Corpse Run 1,139: Game of drones on and on
Ok so I’ve finished the first four seasons of Game of Thrones. Neat. I’m a binge watcher by nature and this show is easily binge-able.
I’m also at the part where Victoria says the show begins its slow (initially) decline into awfulness, which is a shame but also an exciting prospect.
Without going into any spoilers, here’s my take so far:
Seasons One, Three, and Four: Good
Season Two: Ehhhhhhhhhh with a few good bits
The biggest complaint I have so far is that the pacing often isn’t great and the story routinely gets super hype… but then is all like, “Hey, that hype thing? We’re going to ignore it for a while. Like, a long while. Like, it’ll be literally hours of other content before we get back to that hype thing.” I totally get that a television show wants to make sure folks are hanging around to watch, but it results in me detesting the less hype thing while I grudgingly wait for hype thing to return. This does the “less hype thing” a disservice since I may have enjoyed it more had I not been all jazzed up to see a different storyline at that point in time.
Also also, some of the content feels like filler. Victoria confirmed for me that there was something the books only alluded to that the TV show not only shows but stretches out for a decent portion of one of the seasons. This is literally filler. Hey, do we need to pad the runtime for this season? Let’s add five or so scenes of [not telling you cause potentially spoilers]. Whyyyyy?
I don’t expect any adaptation to 100% adhere to its source material. Frankly, I don’t want any adaptation to do that since different mediums require different narrative techniques. That said… the creation of additional content that doesn’t progress the story feels… lazy.
Not lazy lazy… I mean, they took the time to build those sets and write dialogue and hire the crew for those shoots, etc… but lazy in the sense that it appears that this content existed solely to make the season’s runtime similar to others. A shorter season doesn’t mean they did less work; narrative efficiency is a good thing and tight editing is important.
ANYWAY…
…I’m mostly enjoying the show thus far and as I mentioned above, if it really does fall apart like everyone says it’ll be a shame. The first four seasons (give or take S2 being mediocre) were really something fun.
I got a feeling of a belief of total corruption for most all human behaviour from the writing. That and a sexual violence put it firmly in my nope list. But I can respect some moments people have highlighted to me.
The only thing I was really interested in seeing was how they were going to deal with one of the characters having about half his face cut off, leaving him with virtually no nose. I thought the effects work for that would be impressive. Spoiler, they wimped out and changed it to a slight scar…
In the end, the fact that all the shitty annoying characters were alive again meant that I couldn’t be bothered to watch it.
The shift between when they were still mostly using the books as a source to when they started writing their own stuff becomes most apparent when characters suddenly stop dying even when they get into situations where in earlier seasons someone would have definitely died.