Nobody seems to want to say anything, but I think we’re all slowly coming to recognize an uncomfortable truth, and I think we need to acknowledge it. It’s painful, and I know no one wants to be the one to say it, so I’ll start:
I think maybe Game of Thrones is starting to suck.
The very idea that this could happen seems counterintuitive. Impossible, even. Whereas the normal course of entropy for a popular TV show is that it starts to lose steam around the second or third season, as the writers start to scrape for ideas and the actors start to turn the characters into caricatures, everyone watching Game of Thrones is fully expecting this show to keep getting better and better every season. No one has ever even considered the possibility that this show is headed anywhere but up.
Partly this is because of the construction of the show’s plot: Season 1 ended with the birth of the dragons, so the logical thing to expect is that those dragons are going to get bigger and bigger, and kick more and more ass as they do so.
Partly it’s because of the book readers out there, who have been smugly insisting to all of us non-readers for four and a half seasons now that we ain’t seen nothing yet, wait till we get to next season, oh my god you’re not going to believe what happens, etcetera etcetera. For a while, those people were right: season two was better than season one, season three was better than season two, and season four was better than season three.
But now the show is running out of track, as it has just about caught up to the books; each of the first two ten-episode seasons were direct adaptations of the first two 600-page books, and seasons three, four, and five have been a mishmash of the third and fourth books. Author George R. R. Martin has been slow to deliver the sixth book in the series, and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss seem to be holding off on getting into the fifth book because once they do that, there’s nothing left, so they’re kind of vamping, like a band would do when the singer accidentally splits his pants and has to leave the stage for a few minutes. Obviously the show has been changing things from the books all along: you can’t make a 10-hour omelette without breaking a few hundred pages of eggs. And anticipating that the show would outrun the books, Martin has told Weiss and Benioff where he plans to take the story, but without the (supposedly) rich text of the books it’s like the difference between a compass and a map.
Based on the first four seasons, and how rapturously they were received by fans of the books and newbies alike, it didn’t seem like it would be a problem. We were obviously in good hands. These guys have done such a masterful job of turning 800-page books into ten-episode seasons, it could only get better as they got better, right?
Instead, we are now six episodes into season five, and it’s hard to say how the plot has advanced, or in a lot of storylines, whether it’s advanced at all. It’s getting harder and harder to deny: this show is starting to suck.
In the second season of The Walking Dead, after the initial thrill of killing zombies wore off and the show had to start looking for other storylines than just “Get out of Atlanta alive,” it deposited the characters on a bucolic farm owned by a man named Herschel, where they settled down and argued about what to do next. And then argue some more. And then argue about the last argument. Despite being drawn from another supposedly rich source material (that I also haven’t read), the show ended up spending an entire season on that farm, having boring conversations among characters that, removed from existential struggle to run and hide and fight and kill, weren’t very interesting. As much as I loved The Walking Dead when it first started, my patience wore thin on Herschel’s farm and I quit watching before the end of the second season. (I am someone who tends to see TV shows through to the bitter end — I stuck with Big Love a season and a half after I stopped liking it — so this was a more radical move than it sounds like.)
Game of Thrones has a hundred times as many characters and twenty times the plotlines, but look at this season and it’s hard not to conclude that every one of them is stuck on Herschel’s farm: Tyrion began the season on his way to meet Daenerys — a development that everyone is looking forward to, as these are easily the two most popular characters — but six episodes later he’s still not there. Jon Snow became the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and wanted to join forces with the Wildlings — six episodes later that hasn’t happened. Daenerys arrived in Meereen intending to free the slaves and then move on to Westeros and reclaim the iron throne; two seasons later, she’s still there. Stannis was on his way to attack Winterfell; six episodes later, he’s still on his way to Winterfell. Arya went to Braavos to “become no one,” whatever that means; six episodes later, she’s still training to “become no one” and we still don’t know what that means. Brienne was aimlessly wandering the Seven Kingdoms looking for a Stark daughter to protect, and she’s still looking for a Stark daughter to protect. ETCETERA ETCETERA TIMES INFINITY.
I’m not saying I need this show to burn through plotlines like Empire or Nashville. But I honestly feel like if I had skipped all six episodes of this season and started the season with episode 7, the previouslies (you know, the two-minute recap at the beginning of the show that starts “Previously On Game of Thrones — the previouslies!) would be more than enough to know what’s going on, which means I’ve wasted six precious hours of my life on this season, hours I could have spent… um… hours I could have spent, like, watching another TV show, probably.
I am not at the point of bailing on this show yet; I don’t want to miss the inevitable dragon attack on King’s Landing. But the way things are going, that’s not going to happen until season 12, or six-and-a-half highly questionable rape scenes from now.