Game of Thrones: What season was of the show was the worst, not counting the final season?

[Turin]

It's definitely true that there were glaring warning signs for what the show could become going all the way back to Season 2. I don't think the ripple effect that GRRM warned about is all that's to blame though. D&D were almost creatively empty when it came to this story. They even admitted after S8 aired that they were primarily concerned with appealing to football dads and hockey moms.

The last two episodes let me forgive a lot of the earlier season.

Season 7 has to be the answer here, though, because it's clear this is when D&D started massively speeding up plot and character movement so much that it felt like a different show, combined with character fates beginning to be decided in wholly unsatisfying and head-scratching ways.

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I agree 7's the worst, I just think 6 skates by too easily. I also think the last two episodes are very well presented pieces of shit. Sapochnik really bailed D&D out there(he couldn't save them in Season 8 though). lol

 

[ThereAreFourNaan]

It's really hard for me to approach the idea of rewatching the entire show. I might just rewatch the first 2 or 3 seasons and then stop.

I am not a book reader, so this is just from the perspective of a viewer.

I think the show, from a story perspective, could have been condensed into ~5 great seasons (6 at most), assuming they also tweaked the final direction of the show. Season 7 and 8 felt like they were in super fast forward ultra speed bullshit, but that's often because they spent entire seasons making plotlines circle the drain or grow like an out of control kudzu. We became accustomed to huge amounts of screen time being applied to microscopic details of character drama and small scale conflicts. Everything had to have an action and a reaction and a counter-reaction.

The following plotlines felt like they were stuck in holding patterns, sometimes for multiple seasons at a time:

• Danaeris learning to rule / doing stuff out east
• Arya's journey to become a super ninja of doom
• Everything to do with the Boltons and the torture of whats-his-name
• Everything to do with Cercei and the religious people and then stuff in Kings landing afterwards
• Everything to do with the sand snakes / dorne

That's basically 80% of the show for several seasons at a time. There were individual episodes and scenes that I enjoyed in every season, but it was very obviously getting weaker and weaker overall and some of this was just painful to watch and felt unnecessarily cruel or drawn out.

A lot of this stuff could have been condensed or cut to get to the point - which was you apparently wanted the Lanisters to still be in charge of Kings Landing, you wanted Danaeris to be in charge of a great army from the East, and you wanted the Starks to be in charge of the North and need to pull things together for a confrontation with the Night King and then another clash to work out what happens to the 7 Kingdoms. Danaeris vs Night King was an obvious conflict we all knew it was working towards.

I'm told that a time skip had been considered at one point in the books, but I don't know much detail. I think a time skip could have been appropriate here. Several of these plots feel like they were invented just to keep things going, or so some characters would have something to do while others had to solve their plots in the mean time. But it all turned out to be a bunch of bullshit in the end.

I'm going to vote for Season 7, simply because I think the series got progressively worse. I don't feel strongly about that pick, though.

 

[The Artisan]

7 was just as bad as the final season. I loved the loot train attack but that was the only redeeming moment of the season for me.
6 was shaky as hell but had a couple of cool sequences like hardhome and battle of the bastards to elevate it.
5 was a step down but fine.

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I think hardhome was season 5.

 

[NookSports]

The show peaked at Season 3, then went downhill slowly at first, then all at once in the final season.

 

[BossAttack]

Not to toot my own horn but I remember allllll the way back in the early seasons when I and other book readers criticized the divergences from the book as being almost invariably shit and called out the showrunners as incompetent hacks, and gave numerous examples of how they sucked whenever they'd need to adapt/diverse/didn't have book material they could rely on, only to be shut down as some elitist/purist, over and over. "It's an adaptation", "this is fine", "this part was better/improved actually", "adapting a show is hard", "they are not incompetent since they made a successful show", etc etc.

And I'd say, just wait til they run out of book material, it's going to be a complete disaster, they have no idea what they're doing, etc.
The most notable example/early red flags were in seasons 1-2, with the Littlefinger sexposition scene, which truly highlighted how these two clowns completely misread not only the overall tone of the story (it's got lots of raunchy sex amirite??) but also spectacular mischaracterizations, like they see Littlefinger's character, he is a plotter and a schemer amirite? so now he's a mustache-twirling villain you see, nevermind that the whole point of him being so successful at plotting is his subtlety and how he comes across as harmless and innocuous to everyone....
...And, of course, S2's Daenerys's "where are mah dragonz" subplot. Since season 2 adapted A Clash of Kings, and ACoK didn't have a lot of Dany chapters, and the showrunners apparently were incapable of accepting that Dany could simply have less screen time (the horror), they made up that dragon kidnapping plot which was egregiously bad, everyone seems to agree now it was stupid and bad, yet for some reason at the time it got a lot of "iT's AN ADaptAtIon" defense. Well, turns out, that sometimes it's really just a shitty "adaptation" after all, eh?

Then the show did completely run out of book material as we had predicted all along, starting mostly in season 5 and oops, that's when the show's writing really, unambiguously turned to shit? pikashock.gif

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Mhhhmmmmm.

I still don't have a problem with a lot of divergences, so long as they are executed right. Littlefinger being mustache twirling is certainly more "exciting" but it also reveals how they understand nothing about the politics of that world. Everyone loves Littlegfinger in the books because he tries to be everyone's best friend. He come from a low birth, a step-up from an upjumped knight. He has no vast lands. No large castle. No army. No sworn bannermen at his command. And it's because of all of this that no one ever views him as a threat.

Yet in the show, various high lords are all like, "oh, never trust Littlefinger." The fuck? Then why not just kill him? The reason other lords can't just kill each other is because they have vast holdings and bannermen at their command, killing Ned Stark literally triggered a war. You don't have that problem with Littlefinger, so why are you coddling him when you view him as distrustful and dangerous?

Of course, by the end of the series, once LF has gained various titles, lands, status, etc. they decide to just cut his throat in complete open with all high lords and knights in attendance. WHAT?! You can't just do that. The fact that not one nobleman was like, "yo, this is actually kinda fucky, why is he not being given at least some fair trial?" is ridiculous. I'd be real nervous after his execution about doing anything that upset a Stark because my ass could be chopped next with no ability to defend myself. Hey, remember when Robb Stark chopped off Greatjon Umber's head and the result as all his knights and men pulling from Robb's army? Whatever happened to stuff like that?

Bah!

 

[Captain_Vyse]

How can anyone vote for seasons 1-4?

 

[Deleted member 46948]

It's 7. The plot holes and general silliness kept getting worse after s3 onwards, but it reached truly ludicrous degrees in s7. The whole wight plot, my god.

 

[The Artisan]

How can anyone vote for seasons 1-4?

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reading through this thread it seems like some folks do feel like the series was troubled as it progressed but not necessarily that it was at its low point in the first half. although it would be good to get an explanation for voting on that, even if it is just 11

 

[MCee]

Sept and sand snakes made for an uninteresting combination. 7 might be rushed in comparison to past seasons but still more entertaining than 5. 8 was good up until it became a mess at the end of episode 3 and on.