The fans have spoken, the creators have listened. Bring on Season 8.
Complaining about the quality of Game of Thrones is like cursing the gods – both old and new – because even when an episode isn’t firing on all cylinders, it’s still better than 95% of the other stuff out there.
The show isn’t beyond criticism, of course and while we’ll always worship at the altar of Westeros, it is perfectly fine to critique it.
For example, the entire storyline that revolved around Dorne was butchered and as for Season 7, the time-lapses were a massive issue.
Granted, the creators of the show were upfront when they said that things needed to be accelerated in Season 7 because The Great War was coming but there were moments when it felt like certain characters were travelling around the Seven Kingdoms via jetpack.
Again, this wouldn’t be so jarring for other shows, but given the fact that the previous seasons of Game of Thrones dedicated so much time to developing relationships on the road – Arya and The Hound, Bronn and Tyrion, Brienne and Jaime etc. – fans did feel a bit cheated by these ‘time jumps’.
We didn’t even mention Gendry running to The Wall; Christ, it nearly took Jon Snow an entire season to traverse the territory beyond The Wall. Gendry got there in a few hours!
Anyway, there are bigger things to deal with.
With the Season 8 premiere looming large on 15 April (2am on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV) it appears that the Game of Thrones creators have been listening to the fan feedback as Season 8 will be more faithful in terms of continuity and the time it takes for characters to travel from place to place.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, writer Dave Hill confirmed that the final season will make more of an effort to keep the ‘time logic’ of the show.
“You obviously don’t want any criticism of any kind. But with all the things we were balancing to set things up for Season 8, sometimes we had to speed things up within episodes,” said Hill.
“We had a lot of time cuts the vast majority of viewers didn’t catch. We could have a [title card] on there saying ‘Three Weeks Later’, but we did not. Sometimes when moving pieces around you’re going to cheat a little bit. [For season 8], we tried to keep more of the time logic rather than jet packs.”
Director Alan Taylor has previously addressed this criticism but in the same interview with EW, co-executive producer Bryan Cogman explained the decision to have ‘time jumps’ and rapid character movement in Season 7.
“We made a choice to ‘just get on with it’,” Cogman said.
“You can sit at home and do the math on how long it took to get the boats from Point A to Point B and whatever that was, yeah, that’s what it was. There’s always something everybody has got to graft on to and I guess that outrage was better than others, so I’ll take it.”
It hasn’t even aired yet but Season 8 has just got a little bit better.
Bring it on!
Clip via GameofThrones
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