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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 16 2015, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the got-books? dept.

Mike Hale writes in the NYT that after Sunday night's Season 5 finale the wildly popular show seems to have lost its way, and to be losing faith with a growing number of its viewers. After two or three seasons of coherent and satisfying action, the show is spinning in place, stalling for time as it crawls toward an ending that will be more disappointing the longer it's delayed. Sound familiar? As with "Lost," there may be a blueprint, but it's not looking very sound. According to Hale, the escalating series of shocks in the season finale was a prime example of substituting sensation for imagination, busyness for drama. "Not content to kill off a mid-major character, the episode moved on to whipping girls, putting a major female character through an excruciatingly long, nude walk of shame and, in its closing seconds, assassinating a fan favorite who was one of the few wholly sympathetic figures in the show."

Amy Sullivan says that the problem is that it's incredibly hard to craft a epic series without getting necessarily bogged down in the middle installments. "Your protagonists are usually in some long-term predicament or up against an enemy who will keep winning until some resolution is reached in the finale," says Sullivan. "So the need to throw in a few shocking moments for the sake of surprise and to keep readers/audiences off-balance is understandable." According to Hale when you look at the overall framework, nearly all the characters are where they were when the season began. "The usurping Boltons are still in Winterfell; Sansa is still on the run; Arya is still hiding in Braavos; the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen and the sly dwarf, Tyrion, are still marooned in Essos; the Lannisters still occupy the castle in King's Landing," concludes Hale. "This can be blamed on the show's semidependent relationship with Mr. Martin's novels, but viewers (like me) who haven't read the books don't care about that. The question is how much longer we'll care at all."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday June 16 2015, @11:29PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday June 16 2015, @11:29PM (#197074) Homepage

    Hey, at least it's better than Lost.

    Lost's writers were more about not basing it on any book (perhaps quite possibly Lord of the Flies, LOL), or even any literary techniques other than a "what will happen next?" crude ripoff of Twin Peaks and naming characters after reknowned philosophers (the philosophies of whom had nothing to do with the show, but using famous names like John Locke or Jeremy Bentham is like, intelligent, man!). The show was half Benneton ad ("throw in some ching-chong and durka-durka so we feel cultured and everybody will appeal to it") and half Disneyland ride.

    In short, Lost was one of the greatest mass-trollings of history -- a couple fucking Scientologists (fuck you, J.J. Abrams) write a bunch of "random" things on sticky notes, throw them at a target, and the ones that stick become the plot. He literally admitted this verbatim. Meanwhile you had motherfuckers who made their own universe out of what was simply the broadcast equivalent of the generic leading statement of a palm or tarot-card reader.

    And don't get me started on Walking Dead.

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