Also, did you Line of Duty fans notice the cameo from Laura Elphinstone who also almost ****** up Carmichael's investigation in LoD?

Test User wrote:Also, did you Line of Duty fans notice the cameo from Laura Elphinstone who also almost ****** up Carmichael's investigation in LoD?

Yep - how could you miss those ears ? I think they may be bigger than the dragon’s ears !

She’s also spent the week being gently roasted in Chernobyl. By radiation I mean

Congratulations to Jaime on growing his hand back last night as well

https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tv ... 41026.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Falcon wrote:Congratulations to Jaime on growing his hand back last night as well

https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tv ... 41026.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

How else is he supposed to drink that cup of starbucks coffee?

7 seasons of superbly written epic G.O.T ruined by the last 4 episodes and a colossally shite ending. For the love of god get these jokers off the next Star Wars film

Can’t argue with that

On 1st viewing i liked it

Vegas Claret wrote:7 seasons of superbly written epic G.O.T ruined by the last 4 episodes and a colossally shite ending. For the love of god get these jokers off the next Star Wars film

It's been going downhill since series four. I thought series 7 was the low point and much worse than the final one.

Brilliant ending. You can't please everyone but I think that's the only way it could have ended.

One of the things that used to set game of thrones apart was its pacing.

Last nights episode would have been a whole season back when the writers were staying true to the books pacing.

It’s a shame it felt so rushed in the end.

I agree. This season should really have been 2 (or maybe 3 seasons) but what can they do when the main writers want to go.

Inchy wrote:One of the things that used to set game of thrones apart was its pacing.

Last nights episode would have been a whole season back when the writers were staying true to the books pacing.

It’s a shame it felt so rushed in the end.

exactly this

Just waiting for Jon to get a raven

"Grey Worm's f*cked off now, you can come back lol"

Why did the dragon burn that chair instead of burning the man who killed its "mother"?

Why is there still a Night's Watch?

"You murdered fifty people, the sentence is death."
"Nah, I'll take the black please, I've always fancied learning how to knit and I need some peace and quiet to finish my novel."

Let's make bankrupt Bronn, the biggest sucker in Westeros, Master of Coin.

Grand Maester Sam, didn't he drop out and knock up his bird?

Grey Worm: "The sentence is dea..."
Tyrion: "Hang on you need to pick a King. Pick Bran, pick Bran."
Bran: "Okay, I'll do it, and you will be my Hand."
Tyrion: "Hehehehehe, a job I'm soooo good at."

"One of the good things about making Bran King is that he has no heirs so we're basically guaranteed a civil war when he dies."
"Great, so...errr what?"

"The North will remain an independent Kingdom."
"Great, so...errr what?"

Two days later...

Good start Bran...

Can’t get all these folk wanting it redone. It’s fiction. It was always going to have an ending that millions weren’t happy about. There were too many options.
Personally I’d gone for Arya, with an e/w on Samwell but I can live with it.
The biggest disappointment for me was how much of the final series was filmed in the dark. A very cheap trick to save on production costs.

Whilst in no way wanting it re-written, I was a little disappointed that John didn’t become the king! Does leave it open for future spin offs though.

Falcon wrote:Brilliant ending. You can't please everyone but I think that's the only way it could have ended.

It's been the best TV program I've ever seen but I've thought myself for the last few series it would have all ended at kings landing with a battle against the dead.
Still think that would have been the best outcome and although episode 3 of this series was fantastic ,overall
I'm slightly disappointed.

All IMO of course

Car crash for the last 2 seasons. Become everything George r r martin said he avoided. Hero armour, brainless characters, cliched drivel. I hope when he finishes the books he ignores the writing that dumb and dumber have laid down as the ending to his epic series.

I was pleasantly surprised by the finale, having read much of the criticism today. Nowhere near as bad as people are making out and I was fairly satisfied with the ending.

The rest of this season has been terrible though.

Not been critical really, but that was utter shite.

It's a really, really disappointing end to a great series, and it's such a shame.

Breaking Bad was superb from start to finish. Sadly GoT hasn't managed it.

