How Game of Thrones Season 8 Could Have Been Better
How can something so highly anticipated be executed this poorly?
We didn't wait two years to figure out that Starbucks and branded water bottles existed in the Middle Ages. It's sad how we have gone from searching mysterious clues in the previous seasons, to searching mysterious errors in Season 8.
Jon Snow was revealed as a Targaryen, but in the end it didn't even matter. It had little relevance to the show. The wall was broken down at the end of the previous season, we waited 7 years for Winter...but all it took was a knife to end the Night King. He doesn't even get beyond Winterfell.
After all this, did we even have a reason to watch beyond Episode 3? The rest of the Season was predictable, we had already seen the same political drama for the past 7 seasons. However, in the previous seasons it gave us hope for a great ending and there was a reason for us to care. After the Night King died, there was no reason to care for the petty political disputes.
How could it have been better?
1. The Night King and White Walkers should have gotten to Kings Landing for a final clash. The ending of an epic fantasy should bring everything together and then conclude things in a fitting way. A plot twist that is irrelevant to the larger scheme of things was not an appropriate end for such a long series.
2. The lighting. It sounds like a technical issue but one can't help think the darkness was intentional due to the nature of 'The Long Night' in Episode 3. Sure, it's supposed to be dark, but if you want us to watch 80 minutes of battle, at least let us see what is going on!
3. There should have been more scenes with meaning. Jon Snow's reveal as a Targaryen was meant to mean something. We should have gotten to see the reaction of Arya and Sansa. It should have meant something more to Daenerys that she is not the only Targaryen left in the world. But we got none of these meaningful reaction scenes. Instead they wasted thirty minutes to show people walking in the Season Finale. Outrageous.
4. Cersei was never going to be taken seriously as the final villain. It was a very confusing decision to make the last three episodes focus on the final clash with her at King's Landing. The entire hype for the Season was regarding the Night King and the arrival of Winter, not Cersei.
Beheading Missendei and killing a dragon in an extremely unrealistic manner is not a good climax, it's just a terrible attempt to make her seem relevant again. We all already knew that one dragon was enough to burn down the whole city, did we really have a reason to care about these events? Cersei's role would have only been relevant if she was preventing victory against the Night King and had to be defeated. Otherwise, she was irrelevant at this point.
These are just some improvements, I'm sure we can all think of hundreds of other things that went wrong with the final season. Let's just hope that the prequel series can make up for the hole that this season left behind!
