GOT: Season 8

[Prediction? Pain.]

Yep, they are limping to the finish line. Varys was told he would die by the Red priestess and you would think there would be some type of meaning the way it was foreshadowed. He might as well have died from dysentery.

The white walker battle was cool but it would have been better if Jon had actually gotten to fight the NK and then the NK raises the dead because Jon might take him out. It has just been a lot of missed chances that people on the internet have written better plot points. You could probably take the threads on this message board and wrote a better season 8.

There was hints of Dany going Mad Queen but she has never just disregarded women and children. Any time she has been cruel, it is because the weaker have been treated wrongly and didn't have anyone to take care of them. It would have made more sense if she went and burned the Red Keep and it accidentally ignited the wildfire. Her flying around burning women and children just didn't make any sense except they needed a reason that Jon or Arya would kill her.

There are plenty of plot points over the past two or three seasons that have gone nowhere, been sloppily resolved, don't make sense, and are, well, dumb. But I actually have no problem with Arya killing the Night King. I've dug her character arc better than many others and for whatever reason her eventual role in the battle jived with my understanding of her journey in the show. Don't know how that event comports with the sprawling stage that the first five books were setting. But I'm cool with it in the context of the show. And compared to many of the other endings we're getting for plot lines and characters recently, it was a cinematic masterwork.

A semi-related digression:

When my wife and I were talking about the last episode and the way they fumbled Dany's turn to the dark side, I wondered aloud about the rarity of well-resolved, quality television shows. Game of Thrones has a very unique problem that most other shows, let alone shows of its caliber, don't have -- it's based upon an unfinished set of books whose intricate plot and voluminous cast of characters have, at least according to what little I've read about the topic, become unwieldy even for the author. But even without any of those issues to deal with, I think it's more the exception than the norm for a show of this quality to end in a way that is universally satisfactory.

I may be speaking for myself here, but I can't think of many shows of this caliber that were good throughout their entire run and that had awesome resolutions. Mad Men was stellar throughout most of its run and the last few episodes were probably appropriate enough, but I wasn't blown away like I was often earlier in the series. (And I didn't get much out of some of the side characters' stories, like, say, Betty's, in the final season or so.) The Wire ended well enough, I guess, but I felt that the last season was the weakest. Seinfeld ended with a wimper (and had been declining some anyway). The Simpsons was once pure genius week after week, but that ended long, long ago. The Sopranos lost me toward the end, too, and that doesn't even account for people's mixed feelings about the last episode. I dug MASH and the West Wing, but both faltered in their own ways down the stretch. The Walking Dead, Arrested Development, Twin Peaks, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, the list goes on. In fact, the only one I could think of while my wife and I were talking that was both great throughout and that had a personally satisfying ending was Breaking Bad. I thought that finale was just about perfect, all things considered, and that the show maintained its quality throughout the whole series. But even then, my wife disliked that show entirely, so the example didn't work for her.

I guess what I'm getting at is, it's really rare for a TV show to be really, really good throughout it's run. And it's even rarer when one of those shows ends in a way that's satisfying to all or most of its fans. It's just hard to do. (To digress even further, ditto for music. How many musicians have produced universally acclaimed albums consistently throughout an extended career up to and including their end? Not many that I can think of.)

All that said, the rarity of it doesn't make it any less annoying when it happens to a show that you like. It's a damn shame that they've gradually botched the last third of this series.

Come on, warg it up, Bran! Everything else may go to hell, but you still have time to fly your freak flag, buddy!