Chances of George RR Martin finishing his books?

Zero

He's going to do a Robert Jordan sadly

The difference in the writing between the first 4/5 seasons to these is vast.

I enjoyed the last series but final episode did feel flat - it was never going to be easy to find an ending which everyone was happy about.
It’s been a brilliant programme and guess like most successful long running series the best episodes rarely occur in the final series - they become a victim of their own success and the money on offer is so vast that they literally lose the plot or the essence of the programme.

My gut instinct: absolutely no emotional engagement in that episode, and as someone who wanted a Shakespearean downer of an ending to the series, this fell flat by way of miserable closure of too many character arcs while not being a bleak/sober enough ending to hammer home the themes the story has tried to nail.

Analytically: Utter crock of $hit for an ending. I defended 803 (naively) thinking the expedited plot would pay off, me being one of those "reserve judgement until it's over" dickheads. Remove Jon's parentage and the story is basically no different. Jon isn't a wildling at heart, he merely loved Ygritte: that's the extent of his loyalty to the true north; beyond his sense of duty to the realms of men - which in his mind actually includes the lands North of the Wall - a duty which would have been fulfilled either way had he either been proclaimed king or martyred in the name of Unsullied/Dothraki notions of justice for killing Daenerys. That isn't the "bittersweet" ending as was so often billed. It's contrived b0ll0cks.

So many character arcs fell apart and were never resolved to any degree of satisfaction. It seems as though GRRM's novels were intended as a treatise on the politics of power and the inertia, even, futility of attempting to enact change. Well, good luck selling an audience on those themes when the characters' actions and behaviours stop making sense, because the audience isn't thinking about the themes anymore. They're thinking about wasted opportunities. Not sure how a once-robotic soldier became, basically, a fervorous Nazi concentration camp guard - despite his girlfriend's beheading; and he wasn't following orders after Daenerys had died: the plot unnaturally and unjustifiably contrived his hitherto relatively unseen wrath as a means to condemning Jon to the Night's Watch. Those are some weird meditations on how people handle grief. Besides, the entire Unsullied force, the force compelling Jon's exile, all paddling off to the Summer Isles before Jon even said his goodbyes? "See ya', lads, bye now...yeah, enjoy your trip, yeah, bye bye now, stay safe, yeah, right...now f.uck off" is a more natural ending to that scene. Tyrion declaring for Bran is contrived (okay okay, it's fiction and everything is contrived, so...uncharacteristic? unjustified? questionable vis-a-vis the internal logic of the show?) to the point it's immersion-breaking. That isn't subversion, it's idiocy. I liked Sansa's ending. There's some poetry in Tyrion's ending mirroring Tywin's role. Arya's ending, while foreshadowed, turned out to be quite plain and tropey. Overall, a complete waste of the best set-up in TV history.

Edit - mentioned contrivance a few times. My usage here is basically shorthand for unexplored or under-developed plot lines, motivations and character arcs, used to the point of implausibility in order to advance the narrative, just to be clear.

Edit 2 - and no spectacle or cinematic & photographic artistry which would usually, for me, make up for it. I think my summary for the way the entire show has petered out would be "please...please...I can only get so flaccid."

This has to be the best selling point George Martin could have prayed for. Millions will want to read the books when they come out, just to find out what really happens in the end.
Do you think he paid them to do s **** job.

And where the hell did all the Dothraki go?

Bunch of Barbarian uber pillagers, with an entire kingdom at their mercy and the one they choose to follow slain?

They'd have gone absolutely full on Einsatzgruppen on everybody but just disappeared.

And thats before you wonder the collapse in the plot lines of Ayra.

Thought she was the best thing in it, but as she was now a remorseless uber assassin, she's not going to turn into Christopher Columbus in the space of 1 episode.

This is very good btw

One second from every episode of GoT

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2019/05/21/on ... lgic-rush/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Lancasterclaret wrote:And where the hell did all the Dothraki go?

More to the point where did they come from?!

