Not a good day


Fresh off my horrible afternoon of bad entertainment, I’m going to have to watch another shitty piece of garbage in about an hour: the very last episode of Game of Thrones. This show has aggravated me for 8 years, and now they’re going to blow it up awkwardly in about an hour.

There are only two endings that I will find satisfying: 1) Benioff & Weiss are publicly beheaded, or 2) the peasants rise up and slaughter all the Lannisters and Starks and Whatevers and establish a democratic republic with no aristocrats. Both of these endings are fully compatible, and the best ending would combine the two.

I doubt I will be satisfied, and I very much doubt that Weiss & Benioff have the talent to come up with a better alternative.

Comments

  1. marinerachel says

    I don’t know how you’ve followed that turd for the last decade. By the second season, I was so annoyed by the constant tit flashing that was supposed to keep me glued to the screen that I threw in the towel. Much of the show’s content (in the first two seasons, at least) was maddening.

    Then along came Veep and I felt something worthwhile was back on HBO. Now that’s over and I’m sour about the ending not being executed the way I needed.

    I’m cranky about television right now. At least I’ve got What We Do in the Shadows.

  2. Rob Grigjanis says

    So why have you been watching the show? Why not go for a walk instead?

  3. marinerachel says

    Momentum accounts for a lot of the consumption of television series.

  4. Rob Grigjanis says

    marinerachel @3: I don’t think that’s how you spell “masochism”.

  5. Ichthyic says

    Let’s do the masochism tango!

    “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TytGOeiW0aE”

  6. archangelospumoni says

    Well well.
    I have not seen a single minute or even a second of this Game of Throngs thing. I have also never seen a single Seinfeld episode. I also do not have a faceplant, twitter, instagram, snapface, or snap anything else account. I have also not darkened any McDonald’s franchise door since 1977.
    I take pride in avoiding stuff like Game of Drones and instead, tonight I will do something like work on a Beethoven piano sonata or read a “book.” “Books” are cool.

    The act of avoiding stuff like Game of Thongs is what we call “a winning streak.” “Winning Streaks” are to be continued and prolonged with PRIDE.

  7. Rob Grigjanis says

    archangelospumoni @7: Do you float to work every weekday on a cloud of smug condescension?

  8. says

    archangelsospumoni your post comes across as someone telling all the plebes how superior they are to them. You should have just stuck with “I didn’t watch that crappy show either.” Especially since Game of Thrones was originally a book.

    Watching the series does seem to reduce common sense at times. The lead story on one of our supper hour newscasts tonight was about some local woman who’s been an extra on Games.

  9. vucodlak says

    I’ve never watched much of Game of Thrones, and I haven’t read the books. Just from what I’ve heard about there being a great deal of on-screen rape and torture, it doesn’t sound like something I’d enjoy. I don’t enjoy most “gritty and dark” entertainment, unless I’m convinced that the grit and darkness has some actual point aside from “realism.” Absurdly dark humor is another matter, even if it’s not necessarily intentionally humorous. I’ve chortled my way through a few hardcore horror novels.

    One HBO sci-fi/fantasy show I do like is Westworld, and I think Dolores and Maeve’s character arcs are particularly salient at a time when women are being stripped of their most fundamental rights. Maeve is a badass, and Dolores… I think we deserve a Dolores right about now.

  10. Sam N says

    There just seems to be a lot of inconsistency. SPOILERS DO NOT READ AHEAD IF YOU CARE.

    Arya turned Frey’s sons into a meat pie and killed a whole house, yet is still celebrated? How, how the F is she different than Dany other than writers flipped a coin? Unsatisfying. And her whole life was revenge but now she’s Christopher ‘f’ing Columbus (I mean, the shoe fits, maybe she will become a racist despot, too). Her ending was awful, I didn’t mind her transition into being a terrible human being, but the transition out was idiotic.

    Sansa declaring independence, yet the lords still accept a Stark? Wtf? Ugh, just so much stupid. After the nonsense last week of Dany burning the entire city (the Red Keep would have made so much more sense, and still had her slaughter civilians). What was interesting about the show (and I never watched because of tits, there are porn sites for that), were consequences for being good in a realistic brutal world. At some point, it just stopped making any sense. People’s motivations and the way they were framed initially seemed true and fair, in the end it was all just a bunch of inconsistent propaganda.

  11. gregsneakel says

    GAME of THRONES ENDING !
    Bob Hartley (Bob Newheart) again wakes with his wife Emily (Suzanne Pleshette) in a giant bed and tells her that he had just had a dream. He owned a hotel in a fantastic land of Castles and people and every week someone died. Then a dragon burned down his hotel, and he also died but came back as a Jedi force ghost to chat with a weirdo genius named Sheldon.
    Emily rolls back over and says “At least you will finally win an Emmy.”

    PS Spoiler: Larry, Daryl and Daryl survive.

  12. microraptor says

    I had a roommate in college who loved the show, so I ended up watching a couple of episodes.

