. I don't know if it's ten seasons total or more.
And to be completely fair, when we look at books four and five, we're greatly expanding the cast, and it's not always sure that we're expanding it in a way that is productive.
Book four and five spoilers, let's look at the story of Quentyn Martell. He isn't in the show. In short his story is being a potential husband to Dany and he spends the books looking for her. We spend several chapters exploring Westeros and Essos looking for Dany from Quentyn"s point of view. Ultimately Quentyn ends up in Mereen and frees the Dany's dragons, then he... Oh... Dies....
He frees the dragons at a pivotal point (probably). But ultimately that is his story. Is that story worth telling on TV? How many hours of TV is it worth?
I say this because sometimes adapting a book for television (or film) requires making changes. Famously when George wrote the Song of Ice and Fire he wrote it to be unadaptable. So making changes is completely expected.
Does that take ten seasons? Maybe. Does it take twenty seasons? Honestly also maybe.
I think making major changes to fit the story into eight seasons, is a possible eventuality. But planning for ten, twenty seasons, or writing sixish seasons and then trying to squeeze multiple seasons into two. That's the issue.
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Welcome to Television
This community is for discussion of anything related to television or streaming.
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- !movies@piefed.social
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Television Communities
A community for discussion of anything related to Television via broadcast or streaming.
Rules:
- Be respectful and courteous to all members.
- Avoid offensive or discriminatory remarks.
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The headline makes it sound worse than the actual review (based on the first 4 of 8 episodes).
We're not getting George's version. We're getting a version that might still work overall, but it's not leaning that way.
But I'm guessing we're making a shift so that season three can end huge and setup for the fourth and final seat. Now... I've heard myself say those exact words back in Game of Thrones land. So let's hope they don't fuck this up again.
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