#river is good. river when the plot has contrived a reason for her to wear a cocktail dress and use ''hallucinogetic lipstick'' is. mmmm. no

[waffliesinyoface]

watching season 6 of doctor who and, now im remembering why i dont like stephen moffat.

the man loves doing ""twists"" for the sake of doing a twist, he loves really stupid season long plots that should've been contained to one singular B-episode, and he loves making characters say silly things in a dramatic tone of voice.

[mst3kproject]

504: Secret Agent Super Dragon

Let’s move on to another oft-overlooked subset of MST3K – the Budget Bond films.  These are always very bad, but often a lot of fun if you’re in the right kind of mood.

Brian Cooper is Super Dragon, pulled out of retirement to find out who’s distributing poisoned chewing gum to co-eds!  Boy, if that doesn’t sound like the setup for a thrilling spy caper, nothing does!  The plot seems to revolve around a Dutch student named Christine Bruder, so Cooper goes to Amsterdam looking for her.  There, in between fucking his female colleagues and flirting with every woman he sees, he learns that Bruder was part of a plot to smuggle deadly drugs into the United States, hidden in fake Ming vases.  An evil conspiracy is planning to dope the free world on a chemical that will cause us to violently attack one another, and then… uh, I don’t know what happens after that, but it’s probably safe to assume it’ll end in the bad guys ruling the world.  That’s always the goal.

What’s with that spy movie cliché about the glamorous secret agent who sleeps with every woman he meets?  Friends, enemies, co-workers, random waitresses… our suave hero loses no chance to insert Tab A into Slot B.  He can’t walk down the street without having women throw themselves at him.  This trope has been parodied to hell and back in everything from Austin Powers to The Million Eyes of Sumuru and it’s actually sort of weird to see it played straight, as it is here.  As a PSA to my readers: never sleep with a glamorous secret agent.  He probably has like nine venereal diseases.

The weirdest thing in the movie is a facet of this trope: it’s the bit where Cooper and Agent Farrell are busily smooching when a man breaks into her apartment and tries to kill them.  They fight him off, and he commits suicide so they can’t question him.  Cooper then throws his body out the window, turns the soundtrack back on, and the couple just pick up where they left off!  Maybe it’s because I’m not a glamorous secret agent but I gotta agree with Tom Servo on this one: I don’t think I could have sex in the same room where I just watched a guy kill himself. It wouldn’t be right, you know?

I will say that this indifference towards death bothers me less here than it did in Master Ninja I, but the characters in Secret Agent Super Dragon have presumably have years of both physical training to kill and psychological coaching to deal with the consequences. Even so, just getting right back to the makeout session before the body’s even had a chance to cool seems unnecessarily callous.

The other trope I notice a lot of in Secret Agent Super Dragon is the death trap. Our hero’s life is threatened repeatedly but always in some contrived way that allows him a chance to escape. The first time he’s tied to a rail so some machine can come along and roll over his head.  He gets out in the nick of time and it crushes a can of red paint instead.  The second time he’s nailed into a coffin and thrown into the river.  He holds his breath and inflates a flotation device. The third time, he’s trapped in a building rigged to explode.  His buddy flies in with a helicopter.  Why doesn’t anybody just shoot this guy? Villains that stupid don’t deserve to take over the world!

Yet another thing that stands out as remarkably dumb is the cause the charity auction is supposed to support – ‘an International Hospital for Babies with Malnutrition’.  Okay, so, imagine you’re somebody whose child is starving, which probably means you’re dirt poor.  Instead of sending food to you, these people expect you to bring the baby to a hospital, which may be in another country, so that they can feed the kid there. Is the complete impracticality of this supposed to be our clue that it’s a scam?  The script never references that, though.  Did somebody just pick a bunch of charitable-sounding words?  Was it a bad translation of something that actually made sense in the original language?  Are the writers just that stupid?  We’ll probably never know.

Beyond that… it’s honestly really hard to say anything deeper about Secret Agent Super Dragon, because this is another movie that’s not very ambitious. It has some vague themes about drugs as the downfall of western civilization, but its characters don’t have appreciable arcs and there’s not much by way of symbolism for me to analyze. All it wants is to keep us mindlessly entertained for an hour and a half – and there’s nothing wrong with that, honestly, but Super Dragon isn’t even any good at it.  Trying to watch without Joel and the bots I found myself drifting repeatedly.  There’s the charming super-spy, the parade of blandly beautiful women, the evil mastermind with a vague plan to take over the world, the easily-escaped death traps… we’ve done this all before, and Super Dragon doesn’t even use the stereotypes in skillful or interesting ways.

The thing about spy movie tropes is they’re so easy to parody, and have been parodied so many times, that even somebody who doesn’t actually watch spy movies can spot them because we all absorb them through pop-culture osmosis.  Playing them straight therefore runs a very serious risk of boring the audience.  Of course Agent Farrell is working for the bad guys, because in a story like this, a character like her does – and of course she falls in love with Cooper and betrays her bosses for him.  None of this stuff is even really foreshadowed (except that Farrell dyes her hair – can’t trust those unnatural redheads!) but we still know it’s coming because we’ve seen the same shit in fifty other movies. The bad guy wants to cleanse the world so it can be made anew?  Been there. The movie wallows in misogyny but in all the same old ways, so I’ve got nothing new to say about it.

Throughout the film people talk about the ‘legendary Super Dragon’ but I don’t think we ever get a reason why Cooper’s so great.  Bond films begin with a breathtaking action setpiece to show us that our hero has nifty gadgets and balls of steel – Secret Agent Super Dragon begins with Cooper playing dead by the pool.  His most remarkable ability seems to be holding his breath for a really long time, and his gadgeteer, the kleptomaniacal Babyface, makes most of his gadgets out of literal toys.  I think this might be a joke about the obvious miniatures some of these movies use… but I’m not sure.  All I’m sure of is when that dinosaur waddled into the room I was halfway expecting it to demand the return of the Golden Ninja Warrior.

