In its first three seasons, Game of Thrones won critical acclaim and a massive fan base for its ambitious fusion of fantasy and realism. Westeros, the world of Thrones, is endowed with the conventional features of the genre: formidable sorcery, throngs of magical creatures (dragons included!), and magnificent scenery that makes the audience feel delightfully small. The realism, rare in the medieval-fantasy genre, comes in the form of Thrones’s nuanced characters. None of the heroes are saints, and most of the villains have moments of compassion.
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In “The Winds of Winter,” the finale to Season 6 of Thrones, Cersei’s greatest blunder—permitting a band of religious devotees called the Sparrows to form a “Faith Militant” army in exchange for supporting Tommen’s claim to the Iron Throne—has come to a head. The Sparrows proved themselves to be conscientious fanatics and immune to the allure of Cersei’s power. Not only did they investigate the queen for adultery and (in Season 5’s finale) dragged her naked through the streets in a public “Walk of Atonement” for her sins, but they are now prepared to try to convict her for the murder of King Robert.
Exciting though “Winds” was, the drama was diluted by a series of plot gaps. And it was no anomaly in this respect. Since season five, when the story had to go beyond the George R.R. Martin series on which it is based, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have disregarded the basic virtue that made the show a success—a commitment to storytelling and characterization. They paid little price for their oversights. If Thrones delivers a technical spectacle featuring familiar characters and high-octane drama, viewers happily overlook sloppy plotting and imbalanced character development.
But if these problems continue to fester, they threaten to wreck the legacy of Thrones—as a political drama built on realistic plotting and three-dimensional characters—when the show concludes in 2018.
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These sort of problems have plagued the last couple seasons of Thrones. Having exhausted the content of George R.R. Martin’s books (at least two of which remain to be written), Thrones had to create its own story. This is a difficult task, but one within the scope of the talented showrunners.
But the story Weiss and Benioff gave us is a pale imitation of Martin’s books, and of the show’s first few seasons. The showrunners have neglected the basic norms of Westeros. They have failed to scrutinize their scripts for even the most egregious plot holes—a failure that, in light of Thrones’s ever-ballooning budget, could be reasonably attributed to indolence or indifference. And though Weiss and Benioff deserve renown for bringing a world to life, they have populated it with characters of implausible and inconsistent motivations.
Fans and critics seem unconcerned with these flaws. They apparently believe that choreography—Thrones’s cast, music, and inimitable special effects—trumps storytelling, if it doesn’t make it outright superfluous. Who cares about the odd plot hole, so long as the tension does not slacken?
Weiss and Benioff should care, because in the long run, storytelling leaves a stronger impression than technology. If Thrones wants to make a deeper and more permanent mark on television, the showrunners should confront these problems and prevent them from recurring, even if this means hiring more writers and relaxing some of their control over the plot. They will only do this with a prompt—one that fans and critics can provide if they avert their eyes from the technical spectacle to give Thrones the same sustained, skeptical criticism that is applied to more pedestrian TV dramas.
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