All Together Now

"A Year of Ice and Fire" is switching over to weekly-or-so updates, just so I don't feel compelled to drag in stray observations to pad out each individual posts. Look for the next update, um, later.

Today, for my non-existent faithful audience, I'm copying over a message-board post that captures my only new complaint about Game of Thrones this season:

"As I look back at this season, it really sticks out how poorly the show has handled the overall scope of the story. Each plotline seemed to be occurring in isolation, with virtually no reaction to happenings in the others. Until this week, no one in King's Landing ever mentioned Robb's marriage, an event of enormous strategic significance; it was darn near impossible to tell the Lannisters were fighting a war at all, since all the writers could think to do with all the added screen time for those characters was drag out Tyrell/Lannister wrangling that has at least two more seasons to go. Meanwhile, the ironborn apparently sat on their hands all season, until it was time to remind the audience that they hold the North. Robb appears to have forgotten that too, since he made no mention of it, and instead of reclaiming his homeland planned for an attack on Casterly Rock(!). And, of course, Theon had to be isolated from everything else, so they could hold for the finale the underwhelming reveal that his captor is a character who means nothing much to the TV audience anyway. The show is often praised for managing such a large cast and story, but that's easy if all you have to do is divide it into several barely-connected chunks."

Some of that has to do with the (misguided) desire to make the Red Wedding an utter shock rather than an extreme expression of the direction in which the character was already heading, and some is just the inability (seen with Daenerys last year) to create interesting new material for characters they want to expand, but simple incompetence is also likely a factor. The flatness of "Mhysa," with the title scene turned into an underwhelming season-capper, is just the show reaping what it has sown across a season with so little focus that the producers can't bring any kind of closure, only another "Daenerys, white savior" moment and the pretense that anyone cares who Iwan Rheon's character really is. Bring on season four!