About the only place where the movie seems to accidentally brush by a real statement is in a moment that resembles a historical reference.  Cooper has infiltrated a conspiracy meeting (by wearing a half-mask that leaves his rather distinctive chin fully visible) at which the Big Bad, Mr. Lamas, is delivering an expository monologue: their factory in India is in full production of the drug, which will be shipped to America in phony Ming vases and bring the world to its knees!  If you’re going to talk about drugs making and breaking empires, China and India are where it happened.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the East India Company fostered opium addiction in China because they wanted cheap tea and because the British government had vague plans, which never came anywhere close to fruition, to add China to their empire.  The opium to feed this addiction was grown in India, often by farmers who would rather have been growing actual food but owed too much money to the EIC. This all led to the Opium Wars and a lot of other unpleasantness in which the British Empire came out looking even more like assholes than they usually did.  In a story about conquering the world through drug addiction, then, having the drugs created in India and slipped into something Chinese looks like a reference to history repeating itself.

It may also mean something else.  Secret Agent Super Dragon is relentlessly white, set mostly in a city in northwestern Europe, where conspiracies of middle-aged white guys drink booze and decide the fate of nations.  The actual work that makes this possible, however, is being done by people of colour in the east.  Not only does this seem to reference how western nations use other countries as battlegrounds and bargaining chips in their own power struggles, it can also serve as a reminder of something we frequently forget: a lot of what makes our comfortable lives possible comes from other countries, made by people who could never afford to buy it.  My eyeglasses, the sweater I’m wearing, and the chair I’m sitting on were all made in China.  Our entire economy depends on cheap foreign labor, and I wonder sometimes how much longer that can last before the whole thing falls apart.

Is any of this the movie’s intentional theme or message?  I doubt it. The historical reference seems to be just a ‘hey, look how clever we are!’ moment and the rest probably goes no deeper than ‘oh, no, our children are doing drugs!’, which has been on the verge of ending civilization since at least the thirties.  Secret Agent Super Dragon is just a dumb trashy Eurospy movie, and not even a very good one.  I don’t hate it, but mostly because it’s not worth that kind of effort.  The MST3K treatment renders it infinitely more enjoyable, especially when Tom and Crow do Jazz.

Agent Cooper was played by actor Ray Danton, who died in 1992, a year before the episode aired.  Probably all for the best.  I doubt he’d have been into all those jokes about how his character is perfectly smooth.

[the-desolated-quill]

The Time Of The Doctor - Doctor Who blog (So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Fingers And Custard)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Remember way back when I reviewed The End Of Time Part 2, I said I was afraid that Russell T Davies may have set a precedent for overly sentimental, ridiculously OTT, and utterly self indulgent regenerations that are more about the showrunner than the Doctor? Well if you thought David Tennant’s Lord Of The Ring’s style farewell tour complete with stupid choir music and oh so poetic tears trickling down the cheeks was unbearable, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Time Of The Doctor is fucking dreadful for the most part. Moffat takes everything that may have annoyed you about the RTD finale and then multiplies it by a factor of 10 before dolloping on a few more ladles of pretentious stupidity for good measure. Combine that with the usual Christmas special bollocks, and it becomes truly nauseating to sit through.

A mysterious signal from a backwater planet attracts an army of Doctor Who villains into its orbit, but before we can ponder on how similar this is to The Pandorica Opens, we’re whisked off back to present day Earth for Christmas dinner with Clara’s family. Clara needs the Doctor to pretend to be her boyfriend (do women still do that? I haven’t seen a TV show try that joke since the 90s), but there’s a complication. The Doctor is naked! Oh how awkward and embarrassing! Why is he naked?

The Doctor: “Because I’m going to church!”

Of course he is.

You know at this point I’ve become so accustomed to Steven Moffat and Matt Smith’s obnoxious bullshit that i don’t think anything will phase me anymore. The Doctor could walk in wearing a bunny girl outfit and I honestly wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It wouldn’t be funny, but I wouldn’t be surprised neither. Because that’s the problem with doing a random, wacky Doctor. After a while the randomness gets to a point where it paradoxically starts to become boringly predictable. I mean it’s not as if there’s any reason for the Papel Mainframe to have a nudity policy, and the characters wear holographic clothes anyway, so if it’s not funny and it doesn’t serve a purpose, what’s the point?

So off we go to church to meet Tasha Yem, played by Orla Brady. A sassy, flirty dominatrix type character who has a thing for the Doctor. Well gee. haven’t seen that before in a Moffat episode. What’s even weirder is not only is Tasha Yem virtually identical to every female character Moffat has ever written, but she also has a lot in common with one specific female character Moffat has written. She can fly the TARDIS, has absolute authority over the Doctor and there’s a reference to her inner psychopath. Was River Song originally supposed to be in this episode? Either way, it shows how unimaginative Moffat is when it comes to writing women.

At this point the thing that’s irritating me the most (apart from Matt Smith) is the whole greatest hits remix. We’ve had cameos from the Daleks and Cybermen, the Silence show up for no reason, and now the Weeping Angels are back. It seems Moffat is determined to squeeze all the scary out of them completely and it’s just bloody irritating. There’s no reason for any of them to be there really and it’s completely self indulgent. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Regeneration episodes should be about the Doctor. Never the showrunner.

