Warning: It's all spoilers from here on out. Like many workplaces, the Ars Orbital HQ has been filled with many Game of Thrones proclamations these last six weeks. With the series finale now behind us, we've compiled other staffers' final thoughts below. For a full review of the series' final season, head to Jennifer Ouellette's thorough analysis : It's all spoilers from here on out.

A matter of time

HBO is well-known for canceling beloved series before their time, occasionally offering as recompense a couple of movie-length “episodes” after the fact to tie up loose ends for the diehards. If not for its mammoth budget and record-breakingly bombastic set pieces—plus, of course, the fact that the show is one of the biggest cultural touchstones of the past decade—the final season of Game of Thrones would have felt much like one of those hurried cancelled-show denouements, the kind where writers frantically check off boxes and smash round plot points into square holes.

Over much of its existence, Game of Thrones was nothing if not unhurried, occasionally to a fault. The show felt like something that was always going to be there, and conceiving of an ending to its many slow-moving plot threads and character arcs generally seemed so far away that it wasn’t worth speculating about. It was always going to be an unenviable task to bring such a mammoth work to any sort of conclusion, nevermind a universally satisfying one, and we have little reason to believe that the broad contours of the show’s ending differ drastically from George R.R. Martin’s vision. In fact, if the ending had been given time to breathe (at least a full season, but more realistically two), we might have had a successful ending (assuming some of the more galling decisions were also left on the cutting room floor).

Instead, this week we got what felt like a conclusion penned by people (understandably) desperate to move on to other projects and unsure how to make all the pieces fit. It’s just a show, of course, but I admit to feeling a bit of sadness over where we ended up.

But we did get an ending, and that’s something. Martin is almost certainly never going to finish the books—and now more than ever, I understand why.

—Aaron Zimmerman, Copyeditor

The McMartin

I don't pretend to have any experience with the complexity of a production like Game of Thrones. I don't pretend to know what it's like to be responsible for that much budget, that many jobs, and that big a chunk of a company's reputation and money. I'm sure the GoT showrunners sincerely believe in what they've created, and I'm sure they truly did the best job they could possibly do. I recognize how easy (and cheap) it is to armchair quarterback something so massive, and how it's easy to trivialize the challenges of a multi-year production like this.

But, still...it's not how I would have wrapped the series.

My complaints are the same as Jennifer Ouellette's —while the actions taken by the characters do indeed reflect years of foreshadowing, and they almost certainly match the plot information given to HBO by George R.R. Martin, several of the major character beats feel unearned. The most egregious example is Daenerys' turn to "madness," which could have used another full season's worth of warm-up. (Jon's murder of Daenerys, on the other hand, felt pretty appropriate—Jon is definitely one to make snap decisions when he thinks he's in the right.)

It's not that the ending was bad—the final season has some wonderful moments—but it feels a lot like expecting the Big Mac you just ordered to look like the Big Mac on the menu. The thing you actually get served has all the same stuff in it—the cheese, the pickles, the sesame seed bun—but it's just... kind of a disappointing burger-shaped lump.

But I was really hungry for a Big Mac, so I ate the damned thing anyway.

—Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor

Who has the time?

I saw the first season of Game of Thrones as a way to spend time with my soul brother Matt and because my wife had read the first book for her book club. I enjoyed it... but didn't feel a need to spend another 58 hours with it. As is so often the case, Sean Bean's death seemed like a good place to stop: a good man's moral compass proved inadequate to his milieu.

The precise moment I checked out was when one of Bean's kids was whaling on a tree with his broadsword and saying, "Let's smoke these punks who put Dad's head on a stick!" Then his mom said, "Nah, we need to bide our time and blah blah blah," with "blah blah blah" being the equivalent of "spin this out for another seven seasons." That's when I felt comfortable setting GoT aside. I have enough stress in my life without getting addicted to the regular dopamine fix that comes from following cliffhanger-based serial entertainment . I mean, seriously, when do the rest of y'all find time to practice your scales?—Peter Opaskar, Line Editor and owner of the sexiest accent in America