Game of Thrones: Belated Season in Review **If you don’t realize that means massive spoile

Game of Thrones: Belated Season in Review **If you don’t realize that means massive spoilers, then you deserve spoilers.** The best thing HBO’s Game of Thrones has going for it is its expansive nature. The story spans an entire continent and zips from character to character, setting to setting with incredible fluidity. Its ability to cover such a broad array of storylines in such a comprehensive and epic fashion is something possibly only seen before in The Wire, though both shows are trying to do very different things. But this strength can also turn into Game of Thrones’ greatest weakness at times too, as its second season has been somewhat inconsistent about just how it plans to tie its great expanse together. In season one, this wasn’t much of a problem. Every character’s position at any given time was defined by their relationship to Ned Stark (Even the exception, Daenerys Targaryen, had some plot connections to King’s Landing in the assassination attempt against her). This paid off wonderfully as the season drew to a close with Ned’s shocking death in the penultimate episode and the reverberations felt around the cast in the finale. This season hasn’t had something as concrete as an individual character to link anything together. Instead, Game of Thrones has mostly relied on thematic tie-ins, such as what it takes to be a good ruler. And often this has worked, such as in season two’s premiere where the burning comment linked characters visually and thematically by drawing on their views of the gods. But the last two episodes of season two weren’t able to pull this off nearly as well. In the case of the episode “Blackwater” this was intentional and worked like gangbusters. Zeroing in on the battle between Stannis Baratheon and the Lannisters for King’s Landing was a great way to add some narrative diversity to the show, while also delivering a truly thrilling action spectacle. It easily made for the season’s best episode. But that very fact is telling: the best effort of the year was the episode told on the smallest scale. Contrasted with “Blackwater” before it, the season finale “Valar Morghulis” was still a terrific hour of television, but it underlined just how disparate some of the show’s elements have become. The two widest outliers in Game of Thrones are Daenerys in the desert and Jon Snow in the north, and oftentimes these plots felt like shows completely separate from the larger focus of the War of Five Kings. But the separateness of the show has broken down even further of late, with Arya Stark’s morbid escape from Harrenhal and Brienne venturing off into wacky medieval version of Midnight Run with Jaime Lannister. At one point the writers seemed to obliquely apologize for the lack of focus on the outlying characters (or preemptively scold people like me for criticizing that lack of focus). In the episode “The Prince of Winterfell,” when Varys and Tyrion finally (finally!) learn of the new Targaryen dragon babies, Tyrion pushes that threat aside, saying they should “focus on one war at a time.” Which is exactly what Game of Thrones did in the next episode, “Blackwater.” But other than that episode, it has been at times hard to see what many events in the show have to do with that one war. Sometimes the show provides some other commentary on how the entire map has gotten so massive that nobody is really interconnected anymore - Theon killing all the crows in Winterfell, for example. But more often than not the lack of interplay just falls flat. Whereas Ned Stark’s decapitation echoed everywhere, the Battle of Blackwater Bay just sat there for Tywin’s horse to shit on - which was kind of the point, thematically. But the biggest moment of the season should have some impact outside of just one of your half dozen plus storylines. The last developments in our main outlier plots seem to indicate that everything will start merging together in season three. Daenerys has finally pilfered some resources to get back to Westeros, so hopefully she’ll have more people than Jorah and Ghost Drogo to bounce off of soon. Oh, and there’s a massive army of white walker zombies heading for the wall that look a bit troublesome. That might catch the attention of the Starks and Lannisters soon enough, which will be great for season three. But for season two, these developments largely made the events proceeding them feel languid and unnecessary. Its a credit to the Game of Thrones crew that I still consider it one of the top five shows on the air even with these issues. But if its able to combine the range and detail of season two with the focus of season one, it could be so much more than that. -- source link

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