And just when you thought Moffat was done mining through his back catalogue of crap, the bloody crack of doom shows up again. Turns out this is Trenzalore and on the other side of the crack is Gallifrey. The Time Lords want back in and need the Doctor to answer a simple question so they know they’ve got the right universe. Doctor who? Which leads to the main crux of the narrative. The Doctor having to protect Trenzalore from comedy Sontarans, Daleks that all of a sudden remember who the Doctor is now thus rendering Asylum of The Daleks completely pointless, and a wooden Cyberman with a flamethrower (I’m not even going to dignify that with a response). Armed only with his magic wand/sonic screwdriver, he must prevent another Time War from occurring. Oh boy. Where do we start with this bullshit? Let’s start with the Question itself. Why do the Time Lords need the Doctor’s name for verification? They have no problem listening to Clara’s pleas at the end. Why doesn’t the Doctor just tell them to stop broadcasting the signal and wait a bit while he deals with the mess they’ve caused? And what’s the point of the truth field? Either the Doctor wants to reveal his name or he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to lie about it. Plus Moffat ends up contradicting this by having the Doctor lie to someone about having a plan. So what’s the point?

At a push, this could have worked if the story focused on the people of Trenzalore. Get us to care for them and have the Doctor form a strong emotional connection with them, thus giving this siege some dramatic weight. At least put some effort into trying to justify why the Doctor stays so long (at one point he says he’s finally found somewhere that needs him to stay, but that’s bollocks. I can think of several places that could have benefitted from an extended stay from the Doctor). Instead Moffat seems more preoccupied with other matters. Like how many regenerations the Doctor has left and tying up the loose ends of his bullshit arcs. So the exploding TARDIS was the result of some rogue chapter of the Paper Mainframe trying to kill the Doctor. So they planned to save the universe from another Time War... by destroying the universe? 

And the Silence are genetically engineered priests that make you forget your own confessions?... Doesn’t that make confessing your sins somewhat redundant once you’ve forgotten them?

And then there’s the whole Doctor dying crap. If the BBC had any balls at all, they would have made this the last ever Doctor Who story. The reason Robert Holmes introduced the 12 regeneration limit way back in The Deadly Assassin was in order to impose a limitation on the show. It would still have some longevity, but at the same time it wouldn’t be infinite and threaten to outstay its welcome. After the Thirteenth Doctor, that’s it. Now thanks to the retroactive inclusion of the War Doctor and the Ten clone we got in Journey’s End, Eleven is to all intents and purposes the last ever Doctor. And yeah. Why not? 50 years is a good solid number to end a show on, right? 

But the BBC clearly have other plans.

A more naive member of the audience might think all the Doctor’s speeches about how all things must come to end might be setting us up for the grand finale to the whole thing, but naturally that’s not what happens. Of course Moffat finds some contrived way to extend the regeneration limit indefinitely. Doctor Who is the BBC’s biggest cash cow. They’re not going to let it go quite so readily. So Clara demands that the Time Lords save the Doctor like the spoilt, arrogant, entitled little prat that she is and hey presto, the Doctor can now blow up spaceships with his laser hands (God knows what’s going to happen when Peter Capaldi regenerates. He’s probably going to end up blowing up a small moon).

And don’t get me started on the avalanche of plot holes this opens up. So if the Doctor never died at Trenzalore, how did Clara jump into the wound in time to save the Doctor? Without the wound in time, there’s no Oswin or Clara in Asylum Of The Daleks and The Snowmen. Without Oswin and Clara, the Doctor would never have tried to find present day Clara in the first place. Without Oswin and Clara, the First Doctor would never have picked the right TARDIS back on Gallifrey (ugh). Good luck trying to work out the Eleventh Doctor’s canon now because Moffat has become so liberal with the timey wimeys that the whole thing has just descended into a mindless mess.

And even after all that, The Time Of The Doctor still isn’t finished yet. Oh no. Instead of Peter Capaldi walking down from the tower and into the TARDIS, we get another sappy monologue from Matt Smith about how change is good and how he’ll always remember when the Doctor was him, Murray Gold goes into overdrive with his violins in an attempt to drown us in slush, Clara starts crying her eyes out for no bloody reason (seriously, why the fuck is she crying? She knows what’s going to happen. Hell, she was the one that made sure it would happen. Dozy cow), and just when you thought this couldn’t possibly get any worse, fucking Amy shows up! For God’s sake! No doubt the Moffat fans were crying gallons of tears over this. I was too busy sticking a cushion over my face and trying to pretend this wasn’t happening. Honestly, I have never seen such cringeworthy, self-indulgent drivel in all my life. They should have replaced this with Steven Moffat giving himself a self congratulatory blowjob. It would have had the same effect.

So after all that bollocks, is there ANYTHING I liked about The Time Of The Doctor?... At all? Well... I did quite like Handles. He did make me laugh a few times and I was genuinely choked up when he died. Yeah, when you’re more upset over the death of a fucking Cyberman head than the Doctor’s, something has gone spectacularly wrong. I fucking hated this episode! It’s infuriating, self indulgent, utterly moronic and extremely dull. I was so fucking bored by this episode. I didn’t care about anything that was going on. I didn’t care about Trenzalore. I didn’t care about the Time Lords potentially returning. I didn’t care about the Doctor’s impending death. I didn’t care because Moffat never gave me a reason to care. As usual he’s more concerned about his convoluted series arcs and showing everyone how clever he is rather than telling an engaging story. And the most exasperating thing of all is this isn’t even Moffat’s last series. He’s still got the Peter Capaldi era to ruin yet. So why is he bombarding us with this fanwank tribute to himself? Are we going to have to go through all of this again when Capaldi regenerates this Christmas? Jesus Christ!

