Go back six years, and this doesn't seem strange at all. Game of Thrones was the biggest show on television, finishing its sixth season with Dany crossing the Narrow Sea, Sansa and Arya back on top at Winterfell, Jon being named King of the North, and Cersei laying waste to the entire heads of state blowing up the Sept of Baelor. It was an incredible final episode capping a great season and setting us up for what was supposed to be an incredible end.
Go back three years, when Game of Thrones finally ended, with Bran ridiculously being named king because of the power of "good stories" or whatever, and the fact 10 million people would watch another minute of story in Westeros, and it seems bizarre.
Since that finale, the way we as a society perceive Game of Thrones the tv show changed completely, and deservedly so. The rush-job, patchwork, plot idiocracy that was the last two seasons, and particularly the last one, really did just damper the entire run of the show. It really left me, along with many, many others, wondering if we've thrown hours and hours of our lives away watching the show from its start. But a funny thing happens over the course of three years.
No, my opinion of the show's end has not changed. The ending was still terrible. But time has allowed us to more easily separate the show's end, and more pointedly the show's creators, with the source material and the world of Westeros that intrigued us in the first place.
It's clear as day that the lasting legacy of Game of Thrones won't be so much the world of Westeros's terrible end, but the show's creators throwing their careers away for no real return. It is funny how much HBO has gone over and above to make it clear David Benioff and DB Weiss have zero involvement in this show. And who can blame them. The show went off the rails when Benioff and Weiss literally lost the plot - in the sense when the show caught up to the books and passed them, Benioff and Weiss had no real ability to craft a show without clear source material.
While I do give them some defense in that when the show started they probably did think Martin would release at least the penultimate book, if not the final one. Martin didn't, and they basically lost their minds trying to play storywriter for the first time. More worryingly though was their seeming lack of passion and desire to just wrap it up. Them shortening the last two seasons, when they had to cover basically 1.5 books, was just a maddeningly dumb decision. Maybe they wanted to move on, but as many interviews with actors, and other HBO people, have shown, no one else wanted to speed up the finish.
Anyway, it is easy to shift all the blame for the sour taste Game of Thrones left us with to those two guys. And man have we all done so - from Disney then pulling away a Star Wars trilogy from them, to their ill-fated week when the world figured out they were trying to do a show about a US where the Confederacy won the Civil War. Benioff and Weiss are done for. Which is good because then we can at least attempt to believe in the Westerosi world with those two far, far away.
Coming back to the actual House of the Dragon show, it is far too early to say if its good or not, but at least it seems to have a clear point of view. It isn't, at least for now, as sprawling a world as even Season 1 Game of Thrones was, and that may be for its benefit. I love the little touches and hints and names of families and people we came across in the mothership show. It all is nostalgic, but in a good way.
This could break down over time, for sure. While it is easy to place all of the blame on how Game of Thrones ended with Benioff & Weiss, we have to at least admit that they were around for when the show was good as well. We have to see if the new show-runner can do a good job here. But there's an opportunity to take advantage of the fading memory of how terrible the Game of Thrones ending was, and take us back to the world of the show we used to love in the first place.
