Season 5 (All Episodes)
Golly. This year has certainly been a mixed one for Game of Thrones, a roller coaster of emotion - and not always in a good way. The series, which looked set to squash two of George R. R. Martin's weakest novels together, started promisingly enough, lining up a few decent storylines and discarding the more useless ones. It also finished spectacularly - the cinematic finale of its eighth episode, "Hardhome", momentarily caused me to lose my professional restraint and squeal like a 16-year-old. But in the middle, and hovering around the edges at all times, were niggling doubts and irritations, that can really be pinned down to one thing - bad writing.
Don't get me wrong, I think Game of Thrones is imaginative, escapist entertainment that we should consider ourselves lucky to be experiencing. But I don't think for a second that it's anything really more than that - for all its interesting ideas about fantasy and historical realism, about subversive characters and pushing the limits of the form, it is still a drama whose pleasures are mostly derived from its spectacle - notably the "shocking" moment, which reared its head a-plenty this season, perhaps even more so than the last. But the problem with the "shocking" moment is that, once it's passed, it can't be repeated again. And if you think about it for too long, everything can begin to fall apart, and you begin to question whether you really enjoyed everything that preceded it in the first place.
I mean, even though I consider myself a fan of Martin's books - which are, in spite of everything, superior - I still don't consider them the Ulysses of fantasy fiction. They're just good stories. And that's fine. But the thing about the books is that there's a thread of consistency running through them, even in their most sluggish moments. Martin is a good writer who writes good stuff (maybe a little too good, considering the length of his working process), yet too often the show drops the ball by excessive simplification, by misunderstanding characters, or, more often than not, by dropping offensive examples of stupid, clunky dialogue.
This was the year that (SPOILERS!) Daenerys' dragon Drogon (eh) dropped in to save the day and re-enact a scene from The NeverEnding Story, where Sansa's sacrifices in character meant she was subjected to more abuse by men, where the writers crammed in two 1,000 page books worth of material and STILL managed to make everything feel dull and plodding and worthless, at least until the end. Perhaps the most criminal offender was the events in Dorne - a quietly engaging story about Jaime Lannister traversing the Riverlands was transformed into a ludicrous buddy quest with Chuckle Brother sound-a-like Bronn, that contained a fight scene the Wachowskis would be ashamed of and one of the most toe-curlingly awful lines ever uttered by a living breathing person. (Sand Snake 2: "You want the good girl, but you need the bad pussy." Everyone else: "WHAT.")
Again, by sacrificing nuances in character and action, the show only seems to work with big action setpieces and those "shocking" moments. When it does work, it's terrific - Queen Cersei's walk of shame, Jon Snow's Ides-of-March moment - but it's always over too soon, and then we're back to "bad pussy". It's just not good enough.