I suppose I should end with my final thoughts on the Eleventh Doctor in general. I think I’ve made my views on him pretty clear over the course of these reviews. I’ve got nothing against Matt Smith. I’m sure he’s a great actor and a lovely guy. I did kind of like him in his first series. It was a nice blend of quirky and serious. What really got up my nose was when they started to ramp up the goofiness to the point where I just wanted to hurl something large and heavy at his head in a desperate attempt to shut him up. He got so annoying and so irritating that by the time we got to The Time Of The Doctor, I was more than ready to see the back of him. And look, if you like Matt Smith’s Doctor, that’s fine. More power to you. I’m genuinely glad you got more enjoyment out of his Doctor than I did. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

[gregellner]

Promo picture by HBO.

This is unusual for me, but nonetheless I will be reviewing the entirety of the seventh season of Game of Thrones in hindsight, as it is panned out.

In order to keep this all from seeming like nothing more than one side, I will start by acknowledging that yes, there are some elements of this season that I enjoyed. Two parts in particular: Euron Greyjoy’s ambush of his niece Yara’s fleet and Theon Greyjoy’s brutal hand-to-hand fight with a nameless Ironborn raider.

The ambush was well lain out, and made military sense. Euron managed to catch the Dornish-Greyjoy fleet (hereafter called the Targaryen fleet) unawares, and the fight between his men and those of the Targaryen forces included casualties on both sides. Furthermore, unlike the attempted rescue of Theon in Season 4, the main antagonist of this arc actually is hit and suffers some damage, with his armor having meaning beyond being just metal clothing that has been ignored since approximately Season 4. Furthermore, he got rid of some characters who had grated on fans, though admittedly this is more a case of cleaning up the showrunners’ own mistakes than actually good writing in its own right.

Theon’s duel showcased a different kind of fight, one of pure endurance. There is nothing flashy about the hand-to-hand beatdown on the beach, just blood, punches, and kicks. However, the fight goes to show something that many recent fights have ignored: giving character progression in a meaningful way, with the actual possibility of death for a major person. Theon’s castration proves essential to this fight, giving a mixture of triumph, brutality, and even humor to the fight itself.

However, there is only one word that I really need to say when discussing the rest of Season 7 of Game of Thrones.

 Failure.

I see this entire season as a failure on almost every level. While there are a few good character moments, they are few and far between, with far more time spent treading water than actually moving forward in the plot. In order to best articulate this process, I will go into depth on the different elements of the plot, and its different developments, especially how they are presented (which is one of the most important things about the plotting).

First, I’ll go into the general problems that have cropped up in the season, then I will turn to specific elements.

  Fast Travel

For those who are unaware, the phenomenon of “fast travel” is a concept in video games where a player can move across a distance that would normally take a very long time (perhaps half an hour to an hour at times, if not more) in the space of about a minute with a single button press, only having to wait through a loading screen before they are spontaneously at their destination.

This phenomenon seems to have been injected into nearly every single force in Game of Thrones for this season, all in the name of moving the plot along faster. Euron Greyjoy can travel around the entire continent of Westeros over the course of fifteen minutes. A call for aid can travel to the far south of the map and allow for travel right up to North of the Wall (with time for a new outfit to be tailored) in perhaps the same amount of time, if not twenty minutes.

This type of problem would not have a significant effect on some fantasy stories. After all, the only thing anyone needs to say is that “a wizard did it.” The issue is, there is no actual mechanism to allow this kind of speed. In every other season, people would be hard-pressed to find transportation from one place to another. In fact, the entire reason the Red Wedding even came up in the first place was a lie about a deal that had allowed for easy passage of the Northern troops south. If this kind of mechanism were in place, we wouldn’t have ever needed to see the Freys or their castle in the Twins, instead able to just move the characters off screen and magically have them be on the other side of a major river.

The effect is similar to one people had in hindsight about The Lord of the Rings: if Frodo and Sam could have just used the eagles in the first place to just go right to Mordor, why walk all the way and allow so much death? Because it wouldn’t make a good story, yes, but it still relies upon a completely new system that could, logically, have existed earlier. But I digress.

In fact, the only army that doesn’t seem to have that kind of speed is that of the White Walkers. If they did have it, this season would have been over before it began, and, heaven forbid, the Night King would have had to actually do something more than once in a season.

 Plot Tailored to the Audience, not the Story

While television does have its own limitations, they should be tailored to making a good story, not just a vast spectacle or a shocking drama. The seventh season of Game of Thrones seems to fall into the trap of tailoring character actions to a plot for “intensity,” rather than creating an organic, interesting plot through the actions of the characters themselves.

When questions are asked in this section, there is an implicit response you should assume: “Because the showrunners said so.”

  Blackwater Rush

The massacre at Blackwater Rush is highly praised by many a viewer, but there remains a serious issue that people tend to overlook: how would she even know that the Lannister-Tarly forces were still there? How would she get her own forces, her Dothraki horde, across the entire country in time to catch up with them? And perhaps most stupidly, why would she go into battle in nothing more than her regal dress, rather than, say… attempting to wear any sort of armor? Is she aware of the plot armor she has? I will discuss “plot armor” below.

  Great Wight Hunt

This hunt, first brought up in Episode 5, then carried out in Episode 6, is far and away the most infamous example of the plot being tailored to television audiences rather than even the most basic logic.

As anyone who knows about zombie apocalypse stories would know, the idea of grabbing a single member of the undead from a horde is virtually impossible without alerting the others, especially without it being killed. Jon, who has actually faced wights, would have known this and accounted for it, even told the others how stupid of an idea it was, had he been given an ounce of actual logic to use. And, surprise, surprise, it doesn’t go according to plan. Catching one wight led to a bunch of wights seeing the group, followed by some more, and then an entire army. Who could possibly believe this was a good idea?

