Game of Thrones: Lots of Shock, No Awe

Besides all the rape and murder, show was 'nothing special': 'Slate' writer
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 15, 2015 1:12 PM CDT
Game of Thrones : Lots of Shock, No Awe
Tara Fitzgerald, left, as Selyse Baratheon and Stephen Dillane as Stannis Baratheon in Season 5 of "Game of Thrones."   (Helen Sloan/HBO via AP)

While everyone else was OMGing during last night's Game of Thrones finale, Willa Paskin was likely doing a lot of eye-rolling. Over at Slate, she digests the finale, puts it into the context of the entire season, and concludes the show is as exciting as … the weather. "It's pretty boring, except for the cataclysmic disasters," she writes. "On Game of Thrones it's always bleak with a 90 percent chance of rape and sudden death." Which the show had in abundance this season, she writes, but to what end? "Game of Thrones can do twists; it can do turns; it can do gruesome and gonzo," she acknowledges. "But my point is that this season wasn't so great at anything else." To wit: Once you got through all those aforementioned WTF moments, Paskin didn't think there was a whole lot of "there" there.

"The show has dealt with its overabundance of source material by undercooking most of it—a chef who needs to make 10,000 meat pies in 10 hours and gets a dragon to brown 100 just right, but leaves the rest scorched or raw," she complains. To back up her claims, she points readers to an article by the like-minded Todd VanDerWerff, who writes for Vox that every episode seems to now go for the quick, shock-value hit rather than well-rounded storylines that would enhance the entire series. "Exclude the big moments—all the aforementioned events in the finale, … Sansa's rape, the immolation of Shireen, and Drogon the Dragon’s coming-out barbecue—and this season was a whole lot of nothing special," Paskin writes. Click for her full column. (More Game of Thrones stories.)

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