Game of Thrones
Out of context: Reply #839
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Am I The Only One Getting Very Bored By 'Game Of Thrones?'
There was another episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones last night. As in all Game of Thrones episodes, dozens of characters made incremental progress towards their inevitable fate, a few one-liners were delivered and the political field shifted slightly in one direction or another. Some dudes were stabbed and some characters were disappointed by their choices. We ended, like usual, with a towering image evoking some great storm to come. When will it come? Oh, you know, later. It’s been this way for a while now, and I’m starting to get a bit exhausted by it. For a show that feels so active all the time, nothing ever seems to actually happen.
It’s not the worst thing: the show is still eminently watchable: visually sumptuous and well-acted, with enough satisfaction to keep the thing moving along from moment to moment. We have moments like “The Mountain and The Viper” that remain some of the most jarring and well-executed on television. But that’s about it: I stopped wondering what was going to happen a long time ago, because the answer always seems to be: not much. The more the show writhes around in its increasingly complicated politics, the more it’s become clear just how stuck it is.
George R. R. Martin’s started the series with a trademark brutality. No character was safe from an ever present threat of death by treachery, negligence or just cruelty. For a while, that bizarre randomness felt dangerous and exciting, keeping us constantly wondering when the entire show was going to get turned on its head with a high profile death or a dramatic reversal of fortunes. And then, over the course of the show, we started to learn that the show was never, in fact, going to get turned on its head. People die, battles get fought, titles get awarded and everything stays pretty much the same, an endless game of tug of war between dozens of teams that never mange to move the rope more than an inch. There’s no better example of this than last season’s long arc about the great coming war between the Wildlings and the Night’s Watch. Everything came to a head in an episode-long battle that apparently solved nothing until it was invalidated by a deus ex machina in the next episode, and now we’re back to arguing the internal politics of the Night’s Watch while the Wildlings chill.
The biggest problem is that the show was so clear about its broader structures early on: “Winter is Coming,” they told us ad nauseum throughout the first season. It worked! A looming sense of dread hung over each episode like a fog, infusing the petty squabbles among the nasty nobles with a nihilistic futility. And then, just... not? Nobody cares to mention Winter anymore, and the White Walkers seem to content to use their zombie army to just sort of trot around north of the wall. Or at least, we assume, because we only see them once a season or so. Maybe they’ve got a charming family sitcom going on with their new baby. I was willing to forgive it in Season 2, and even in Season 3, but the bizarre lack of forward momentum in any larger plots is just exhausting.
Then you take the other series long structure: the looming threat that Daenarys Targaryen will return to Westeros with her Dragons/ships/armies/cities or whatever she seems to be amassing at any given moment. And yet she’s failed to interact with the rest of the show for five seasons, content instead to defeat enemies that were introduced in the same episode and engage in a whole lot of white savioring. We seem like we are finally going to get Tyrion, a character from the Westerosian plot, to at least speak to her, but of course he spent the entire last episode in a wagon talking about futility. Apparently, he’s on his way to some other city where he can pick up the road that will then take him to Daenarys. Get on with it.
It all leaves me feeling like the whole show is, despite appearances, more than a little timid. There’s creative storytelling, and then there’s just falling down on the job. You get your disparate storylines, you weave them together for dramatic effect, you set up your overarching threats and gradually bring them to bear in exciting ways. It’s not rocket science. I have an image of George R. R. Martin standing on the side of the road with his narrative stuck in a ditch, hood popped open and smoke pouring out.
“Dude,” one might say. “Your narrative is broken!”
“Yeah, it’s a shame,” he’d say.
And then you’d put the Daenarys in the Westeros, top off the White Walker fluid and the whole thing would start humming again.
One hopes that the narrative picks up momentum now that the showrunners can take the reigns from Martin, but they’ll have to axe about half of their characters to get some semblance of forward motion. When each character only gets about ten minutes of screen time an episode, there’s just no time to get anything done.
I think about Breaking Bad — that show had some of its own problems, but being boring was definitely not one of them. It’s instructive: the last season set us up for an elaborate cat and mouse game between Hank and Walter that would eventually boil over into a direct confrontation, and the audience settled into to watch the tension build. Then, bam: we got the confrontation in the first episode of the season and the show continued at breakneck pace from there. Not every show needs to drive with Breaking Bad’s unrelenting force, but Game of Thrones could definitely take a lesson: get on with it.