On top of that, the reasoning for the hunt is completely pointless. If the idea is to bring back a single wight for Cersei Lannister to learn of the imminent invasion, she, being a narcissist par excellence, would ignore the threat and let other people handle it just so that she could gain more territory for herself on the throne. Again, surprise! This is exactly what happens. On this count, Tyrion, the one who has the most experience with Cersei, would have been the one to say how stupid of an idea it was… but the entire plan was his idea in the first place!

Let’s not fool ourselves: the real reason this plot even happened was because of the need for a traditional major event for the penultimate episode of the season. However, it failed at even that, owing to the imperviousness of plot armor (again, to be explained below).

  Sansa and Arya’s “Plan”

Some believe the “plan” that Sansa and Arya Stark had to trap Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish was very clever in hindsight, but that’s all it was: a good idea in hindsight. The actual plotting of the scenes leading up to the revelation in the season finale was idiotic at best, and nonsensical at worst. The two sisters would have had no reason to keep up their act of hostility to one another in private, especially given there is little indication at all that Littlefinger has actual spies in Winterfell. All of his “knowledge” is that which he gains by himself in this season. The only reason to keep up the charade is for the sake of the audience, which, again, does not actually exist in the world. Their scenes play out, especially in hindsight, as if they were acting out in a play to go off of reactions… to something that isn’t even there.

This all could have been solved by using a character with had almost nothing to do this season: Brandon “Bran” Stark. Given his omniscience, all that was needed was a single line after one of the Sansa-Littlefinger conversations about how the former’s brother wanted to speak to her, with her going off to talk to him off screen. That way, it wouldn’t come across as nearly as contrived as it was.

  Impervious Plot Armor

“Plot armor” is the phenomenon of people in a story surviving seemingly impossible, if not highly improbable, situations because they are important to the plot later on down the line, storyline logic possibly being ignored in the process. Game of Thrones once prided itself on the idea of nobody having such immunity, but over time, this kind of story-driven immunity has become more and more prominent. Though the most infamous case was Ramsay Bolton, who could wade into combat against heavily armored foes shirtless and come out fine, this season has given a serious case to all major characters with important roles. The most glaring cases of this phenomenon come in the form of the assault on Blackwater Rush (the battle of the loot train) in Episode 4 and the infamous “Great Wight Hunt” in Episode 6.

In the case of Blackwater Rush, not a single person with a name died in the entire battle (if one could call that massacre a battle at all). The only named deaths came after the fight was over, and were limited to Randyll and Dickon Tarly (who each barely had a role in the story in the first place). On the other hand, Jaime Lannister was tackled into inexplicably deep water in heavy plate armor, which should have been enough to drown him, and not only managed to get away more or less completely unscathed, but apparently managed to, with Bronn, swim the entire length of the apparent lake with said plate armor on, while underwater.

The Great Wight Hunt is even more egregious. There are a grand total of three deaths, and only one of them is even a member of the crew on this completely idiotic plan in the first place. Jon not only offers to give his White Walker-slaying sword back to Jorah (despite the fact he could have tried to do this before leaving Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, outside of wight country), but is saved from imminent death no fewer than four times, including somehow killing two wights off-camera without a single weapon in hand in the freezing water (what hypothermia?). Tormund is seemingly nearly killed, and put into a position where he could logically die, only to be saved by Sandor Clegane because… reasons. Gendry is sent running back to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea without any weapons whatsoever, and his only real injury is exhaustion and perhaps cold. Jorah seems to almost fall off of the back of Drogon, only to be completely okay, negating that threat.

The only three deaths in this hunt were all more or less inconsequential (dragon-turned-undead be damned).  Thoros of Myr lost any relevance he really has when the magic system he uses spontaneously changed for the sake of spectacle (more on that far below), with his only real use thereafter being a means to bring Beric back from the dead if he falls. However, there’s only one season left, and Beric doesn’t really add much to the plot anyway, so who cares? Benjen dies as he unlived: appearing out of nowhere to save someone before leaving the narrative altogether without much importance. What interest he did have, from Jon finding out he’s still around (which he barely even mentions) to his employers the Children of the Forest (who are seemingly all dead), is gone, and his plot went pretty much nowhere. Viserion… while there is an interesting thing of an undead dragon (which can somehow still breathe blue [even hotter] fire despite fire being deadly to wights because… reasons), both Viserion and Rhaegal are barely even characters. Their entire role in the story has been “the other two dragons who aren’t Drogon,” so honestly, he wasn’t much of a loss. If anything, he’s marginally better undead (or a White Walker, or whatever) because he has something to actually distinguish himself. The plot didn’t lose anything by having him die; it gained an actual character, and one with somehow less personality than anything else (which given it’s in an army of thoughtless wights, is really saying something).

 Modernization of Symbolic Unimportance

 As said by Tywin Lannister in the “Histories and Lore” video for the Westerlands, “Fools look at the Westerlands and see gold. Fools see our wealth and call it strength. Gold is just another rock. The Westerlands are strong because of House Lannister. From strong leadership comes unity. From unity comes power.” In fact, the strong leadership shown by House Lannister is not because of their gold, but in spite of their lack of it. Their mines long since went dry, but they manage to keep an air of importance due to Tywin Lannister’s careful, ruthless politicking.

The fall of an ancestral home is seen as a major defeat in most seasons. The fall of Winterfell to the Greyjoys and then the Boltons meant the end of House Stark. Brynden “Blackfish” Tully died holding the line against invader to his own home of Riverrun rather than abandon it.

