Reflections on the Third Season of Game of Thrones

As I think I remarked some years ago I pretty much gave up on Game of Thrones after season three.

This was, I think, because the ways in which the adaptation of the books fell short kept adding up for me, and totaling higher than what the adaptation was getting right--all as my experience of the books was that their interest pretty much goes downhill after number three, the more in as the comparative slog of the fourth and fifth volumes was as yet unredeemed by the "winds of winter" whose coming seemed no certainty.

I was also annoyed with the way the producers lamely split the third book into two seasons, dragging out the best part of the series (thus far) as if to stall us as they figured out what to do about what the much weaker later material.

However, it was also because of what they filled that third season with when they could have been advancing the plot instead.

George R.R. Martin's books depicted the quasi-Medieval world of Westeros as a brutal place, and anyone watching the TV series could hardly complain if it depicted that brutality. However, the makers of the show all too obviously wallowed in it, an impression I first had at the end of the third episode, "Walk of Punishment," when Jaime Lannister's captors cut off his sword hand. The scene is of course in the original book and an important part of his character arc, and the presentation of the incident as such unobjectionable. But the episode's cutting from the severing of the hand to the end credits with "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" blaring over them smacked of the cheap nihilism of the edgelord (and as if to confirm it, had the commensurate praises of the claqueurs!). Likewise I deeply disliked the way the show disposed of Rose, and the decision to very lengthily (and tastelessly) dramatize Theon Greyjoy's captivity and torture, and a good deal else (while it said to me an awful lot that few in the commentariat found anything at all objectionable about all this).

Of course, some go on watching shows in which they have lost interest. I certainly had done it in the past. But by this point I was outgrowing that bad habit, just walked away, and have not really bothered to look back since--all as, of course, The Winds of Winter remains an unkept promise over a decade on.