The Third Queen: Thoughts on the Seventh Season of Game of Thrones
Well, this season of Game of Thrones was pretty shit, wasn't it? That comes as a bit of a surprise, to be honest. For years, I've taken an attitude of fond indulgence towards the show. What's wrong, after all, with watching a bunch of generally quite fine actors enact a complicated plot with stratospheric production values and the occasional fantastic action scene? Sure, the show wasn't actually about anything, and its writers had blind spots on issues of race and gender that were often glaring . But if you're able to put that aside, what's left is a genuinely enjoyable, well-made soap opera whose main appeal is the desire to know what happens next. It hadn't occurred to me that this was a formula that could be screwed up, but at the end of the shortened (and yet seemingly endless) seventh season, there's really no escaping the conclusion: Game of Thrones may not be a good show, but there is a palpable difference between good Game of Thrones an