HBO





HBO

Mashable

Game of Thrones' short, penultimate season ended last night with a bang (heh), and I suspect that every one of you has a hot take about what went down. Regardless of whether you loved or hated this dragon-fueled season, one thing is obvious: the show has completely changed its approach to pacing, which has resulted in an enormous tonal shift over the past seven episodes.

Spoilers ahead.

Call it the CW effect. Watching Game of Thrones now feels like mainlining a bunch of CW shows like Arrow or Vampire Diaries—or even, sometimes, Jane the Virgin. The pacing is so fast that there are multiple reversals of fortune in one episode, and people go from "hey so we are kind of friends" to "we are totally boinking" in 40 minutes. I should say that I love a lot of CW shows, and I'm definitely not opposed to fast pacing. But part of Game of Thrones' appeal was a stately, complex layering of circumstances that gave us a sense of the tragic loss so many characters have suffered. So this season's choices felt like stylistic whiplash.

At times, season 7 felt like one of those montages you get during the credits to a movie, when you see rapid-fire snippets of what everybody did after the action was over: The Night King got his groove back with a cool blue dragon (who inexplicably does not have a frost breath weapon)! Daenerys and Jon aka Aegon finally got together! Littlefinger was brought up on charges of betrayal and paid the ultimate price! The Hound is still messing things up in a lovable way! Bran became an ultra wizard! And so forth. Except usually there is some kind of resolution before you get the snapshots of "life after the story ends."

That said, there are good reasons why season 7 had to move at breakneck speed. There was so much to resolve that the action was bound to feel a little pat and cheesy. I don't think any of us would have been satisfied with a more thoughtfully paced conclusion that dealt with the White Walkers while leaving the fate of Westeros ambiguous. So the writers had to cut some corners.

Suddenly, it's incredibly easy for characters to cross the entire continent of Westeros. Just jump on a ship or a dragon and go! A bunch of other stuff happened really fast, too: we found a cure for greyscale, a giant vein of dragon glass, and all the remaining Starks came together. In fact, all our separated characters came together in various clumps of super friends, resulting in last week's awesome zombie-hunting bromance banter, and, earlier, Oleanna Tyrell's snarky infodump to Jaime before she died. There was also the "everybody meets everybody" scene last night, with Cersei, Daenerys, Jon, Theon, and pretty much everybody else having a family reunion hell.

Seeing all our main characters in the same place is oddly satisfying for the same reason oddly satisfying videos go viral. We get a visceral satisfaction out of watching things line up perfectly, even when those things are crushed cans or pieces of tape.

But I don't want to make it sound like season 7 wasn't sheer bonkers fun. Once you let go of the idea that Game of Thrones is some kind of serious commentary on global politics (or global climate change), you can start to appreciate the show's new direction.

Fire everywhere

Watching dragons rip the shit out of everything meant that every shred of realism went out the window. And it looked great. There was burnination, there was a beautiful queen riding on the back of a fierce beast, and there was blue flame vs. the Wall. Even though the entire show was premised on the idea that eventually we'd get dragon action like this, I would argue that it couldn't happen without putting aside the careful, gritty tone of the first 6 seasons. Dragons make everything too easy, and part of what made pre-season 7 Game of Thrones believable was how damn difficult everything was.

The same goes for this season's focus on the army of the dead. Making the White Walkers major antagonists also undermined this show's previous attempts at realism—even though, again, we've always known the White Walkers lurked out there. Old Game of Thrones foregrounded cruel, greedy humans as bad guys; we understood them, and we saw ourselves in them. Now we get to sit back, relax, and enjoy flensing the crap out of some mindless skull dudes. It's like Dunkirk morphed into Pacific Rim in the final act.

Or maybe it's like Dunkirk became Downton Abbey. Because that whole "Jon is actually Daenerys' nephew and now they are making babies" reveal was...wow. I mean, we kind of already knew it was coming because Bran had a vision of Jon's birth last season. Still, last night's episode made it inescapably clear that Jon's mother was Lyanna Stark, Ned Stark's sister, and his father was Daenerys' older brother, Rhaegar Targaryen. Plus! Thanks to the now-rapid travel system across Westeros, Sam arrives from Old Town just in time to tell Bran that Rhaegar and Lyanna were secretly married. So Jon isn't even a bastard! He's Aegon Targaryen, namesake of the dude who came to Westeros from Valyria with his dragons a zillion years ago.

Admit it—you kind of love that you're watching a goofy show about dragons, undead monsters, and incestuous love. Or maybe you seriously hate it, because you were hoping that the show would have a hard, realistic ending where everybody dies of starvation because their monarchs wasted all their resources making war instead of preparing for the climate disaster of endless winter?

I think we all have to accept that we're watching a different show now. The final two half-seasons of Game of Thrones are going to be a silly, fun ride. You had 6 seasons to think about the deeper meaning of these characters' lives. Now we're to the part of the story where light fantasy takes over, and the ultra-fast pacing means there's no hard-bitten naturalist storyline to balance it out. So we're losing something, but we're gaining a swashbuckling momentum too.

We can speculate as much as we want about how this season could have gone differently if the writers had more time to unfold the story, but there's no getting around the fact that eventually it was going to be all firebeasts and skullmasters and incestuous tyrant queens. It's just too bad that we didn't get a little more of the monstery insanity earlier, so we could have had a bit more plausibility in the show's last few episodes.

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