Game of Thrones
Rating:
Sky Atlantic, last night
More than a million people have signed an online petition to see the final season of Game of Thrones remade ‘with competent writers’. By the Seven-Faced God, please, no. Being bored to despair once is quite enough.
The most bloodthirsty, surprising, controversial, ruthless, ambitious, perverse and sadistically witty show on television has been reduced to a pile of pretentious tripe this year.
The finale – aired in the UK at 2am yesterday to coincide with the US screening – was 75 minutes of the dullest story ever told.
This whole pitiful spectacle couldn’t have been more stultifying if it had opened with the words, ‘This is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Democrats of Westeros’
Showing it at 2am was like serving liquid Mogadon. Tens of thousands of viewers must have fallen asleep before it ended. I watched it in the afternoon and still needed matchsticks to prop my eyes open.
At one stage, scheming Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), the last of the Lannisters, went around a palace table straightening the chairs. He was quite literally rearranging the furniture as he waited for other characters to arrive.
Amazonian warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) spent what seemed like five minutes writing up the obituary of her dead boyfriend. With a quill.
The most bloodthirsty, surprising, controversial, ruthless, ambitious, perverse and sadistically witty show on television has been reduced to a pile of pretentious tripe this year
And these scenes were lively, compared to the paralysingly dull speeches at a council of war, about the importance of democracy and the problems inherent with a hereditary monarchy.
This whole pitiful spectacle couldn’t have been more stultifying if it had opened with the words, ‘This is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Democrats of Westeros’.
The problem was that Game of Thrones, once so irreverent and mercurial, started to believe its own press releases. After winning more Emmys than any series in history, it imagined it was Great Art.
