GAME OF THRONES

Revengers: Endgame

So, about that ending... Judgement is passed on a divisive season.

UK Sky Atlantic, finished US HBO, finished Showrunners David Benioff, DB Weiss Cast Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Gwendoline Christie

EPISODES 8.01-8.06 To start with, the game being played in Game Of Thrones was chess on a grand scale. By the final season it’s more like pub skittles.

Of course, skittles can be fun – and there’s a lot to enjoy in the show’s final run – but the subtlety and nuance of the early years has been almost entirely replaced by epic battles, grand gestures and melodramatic plot twists.

Perhaps this change in tone is inevitable. After all, early seasons were about characters scattered across a continent, all stabbing each other in the back. That lent itself to slow-burn, character-led storytelling. This endgame by necessity has to draw characters and plotlines together. The pace has to increase. Confrontations have to be more on-the-nose. Whispering advisors like Tyrion, Qyburn and Varys are sidelined. Subtlety is a casualty of war.

The broad strokes approach, though, still leaves fans feeling short-changed. Take the resolution of the war with the White Walkers. Sure, Arya’s nifty knife move to kill the Night King is a punch-the-air moment, but the idea that killing the leader means all his followers dissolve away is a fantasy cliché of the kind GOT once railed against.

Dani turning into the Mad Queen is a ballsy move, completely foreshadowed in the series (despite what some fans might think). But to have Jon stab her one episode later? It’s too sudden, too neat. See also: the council electing Bran the new king after a 10-minute pow-wow? It’s woefully unconvincing, and would have taken three episodes of arguing and a few random deaths to achieve in the old days. And the less said about Drogon’s “melt the pointy thing that killed my mistress” visual metaphor hissyfit the better.

The show feels more like its old self in quieter moments. You’re far more likely to find your eyes welling up when Jaime utters, “Arise, Ser Brienne of Tarth,” than Dani getting all theatrical over Ser Jorah’s death. Similarly, Tyrion’s betrayal of Varys hits far harder than Jon’s of Dani. Arya is brilliantly kick-ass throughout, and there’s fan-comforting closure for the survivors, even Ghost.

If nothing else, it looks epic – when you can actually see it. Some of “The Long Night”’s atmospheric gloom is a tad indulgent (possibly covering up a host of errant coffee cups), but otherwise these final six episodes boast production values never seen on TV before. Maybe that’s part of the problem: GOT was often at its best when it was more jaw-jaw than war-war. Dave Golder

The writers originally planned for Ser Jorah (Iain Glen) to survive and join Jon at the Wall in the final episode.