Game of Thrones

The first season is sharp, political, plot-intensive, light on its feet. The last seasons are heavy, dark, personal. The first is cheesier in a Sorkin kind of way, the last cheesier in a James Cameron kind of way. There's so much good writing to squeeze into the first; there's no writing to squeeze into the last, just events, and it shows.

I should write a post solely on the direwolves.

The Long Night and the final War for Westeros should be in separate seasons

The Long Night : Minas Tirith and Mordor : Odysseus slaughters suitors in his home : dark climax

The massacre of King's Landing : The Scouring of the Shire : that weird second battle with the suitors : odd second climax

Ned's death is a stellar collapse, forming a black hole that reverberates throughout the series like gravitational waves.

:'( Ned tells Arya and Sansa "we're going home"... if only!!! It's so terrible watching season 1 progress, knowing how it turns out. Sickening.

Reflecting on the Red Wedding, one year later... Yes, it was shocking. Yes, I expected Robb and Cat to scaffold the show for seasons to come. Yes, it was a massacre. But what singed it on my memory more than any of this was the style of the killings. First was Robb's bride, stabbed out of nowhere. Okay so immediately the imagined future of this house is toppling in sudden fashion. Next is Robb. That's crushing, yet he dies a main character's death, shot by many arrows, refusing to fall, finally ended with a quiet knife in the heart. Crushing, but comprehensible. What floored me was Cat's fate. We're forced to witness an innocent woman's utter despair, and then her utter debasement. Her throat is cut. There's something about that for me. Does everyone feel the same? Even when she delivers the Frey girl the same treatment, I'm stunned. There's something about opening a human's throat. It has to be one of the most dehumanizing deaths. So many deaths would serve Cat better. Not only is her throat cut, the show doesn't even show her falling in slow motion, doesn't play any music, does nothing to romanticize the moment. This woman, full of life, love, legacy, reduced to blood and skin all over the floor in one second. And we have to watch all of that escape her like she's a pig. I felt similarly about her husband's death: shocking from a plot perspective, for sure, but so much more sickening by its execution. The show's very protagonist is dealt like an extra, like an animal. In one bare, blunt moment it's over, all heroism in him collapsed to a heavy body on the floor. It's like observing a quantum -- all of the potential and richness of the wave collapsed at once to a single point. Anyway, all of Cat's humanity spills out in that memorable image. She's treated like an animal not just by the Frey's but by the show. We witness all of her pain.