Ep.3 - We see everyone but a handful of main characters die. Inc surely all Dothraki who suicide themselves in a blind charge for a good visual.
Ep4 - "Half our army is gone", wait, what?!
Ep6 - Danny gives Nazi rally to massive army.

CombatClaret wrote:More to the point where did they come from?!

Ep.3 - We see everyone but a handful of main characters die. Inc surely all Dothraki who suicide themselves in a blind charge for a good visual.
Ep4 - "Half our army is gone", wait, what?!
Ep6 - Danny gives Nazi rally to massive army.

Good point

Maybe the cutting room floor has the bit where half the Dothraki go on a wide sweeping movement around the army of the dead but arrive too late to take part in the fighting.

Dragon turns up, finds "mother" dead, burns a chair.

Dragon had guilty conscience after burning so many buildings and people and wasn't sure what the handle was sticking out of Danni so used up the rest of the lighter fuel in distressing the chair . Hehe !!

I can see his thought process to be honest. Metal pointy thing has killed Mum so I'm gonna kill the chair made of all the metal pointy things. I hope my stepdad (cousin?) Jon feels avenged. He looks so upset.

The last two series have been about the destination, not the journey. The first 6 were about the journey.

I think they should have made it a ten season show and better depict how each character arrived at their destination.

I don't think the destination that everyone arrived at is the problem, it's the pace in which it got there. Just one extra episode in 6, 7 and 8 could really have set the scene. And it needn't be a fighting scene, just dialogue, which was the best part of it for at least four series, probably 5.

But I don't know how money in TV works. Who decides it's 6 episodes? Who decides the length of those episodes? Who pays for it? Etc etc

Falcon wrote:I can see his thought process to be honest. Metal pointy thing has killed Mum so I'm gonna kill the chair made of all the metal pointy things. I hope my stepdad (cousin?) Jon feels avenged. He looks so upset.

The thought process was "Yeah, let's have the dragon burn the Iron Throne, that'll be cool."

Like everything since it jumped the shark in season 5 it falls apart faster than a microwaved kebab if you think about it for more than ten seconds.

duncandisorderly wrote:But I don't know how money in TV works. Who decides it's 6 episodes? Who decides the length of those episodes? Who pays for it? Etc etc

100% the decision of the two producers/writers, David Benioff and Dan Weiss. GRRM believed the scope of the story in the books would have needed around 13 seasons in total, and at 12 episodes a season. Even in the streamlined TV version of the story, (which was still practically perfect up to and including S6) there were enough plot lines already set up for (finishing at) 10 seasons. Easily. HBO were hoping for 10 or more and were prepared to commit more money to those seasons. D&D, the showrunners, apparently wanted to finish at season 7, and a shortened one for that matter. They met at a compromise of finishing at 8 with the final two being truncated.

HBO are quite unique in that they leave their creative writers alone, facilitating the development of the show where needed with funding and marketing etc, while putting faith in the artistic vision of their shows' creators where other TV (and film) studios might step in, often overbearingly and to the detriment of the show. In some regards it's this ethos that allows HBO to smash it out the park so often, but it requires people involved to actually follow through. Upon hearing of the shortened final two seasons I was initially hoping that if the entirety of LOTR could be told in around 9 hours, the final two chapters in GRRM's story might be doable in 13-14 hours of screen time if the writing was solid enough. In hindsight, not the case. D&D got the call from Disney: they want a Star Wars film ready for Q4 2022. Just announced a week or two ago, but rumoured for a long while. Perhaps they wanted to make bank on their rep while they were hot. I dunno. Either way, while the episodes were still thoroughly enjoyable as spectacle, the showrunners abandoned everything that is great about long-form story telling through their greed, arrogance or incompetence.

A quote from at-the-time HBO programming president, Michael Lombardo, from 2015 when it was speculated the showrunners wanted to end at S7:

“This is the hard part of what we do. We started this journey with David and Dan. It’s their vision. Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely. If they weren’t comfortable going beyond seven seasons, I trust them implicitly and trust that’s the right decision-as horrifying as that is to me.”

Cersei’s nokes and mufty were the highpoint