This season does away with all of that. Jaime sacrifices Casterly Rock to Tyrion, and both of them agree on it being a strategically beneficial move, for the sole reason of the gold mines having run dry. The importance of the fort was not the gold alone, but its symbolic power. By abandoning it, Jaime should have lost favor, as he would have shown its unimportance (and by extension his poverty) to the world, but none of that happens at all.

The increasing importance of the Iron Bank of Braavos can be excused as Cersei dealing with things very differently from her predecessors, but the overt decision to abandon all pretense of wealth doesn’t make any sense from a medieval perspective that the show is ostensibly supposed to use.

 Romanticizing Incest

Earlier seasons of Game of Thrones, while treating some incestuous couplings as loving, did not shy away from the idea that they were disturbed and often resulted in problems, the most commonly cited example being House Targaryen, with Cersei Lannister’s relationship with her twin brother being more up front in how it was shown.

In this season, however, the budding romance between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, unknowingly nephew and aunt, is treated as a true loving pair. The fact that they seem to have absolutely no chemistry aside, their relationship is disgusting to some in a way only outstripped by Lysa Arryn’s… mothering of her son Robin in earlier seasons. Is this relationship supposed to suddenly be okay because it is between two protagonists? Is incestuous romance only looked down upon when it is performed by villains? These seem to be indications by the showrunners.

  Character Developments

 Euron Greyjoy

While the newest King of the Iron Islands is a fun character in his own way, mostly in how he seems to be a more fallible version of what Ramsay Bolton had been before, he has an enormous amount of logistical problems.

First and foremost, his fleet of a thousand ships. Not only did he manage to have them made on a collection of islands that has almost no trees, but he managed to make them all in the span of…what, a week? A month? Not only that, but the ships are purported to be better than the original ones, again without any supplies whatsoever. Raiding can only justify so much.

On the other hand, we have his sneak attack on the Unsullied at Casterly Rock. The fact that his massive fleet that could be completely missed until the first shot is fired stretched credibility far beyond the breaking point. While their assault on the Targaryen-allied fleet commanded by Yara Greyjoy is possible, even well done, this one smacks of incredible stealth skills that do not at all mesh with the borderline psychopath Euron. Not only are his ships still black-sailed, but they are able to sneak up on the Unsullied fleet in broad daylight, rather than using the cover of a storm for a sneak raid.

The only possible excuse for this Euron ex Machina would be the Unsullied being one of the worst armies in the entirety of the world (which, given their incompetence in almost every single encounter they are a part of aside from the one in which they were initially freed, I can’t really deny), but even that discounts the idea of leaving even a single scout.

  Jaime Lannister

Jaime Lannister, infamous as “the Kingslayer,” is portrayed in an extremely bizarre way in this season. After the death glare he gave to his sister in the previous season finale for doing the exact same thing that he had become an oathbreaker to avoid, he spends the entire season, barring the finale, working with her. The only real attention given to the thing that should, by right, have him defecting, otherwise quitting, or outright killing Cersei to save the kingdom is for him to imply he might be afraid of her, after saying he does not hate her (despite his expression in the previous season showing that’s blatantly untrue).

Every single thing about Cersei’s treatment of Jaime makes him seem deliberately weak. She implicitly threatens his life with her “never betray me again.” She ignores his quite reasonable comments about the danger they are in and how the Lannister dynasty would only last a single generation. For all of his talk of being in love, he seems more like a kicked puppy than an actual threat, let alone someone with any real agency.

Yes, he managed to break free in the season finale, but it seems to little too late, and should have happened in the start of the season, even if it meant being rid of him for the majority of the season. In the very least, he should have died in Blackwater Rush to avoid this stupidity from continuing (as mentioned above under plot armor).

  Brandon Stark

When it comes to Bran Stark, it’s easy to say that the actor is playing a completely different character from the previous seasons, and not one that is really all that interesting. Rather than being afraid or uncertain about… anything, he seems to have had all of his actual personality removed.

Of course, that seems to have been the point in the story, but the presentation is extremely poorly handled. While Bran could reasonably have had this personality if he had shown it before, he seemed exactly the same as always when he absorbed all of the memories of the three-eyed raven. As such, Meera Reed’s “revelation” that he “died in that cave” rings hollow, and her surprise at his lack of emotion is understandable, but for all of the wrong reasons. All that needed to be shown was him having this personality after he escaped from the cave in Season 6, when he met up with Benjen Stark. However, this apparently had not been used, and from the sounds of things, was not even considered at the time.

His new identity as “the three-eyed raven” (a designation that makes absolutely no sense for him given his lack of any actual connection to that identity beyond having similar memories and powers) is one of the most stereotypical fictional children: the creepy child with supernatural powers. There isn’t anything really interesting about this archetype, only how it is used, and the showrunners seem to be unable to find any real use for him beyond “be creepy and stay in the corner” until the season finale. Even the chance to delve into the history of the previous three-eyed raven, to learn of his work with the Night’s Watch and his relation to the Targaryen family as Brynden “Bloodraven” Rivers, is not even given lip service, which would not be so grating if the show didn’t take its time to repeatedly show how nobody has any idea what the three-eyed raven even is.

  Daenerys Targaryen

If there is one character I am irritated by above all others, it is Daenerys Targaryen. She is the epitome of the creator’s pet to me, someone for whom the narrative bends over backwards to justify every action, and whom fans actually agree with. Actions such as roasting the Tarly heads of house alive are seen as justified because she “gave them a choice” and going back on her word would cause the threats to lose their menace, ignoring the fact that she is the one who came up with the choices in the first place, making her responsible one way or another. It’s hard to take someone seriously as a heroine when their entire character revolves around their own self-importance, such as her “courting” with Jon Snow.

