It's sort of like how I imagine that childhood game, musical chairs in hell. The music just doesn't stop. My girlfriend summed it up best. We could have just skipped to the last four episodes and not missed anything. Lots of walking. Boobies for no good reason except to keep viewers distracted from the fact THAT NOTHING HAPPENS! But I know that stuff has happened, two seasons worth of back-stabbing, machinations, war, incest, torture, castration and ice zombies have happened. But I never had the sense that any of that needed to take place over thirty hours of screen time. In fact much of it could have been dealt with in a few well-delivered lines of dialogue. "Whatever happened to Theon Greyjoy?" "Oh, I believe he's been captured and tortured by a rival house." "Let's go get him!" And so forth.
I'm not necessarily a "hater" of the series. I love the idea, and I love that they've given so much attention to set design and costuming. But like the book, it feels sprawling in a way that diminishes from all that effort. Instead of presenting us with a compelling story told through taut narrative, we're drowned in detail and told to ignore the ponderous pace and lackluster plot. And of course distracted with breasts. Because apparently we're all too libidinous to want to watch a television series that didn't needlessly exploit women. (You don't need to tell me it's historically accurate. A: I know. And B: This isn't history.) All the time needlessly spend ogling naked women could have gone to story telling, character, plot. Anything else, really.
But let me dismount my soapbox. I'm going to file Game of Thrones in the same category as Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. I don't understand the appeal, but I appreciate that people seem to like it. Let's just agree to disagree.
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