NEXT TIME ON SPOILER VILLE
Your week’s TV
ET’S face it: there’s only one TV show that people are really talking about at the moment, and it’s Game of Thrones. It would be great, in fact, if people could talk about it a little less. Because the show airs at some ungodly hour on Sunday night, I would have assumed that most South Africans — like me — would only get the chance to lock their peepers on it on Monday night.
Not so, my friends! It seems that an extraordinary number of our fellow countryfolk have the necessary freedom of time to consume the show during working hours on a Monday and then share their abundant thoughts on social media.
I’m not one of those people who get rabidly agitated about spoilers, I promise. One has to be realistic about these matters. The reach of Game of Thrones is now so vast that it is completely unreasonable to expect to be shielded online from news of major plot developments beyond, oh, three hours of its original airing. That doesn’t stop it being maddening, however, when you haven’t seen the episode yet but all anyone is tweeting about is Hodor, which obviously means Hodor is dead. Spoiler alert, but if you didn’t know that by now I literally have no idea how.
The latest season of Game of Thrones has been arguably its best yet. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the plot of the TV show is now untethered from its source material, George R R Martin’s fantasy novel series. Maybe it turns out that TV writers are better at controlling the narrative arc of Martin’s universe than he is? It must suck to be EFFECT OF GoT SPOILERS Martin at home, watching the latest episodes and muttering, “I wish I’d thought of that”.
The other thing that must be stressful is being an actor on the show now that the plot has gone off piste from the novels. Previously, you presumably had a fair idea of when your character was going to be killed off, based on what happened in the books. Now, it’s anybody’s game. I can imagine the actors frantically rifling through the latest scripts, praying for their characters to be spared death for one more episode. We all know most of them are going to meet a sticky end sooner or later.
One of the most enjoyable things about the latest season has been the number of decisive steps forward that the plot has taken, particularly after a fifth season which often felt strangely aimless. Okes are seriously getting their stuff together. You can tell Jon Snow means business from his new man bun. Now if only the Khaleesi would reunite with those pesky dragons ...