    I don’t get what was supposed to be so enthralling about it.

  13. says

    I started reading the books about twenty years ago. Literally half my life so far. I read them at about the same pace Martin writes them so it wasn’t a big deal. I’m not a slow reader, I just took frequent long breaks and sometimes it would take me two or three years to finish one of them. Basically, I would reach a point where I was so infuriated with the shitty things that kept happening to good people I just had to take long breaks.

    I pretty much had everything figured out about halfway through “Dance with Dragons”. Trust me it’s all in there. You just have to know where to look.

  14. F.O. says

    I did like (liked?) the show.

    I found refreshing the fact that the events were dictated by what makes sense in an unjust world rather than by plot/message necessities.
    While far from perfect (for example, his portrayal of people with dwarfism is lazy) I think George R.R. Martin did a great job with his setting, his plot and his style.
    He describes a gritty fantasy setting where magic and the supernatural are poorly understood and genuinely scary, where dragons are really the thing of the legends and still they don’t drive the plot.
    The plot is advanced by a clash of history and cultures which makes it very, very human.

    I don’t like how the show indulges in violence porn and sex porn and I don’t like how that was part of its success.
    As the show progressed further and further away from Martin’s books, it turned dumber and dumber, more and more hollywood-blockbuster (plus the above mentioned porns) and the elements that made it worth watching withered and disapppeared, together with my ability to suspend disbelief.

  15. clevehicks says

    I absolutely agree with critics who say the show has suffered over the past few seasons without having the books to rely on.
    Nevertheless, I still think it is still a beautifully-made and often moving show.
    Even in the rather rushed final season, the antiwar and ‘power corrupts’ messages seem intact.
    Overall I liked it.
    They did kind of skimp on the White Walkers though. They seemed to have been turned into a bit of an afterthought.

  16. birgerjohansson says

    (off-camera): Daenerys uses dragon fire to cast a magic ring, and inserts part of her magical power into it. Since ordinary fire cannot destroy it, she cannot be permanently killed.
    Westeros a hundred years later. Aristocrats sit around a table drinking and talking. “Thank the gods we got rid of that uppity bitch”. Someone knocks on the door….
    Camera shifts to outside the palace. The windows are briefly lit from inside, to the sound of horrible screams.

  17. says

    I’ve never watched GoT. Nothing against it – just didn’t appeal to me personally. I’ve been waiting for the final season of The Man in the High Castle (which I absolutely adore) while enjoying Killing Eve.

  18. unclefrogy says

    I watched an episode early on in the first season but I just could not see the point. It was just ambition without any restraints or honor personal ambition with murder and death as important tools. I could see that there was not going to be any Runnymede in the future just an endless pointless struggle, I could not be less interested.
    it looked wonderful which I think is really am important aspect to the series’s success. It benefited much from the improvement in special effects. does anyone think it would be as successful in black and white as a TV stage play?
    uncle frogy

  19. birgerjohansson says

    Off camera in season five:
    Daernys casts a magic ring using dragonfire, and invest it with part of her magic power. As long as the ring remains, she cannot die permamently.
    And since Westeros has nothing else as hot as dragonfire, the ring cannot be destroyed.
    – –
    Fast forward a century:
    A group of aristocrats sit around a table, talking and drinking.
    “BTW, tänk the gods that uppity bitch died. She never respected the great houses”.
    (There is a knock on the door. The camera shifts to a view from outside the palace. The windows are briefly lit up from inside, as we hear roars and terrified screams)

  20. birgerjohansson says

    Off camera, sometime in season five:
    Daernys casts a magic ring using dragon fire, investing it with part of her magic.
    As long as the ring remains, she cannot be permanently killed. And since Westeros has nothing else as hot as dragonfire, the ring cannot be destroyed.
    – –
    Fast forward a century.
    Scene : Aristocrats sit around a table, drinking and talking.
    “BTW, thank the gods the uppity b*tch died, she never had any respect for the great houses.”
    There is a knock on the door. The camera shifts perspective to outside the palace. Suddenly, the windows are lit up from inside, and we hear screams followed by hideous roars. Then silence, followed by the sound of a woman’s steps …

  21. birgerjohansson says

    Godsdammit, should be “Daerneys”. The stoopid of the script writers is rubbing off on me. My bad.

  22. clevehicks says

    The more I watch clips of the final episodes of GoT, the more I think we are just a hyper-critical society, feeling obligated to react quickly before we even allow anything to sink in. For all this season’s flaws, there is some really good acting in there. And some very moving scenes. Do we all have to form immediate opinions about it? Can’t we reflect a bit? Can you imagine how JRR Tolkien would have fared in a ‘Twitter society’? Oh, the depiction of the ‘swarthy’ orcs is racist! The Aragorn parts of the Two Towers are boring! So few females! How cheesy for Gandalf to be resurrrected, garbed in white, no less! All of these complaints would have been valid of course. But we need to let these things breathe a bit before we … attack.