I must have missed that. Did it air before the episode started? I was watching after and I think all I saw were the previews of Watchmen and His Dark Materials.
You might have not even realized that's what it was, especially if you missed the title at the end. i really liked season 2, and I didn't really know if they could do anything else interesting going into it. I'm excited to find out what else is in store.
I don't have an issue with the plot points per se -- in fact, I can imagine how GRRM will work them into the book form. I just have a huge issue with them not pacing the series and having enough time to properly set them up -- so then it all feels absurd, things feel rushed, the endings feel more erroneously happy than the nuance that would have made them gel better with the earlier seasons. It was just poorly managed from their end, when they had an opportunity to do it better, and I'm not sure how they managed to trip over their own feet here.
I think part of the fan base issue is that it's like Star Wars now, you have a widely diverse fan base rather than a solid small base who are all there for similar reasons. Used to be that fantasy readers used to be more uniform, but the scope has broadened... with GoT you had your original core audience but by the end of Season 4 (when the series was truly making a name) you started picking up a ton of fans of folks who might not even follow fantasy, just like LotR did even if people had no interest in fantasy or reading the books. It became more of a cultural experience and the viewer base I think doubled (from 6-7 million to what it was for the finale -- might even be tripled). So you have all these different "types" of viewers, all prioritizing different things. And some are there expecting a particular ending. It's kind of the danger when you name your kid after a book character when the books aren't finished, and they end up being quasi-fascist. How many parents named their kids Darth? (probably not many) But we knew Darth was tainted from his first appearance. Anyway, a lot of the "non-core" viewers -- the ones who jumped on later as part of the cultural phenomena -- are voicing a particular kind of complaint. People from other groups of viewers probably have different complaints. But they can't really be lumped together in terms of concerns. The later viewers might bail on further GoT series, depending; maybe some of the core group who also probably have read the books will persist.
Anyway, I rewatched parts of the episode twice. my issues with the last two seasons really come from terrible pacing, resulting in plot points that feel out of the blue rather than the surprising but inevitable conclusion of complex narratives, and from logical inconsistencies occurring because they keep skipping steps out of convenience (again, another pacing issue). And then sometimes they waste what time they DO have in the episode with silly, trivial stuff rather than the stuff they should be getting across.
I don't fault the actors, and in the finale I think considering these issues, Dinklage and Harrington and Clarke in particular deserve praise for their heavy lifting... they had to bring weight to stuff that the script and plotting didn't necessarily earn.
All that being said, I only cried once, and that was the scene with Brienne, where she performs a particularly gracious act. It was a small scene but Christie delivers; and despite it being soured by bad pacing in the character arc, i could read the intent behind it.
I also went back and rewatched the end of Season 2, when Daenerys is in the House of the Undying. It's kind of interesting to rewatch now in hindsight of how things pan out.
(Also, I still have to say jesus, jon -- I've been called "the poster child of ambivalence" by people IRL before, but you really take the cake sometimes. I wanted to slap him at times.)
Yeah..... I knew what was going to happen in that throne room because of that, and the one thing I did predict was the way her story would end, in addition a lot of hesitant moping from Jon before it happened. Everything after that I didn't see coming. A lot of it was truly out of left field rather than quietly laid in the background like the Red Wedding, for instance, but that's just the way the off-book portions of the show have been. I agree that I would have liked for the journey to be less choppy and a smoother transition, but I do think the ending itsself is good.
I never thought the ending would have been a total downer. I'm glad they went with a positive ending that wasn't entirely predictable and boring
The biggest flaw with the later seasons is the way they simplified the characters and made them less interesting than in the books, or even in earlier seasons. Tyrion is the biggest victim, but Jon suffers from it greatly, also. (In the books, at least, Jon shows more political cunning as leader of the Night's Watch and during his time with the wildings, even if he's still impulsive. But the show didn't really explore that aspec of the character as much as I wanted them to., so he really does come off as kind of slow. ) With regards to villains, I think Ramsey and Roose suffer from it, and certainly Euron. Arya doesn't come off too badly, and Cersei was enjoyable to watch. They botched Sansa a little by having her take on the role of "fake Arya," rather than showing her spend more time with Littlefinger in the Eyrie. I think the books will probably continue her journey in the Eyrie for longer. It's not quite as bad as some of the other characters, because she at least ends up in an interesting place.
The second biggest flaw is just the way they abruptly, in an unsatisfying fashion, terminated so many of the threads from the books I was eager to continue following. Like Ramsay and Roose, Stannis , the previous Three-eyed Raven, the Children of the Forest, Rickon, the Faceless Men, Barristan, greyscale, Mereen, the Vale, the Citadel, etc. The way those threads were concluded didn't shock me; it just felt like desperately trying to get rid of a bunch of subplots as quickly as possible. The one exception I'll allow is Cersei's nuking of the Tyrells, because they took care to build up to it from earlier in the season. They did enough of the work for it to feel like somewhat of a satisfying, if horrifying payoff.
Season 6 is the worst in this regard, and is, in my opinion, the show's weakest season. Season 5 kept some of the stuff from the books I liked with Myreen and the Night's Watch, and Shireen's fate was terrifying, if not something I want to rewatch.
