There was something different about the seventh season of Game of Thrones. A common complaint was that the HBO show’s penultimate season felt like a significant change of pace from the previous six. It used to take entire seasons, if not more, for characters to travel from one location from the another. But in the seventh season, it seemed characters were sailing and flying across Westeros in half an episode, tops. Was it the result of the show growing past its source material? Were the showrunners rushing toward the big finale? How did the slow-burn fantasy series fans loved become much faster-paced all of a sudden?

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Game of Thrones producers responded to this criticism. For coexecutive producer Bryan Cogman, if the biggest complaint fans had was how fast ships sails, he’ll consider it as a job well done.

“We made a choice to ‘just get on with it’ last season,” 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.”

Showrunner Dan Weiss doesn’t pay much mind to these kinds of complaints, saying, “We don’t read a lot of that stuff. If somebody says, ‘I don’t like the way you do this,’ I have no idea what percentage of the people watching that opinion actually represents. If that opinion happens to surface louder on the internet, I still have no idea — it could be 1 percent of people that becomes an internet thing for 10 minutes and then it just seems like it’s more than 1 percent. But there’s no way of telling — nor am I interested in finding a way of finding out — how accurate those thoughts represent the broad spectrum of people watching. If you start thinking about that you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

Fans shouldn’t worry too much about those pacing problems popping up again in the show’s final six episodes according to writer Dave Hill, who says, “You obviously don’t want any criticism of any kind. But with all the things we were balancing to set things up for season eight, sometimes we had to speed things up within episodes. 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 eight], we tried to keep more of the time logic rather than jet packs.”

What did you think of the pacing of Game of Thrones’ seventh season? Let us know in the comments. Game of Thrones returns to HBO for its final season on April 14th.

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