Even with all the continued whining and supposed problems, GOT is still one of the generational premiere shows that have been created.
So, all you naysayers, just HOW would you have made Season 8 better...
bet about all that ends up here is a bunch of smart ass comments from keyboard commandos...
Sansa on the Iron Throne
shareWell I can't speak for everyone, but its more they way they came to the conclusions then the conclusions themselves. It was rushed and because it was rushed, the way it ended feels.. a little cheap.
Off the top of my head here is how I would have gone about the episodes (the obvious thing to note is that my ideas would take more then a few more episodes).
Battle for King's Landing: Danny should have arrived with a full army and 2 dragons. The battle should have been fierce (not completely 1 sided), however, because of the dragons Danny should have had a clear advantage. Then the Lannister army gets a lucky strike and kills one of the dragons. Danny pulls back from the battlefield with the last dragon. Danny starts believing she has lost too much, you see her start to show clear signs of mentally breaking. She refuses to allow her dragon back into the battle, instead forces her armies to die wave after wave going against the walls of King's landing. Her advisors beg her to let the dragon return, Vary's hope in who he thought would be a good ruler is extinguished, as she clearly cares more for the Dragon then all of the people that are loyal to her.
Jon with no other options, as the battle appears lost now, approaches Drogon and hopes to ride it as he had the other dragon. After a few tense moments the dragon relents and allows him to. Jon dies bravely atop the dragon, but not before leading Danny's armies to victory. While Danny now appears weak, no longer the ruler she was before. She lashes out burning all of her advisers alive.
She believes Jon has robbed her of her dignity, and declares war on the Northerners as they march home. With her Dragon she sends them scattering across the lands desperately racing for Winterfell for protection.
Now Danny with a much weaker army and a single dragon would demand the heads of Sansa, Arya, and Bran. Sansa would attempt to convince the other Kingdoms to enter full rebellion along side her.
continued...
The majority of other kingdoms join Sansa in rebellion, and Danny's new advisers warn that she cannot win, against the odds. She ignores them and marches north to meet the united Westeros on an open battlefield. And the show ends with the battle about to begin again, as the Game of thrones NEVER ends.
For me this would have been a better way to show the madness starting to grip Danny. But again that's one of about 1000 ways that the show could have ended.
Oof, that sounds awful.
shareAs the user kuku said before, the problem lied in the lack of books as a guide in the last seasons. So, it can't be solved just by reshooting season 8.
It's just better to assume the series ended in a cliffhanger right at the end of season 4.
First of all, we are not writers. It's not our job to write the show. Secondly, you could have made it better by simply erasing the season. Ending a the end of season 7 and never having a finale would have been better than this. This was worse than nothing. It was an insult, and destroyed everything that came before it.
shareThe internet is full of people suggesting how each episode could have been better and most of the time they are right.
As it is, the 2 final seasons felt like bad fan fiction and not on par with the glorious first few seasons of the show.
Well, first we need a list of what people hated most.
-Bran got to be king.
-Dany got screwed out of all she'd earned by a misogynistic infliction of madness.
-Jon seemed woefully under-appreciated given all his contributions.
-Jamie's redemption arc got abandoned.
So how about this?
-Dany does NOT torch King's Landing. She kills Cersei in hand-to-hand combat.
-Sam is charged with figuring out who should rule. He wisely explains that each of the candidates (Sansa, Dany, Jon) has different strengths and divides the kingdom into three areas of specific need/responsibility.
Too easy.
1) Have the characters act according to character as established during all the previous seasons. Tyrion is supposed to be smart. From season 7 onward he was pretty much incompetent. Varys has been 3 steps ahead of everyone else. He was caught and executed WAY too easily. Arya was driven primarily by a desire to get revenge on those who wronged her family, to the point where she went to sleep at night reciting the names of the people she meant to kill. Now she just walks away? Jaime has spent the last several seasons rediscovering his sense of honor, and with a growing realization that his sister isn't just selfish or a bit too ruthless, but that she is genuinely evil. Now he just forgets all that and runs back to Cersei. And worst of all...
2) Dany transforming, almost literally overnight into Die Führerin, Daenerys Hitler. Sorry, this was absolute CRAP! Yes, yes, I know they've foreshadowed it all along, it's still not enough -- this is a woman who, despite her occasional ruthlessness, fought to free slaves and even chained up her dragons because they killed a 3 year-old girl; it's not credible that she becomes a genocidal monster literally overnight. They could have made a descent into madness work, showing things that gradually to turn her to the dark side, and -- for best dramatic effect -- have it result from the consequences of some of her own choices along the way, but that would have had to occur over the course of at least a full season -- and not a shortened season like this one at that.
3) Put the climax where it belonged all along: on the Night King, who billed for ten years now, as an extinction level threat, can't help but look tremendously disappointing and anticlimactic, as they go on to focus on a civil war, little different than hundreds that litter the pages of history.
I could go on, but space doesn't permit.
Thanks for your input.......
It seems that parts of your one and two were dealt with in different ways, but maybe not as in depth or as clear as many seem to have wanted.
For example, yes, Jamie was re-discovering his honor, but his demise and return to his sister was explained in the final episode when Tyrion and Snow spoke.
As for Dany, recall in a relatively short time she lost two of her "children" and her closest friend and most likely saw the thrown slipping through her fingers. I think in some ways - and maybe it did need more time- that it was being shown she was going "mad." And it may have been a superficial way to define it by the conversations over the interbreeding creating mental illness.
On further reflection, it seems that the six episodes did need more fleshing out to bring about more realistic transitions and developments.
Exactly all of this. It just leaves an impression that D&D either didn’t know their own show or didn’t care or some combination of both.
I read an interview with D&D where they said how long they’d worked on the show for and how they really cared about ending it right.
If they cared they should have asked HBO to get more writers involved and potentially even get more episodes so they’re not trying to wrap up all these storylines in a mere six episodes, a seemingly impossible task for even the best of writers.
They could have stepped down as showrunners for Star Wars and let the show continue without them. Shows change showrunners sometimes, sometimes it’s even for the better but nope they reassured HBO somehow that they could pull this off in just six episodes. It just seems deluded on their part.
In the end we have a rushed and nonsensical final season to a great show. The story is fine, but the execution is rushed and poorly thought out, the characters are stupid and out of character, the suspense and the drama is lacking, the villains are undermined and their deaths anticlimactic, the show jumps about so much the world feels small. I don’t want to sound entitled but this could have and should have been so much better and I’m very disappointed HBO and D&D let this happen to one of my favourite shows.