Every single action since the end of Season 2 has resulted in victory, even if she is momentarily captured. When someone is rarely in even the slightest bit of danger, why bother to think they have a bad time anymore? It’s the world of Game of Thrones, after all, and if you don’t have a serious amount of bad luck, you’re probably either disconnected from the plot altogether or you’re one of the villains, and even the latter isn’t a guarantee. Her loss of Highgarden, Dorne, and the Unsullied are glossed over quickly in Season 7 by her aforementioned attack on the loot train going through Blackwater Rush, where her Dothraki horsemen easily slaughter the Lannister and Tarly pikes (which are specifically engineered to hold back a cavalry charge), making any additional army seem superfluous (after all, she doesn’t even seem to need to wear armor to a battle, unlike literally everybody else). The assault is also praised for being “awesome,” but it involves the destruction of food stores rather than bringing them back to the people from whom they were stolen, given Jaime had already discussed the fact that all of the gold had been sent to King’s Landing.

Case in point is the reaction to the end of the aforementioned Great Wight Hunt. Her loss of Viserion (who is barely a character, more a prop alongside Rhaegal next to actual important dragon Drogon), the first real important loss since Season 2, actually gained her the loyalty of Jon Snow, a man who explicitly would not bend the knee to her for sake of Northern autonomy and his place as their king. Contrast the doings of Robb Stark, where his biggest mistakes led to the defection of segments of his army and ultimately led to the vast majority of them dying in the Red Wedding. While he lost everything, including his standing in the North, Daenerys gains even more forces, loses a dragon that hadn’t even done anything important in the series, and as shown by the very next episode, didn’t even permanently lose the Unsullied, who are easily brought back without fuss.

The worst seems to be the fact that enormous amounts of dialogue are about her beauty, benevolence, and overall perfection, including how she is totally not like her father even when she does the exact same things he would have done. It’s not as if I am asking for the showrunners to say she is the worst person ever. But admitting she is flawed in the show and showcasing her as just as much “not always right” as everyone else would be a nice change of pace, especially when it comes to such things as getting Jon Snow, who couldn’t possibly care any less about allegiance to foreign queens over his work with the North and staving off the end times, to bend the knee to her.

At a certain point, it becomes entirely plausible that the characters in the story will, one and all, bow down and accept Daenerys Stormborn as their goddess forevermore, such is her perfection in the story’s eyes.

  Night King

On the surface, the idea of the Night King (apparently created by the showrunners, and distinct from the Night’s King of myth) is disturbing. On paper, he is a silent villain who has lived for eons, capable of raising an army easily and a harbinger of an apocalypse. However… what has he actually done? His accomplishments to date have been killing a defenseless old man, standing in place, walking a little bit, riding a horse slowly, raising White Walkers and many wights, possibly bringing a winter storm, and throwing a javelin. He hasn’t even gotten into a single fight, and on the whole, he’s become more of a plot device than an actual character.

His performance in the penultimate episode of Season 7 showcases some of the veritable James Bond villain qualities that this entity has. He has the heroes at his mercy for what seems to be hours, stuck on an island in the middle of a frozen lake. However, as he showed earlier in the season and was explicitly stated by Jon in the same season, he does not merely come with the storm, but rather he brings the storm. If he could summon up a winter blizzard to cool down the water to the point of it becoming ice again, he could have done so, thereby killing all of his enemies with his own forces before they could be rescued.

The use of his ice javelin just makes things worse. First, he could have used it earlier to, if he could not freeze the lake again, at least throw and kill Jon and perhaps some others, who could be seriously injured by such a strike, especially in the midst of battle with wights or exhausted from the cold. Second, his choice of dragon to kill was rather nonsensical, both from the perspective of the character and from the perspective of the plotting. Drogon is the only important dragon in the entire show, let’s be totally clear on that. Everything important that ever happens with a dragon is far more likely to be his doing than that of the other two dragons, to the point that many viewers forget their names and cannot tell them apart easily. He is the one who is most battle ready, and the one who is burning the wights alive in the center of the battlefield, not to mention the only one of the dragons who seems capable of easily carrying all of the remaining heroes and the captive wight. However, the Night King decides, for some reason, to throw the javelin of ice across the entire battlefield to kill Viserion, who, along with Rhaegal, has had almost no importance to the story. If anything, Viserion has more personality as a member of the undead than as one of the living, and losing him feels more like a boon than a detriment. If the showrunners wanted to make an actual impact on the plot in terms of a loss of forces, they could have had Drogon be the one who is killed instead, especially since he is the biggest, and thus the most threatening.

  Rhaegar Targaryen

Rhaegar Targaryen’s annulment of his marriage to Elia Martell is treated in a very bizarre manner. Rather than following the idea of love ruining the realm to its logical conclusion, the showrunners seem intent on the idea that Rhaegar is the one in the right, having his marriage to Lyanna Stark be portrayed as a beautiful ceremony instead of the fact that it ruined any possible standing with House Martell and rendered Elia Martell’s death even more tragic and pointless. The fact that Rhaegar and Lyanna named their son Aegon accentuates the dissonance between the loving atmosphere and the irritating effects, as he took the time to give the name of his son with Elia to his son with Lyanna as well. Did he have no other choices in mind? Did he just not care? Did he forget he had a son beforehand?

Further, this beneficial treatment of Rhaegar also gives Robert Baratheon the appearance of someone who is entirely in the wrong. While he was wrong in his reasons, believing Lyanna to have been kidnapped and raped, he still saved Westeros from a psychotic king, with Aerys II being essentially Westeros’ version of Roman Emperor Caligula.

  Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish

While the excuse could be made that Littlefinger is love drunk while in his plot at Winterfell, this falls apart instantly when one goes through the means he utilizes. He seems to view the North and the Vale, both places with high degrees of honor with some very rare exceptions, as identical to King’s Landing, trying to use his mind games when the people he is manipulating are not mere unknowing pawns, but people who outright despise him. The idea that he would seriously believe that Sansa would fall for Arya, who he can plainly see is more interested in combat than politics, being interested in usurping her position as the Lady of Winterfell is extremely stupid, and even moreso when one considers the fact that he outright stated his intention to claim the Iron Throne with Sansa at his side to her face.

  Mechanical Changes

One thing that grates heavily on those who like a consistent story is a change in the laws of the world to fit a story, rather than changing the story to fit the laws of the story. If there are no set laws, anything can happen, and nothing matters as a result. It all becomes nothing but meaningless spectacle. Season 7 is extremely bad at keeping anything set, to the point of only the most basic rules staying in place, those that could apply to any fiction ever that involves fire or zombies, and as a result are completely unoriginal. The changes in magic are split across several areas: greyscale, White Walker magic, and Red Temple magic.

  Greyscale: From Leprosy to Acne

In earlier seasons, the progression of greyscale was seen to be akin to a supernatural form of leprosy. It would turn the victim’s body to stone over time, or close enough to it, changing them from the inside out. Jorah Mormont’s condition was so horrific because it was likely impossible to resolve easily. Shireen Baratheon’s survival was considered a miracle, needing the help of healers from both sides of the Narrow Sea, and left a permanent scar on the left side of her face. On seeing the fact of how far Jorah’s condition had gone in Season 7, Archmaester Ebrose claimed that there was nothing that could be done for him.

However, Season 7 also shows that “advanced” grayscale is nothing more than magical acne. The treatment of the disease, which leaves not even a single scar, consists of peeling off the infected flesh (which seems to be just a more painful version of peeling off burned skin) and applying a special ointment to the place where the flesh had been. In fact, the flesh itself does not even seem to be infected, but covered by a kind of coating of grayscale that is held on with pus. How exactly was this supposed to be dangerous, again?

  White Walkers and Wights

Outside of the Night King’s ability or lack thereof to call up winter storms, the White Walkers’ magic and their wights’ capabilities changed significantly in this season with no justifiable explanation.

First, we have the wights’ sudden weakness to dragonglass. In past seasons, they have only been weak to two things: fire and being torn to shreds to the point of being unable to even move their disparate parts. What distinguished them from the White Walkers was the fact that the latter had both different abilities and different vulnerabilities, and the lack of an easy win factor made the wights that much harder to fight off. The reason for gathering dragonglass was not to kill the wights, but to kill the White Walkers, who could only be harmed by dragonglass and Valyrian steel. This distinction changed completely, and with no real reason. What does a skeleton care about being stabbed in the ribs with a glass dagger? It doesn’t have functioning organs, anyway. Fire both made sense (destroying the body) and was consistent, in that you needed to change tactics to fight different foes. With the “revelation” (rewrite) of this weakness, which the show treats as though it were always the case, fire actually seems to be less effective, such as during the altogether pointless and poorly shot fight against the wight polar bear. The flaming swords of Beric Dondarrion and Thoros of Myr (to be discussed below) barely do anything at all to the beast, while a single stab from Jorah’s dragonglass dagger brings it down. In fact, using dragonglass weapons, the undead threat seem to be nothing more than another human army, as they don’t even have much real threat at all and can be killed in a single blow in combat.

Another problem is the use of synchronization between the White Walkers and their wights, which flies in the face of everything we have seen before. If killing a White Walker destroys all of the wights it had raised (a common theme in necromancy or other summon magics), why was there no effect on the force at Hardhome after Jon killed a White Walker? To say that there were no wights at that location raised by that White Walker stretches plausibility to the breaking point, especially when one brings into account the fact that the “Behind the Show” segment for the season’s penultimate episode had both showrunners talk about how they were scrambling to come up with a way for most of the people who went on the Great Wight Hunt to survive. Translation: this wasn’t actually an element of the story before. They made it up on the spot. This fact itself would be a problem, but it also fundamentally changes the nature of the story. If all you need to do is kill the Night King (who, again, doesn’t seem to even exist in the source material), then the story turns from one of war and survival to one of assassination. Just send Arya up there if that’s the case. She seems capable of assassinating anyone she feels like on a moment’s notice if you let her go off screen. There, plot solved, we can go home.

  Red Temple

The primary rituals of the Red Temple, shown through Thoros of Myr in this season, have had distinct, deliberate differences from earlier seasons, ones that make Thoros himself useless, and his eventual death have no real meaning. 

First comes the ability to see visions in the flames. Thoros does not appear to treat the fireplace in which he has Sandor look, but the latter is able to see their destination and the movements of the White Walkers easily, saying things that even Thoros doesn’t seem to have witnessed. If a red priest can’t see something in the flames that a pyrophobe can, what use is being a red priest at all?

Second, and most importantly, comes the use of the flaming sword magic by both Thoros and his companion, Beric Dondarrion. In its prior usage in Season 3, this magic appeared to need the expertise and faith of a red priest, in addition to Beric’s blood. However, its usage in the Great Wight Hunt has the wielders able to light their swords individually with their gloves on, without having direct contact between the blood and the blade. Furthermore, Beric is able to use the spell even after Thoros dies, showing that the latter is not important anyway.

While Thoros is needed to bring Beric back from the dead, the latter is going into the final season of the show having accomplished very little, if anything. Would Beric’s death even be much of a loss?

In summary, this entire season seems to have been a waste of time, and likely the worst one thus far. There were some bright spots, but Sunday nights are dark and full of terrors, the worst of which being poorly plotted, poorly described, poorly shot, poorly written stories told from the seat of one’s pants for the sake of being the next thing to be trending on the internet.