Game of Thrones Season 8 Review Part 8: Conclusion

Warning: This series contains spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones

Now for the conclusion to this series.

The General Problems

Part of the reason for the decline of Game of Thrones' qualities are the reasons I stated before. The showrunners no longer had Martin's books to guide them, resulting in their writing's shortcomings coming to the fore.

The fact that the final two seasons have thirteen episodes between them is a significant factor in why the show ended as poorly as it did. While Daenerys' fall into evil was always destined to be controversial, having more episodes to cover her development might have made it easier to accept. Additionally, giving more episodes to the war with the Night King would have helped him seem like more of a credible threat than he ended up being.

Of course, ending a show like this well was always a difficult prospect for a few reasons. First, the ending would inevitably have been the showrunners' creation, and would thus be unfavorably compared to Martin's true ending. Second, Game of Thrones is dark enough that a happy ending is unrealistic, but at the same time, killing off everyone would be soul-crushing. Last, as a long-running and popular show, viewer expectations had grown considerably over the course of the show, to the point at which it would be difficult to meet them.

In short, the ending being disappointing was largely inevitable given the circumstances, but many of the problems with the final season, such as handling character arcs, could and should have been avoided.

Conclusion

The conclusion to Game of Thrones has divided viewers. Some people defend it. Many others dislike it, and rewatch older seasons, back when the show was still good. Still others feel it ruined the show to such an extent that they can no longer enjoy older episodes knowing how it will end.

I personally fall into the second group. While the conclusion has many problems, which I detailed in the series, and is rather disappointing overall, it does not retroactively ruin the series. The first four seasons are a high-quality adaptation of the first three books, and are still worth watching.

In short, I would give the final season an overall four melted Iron Thrones out of Five(which is not an average of the 2, 1, 3, 4, 5 and 4 rating), and would not recommend watching it. However, I recommend the rest of Game of Thrones, and would go so far as to highly recommend the first four seasons. The ending may not live up to the rest of the series, but you shouldn't allow it to ruin an othrewise enjoyable dark fantasy story for you.

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