Category Archives: George R.R. Martin

Fantasy Booking Game Of Throne Season 6

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Fantasy booking is a term you read a lot from pro wrestling reporters. It’s essentially when they book the storylines and matches that they would like to see, not necessarily what they expect to see. So this is my fantasy booking for season six of Game Of Thrones.

Keep in mind, this is for the TV show, not the novels. Therefore stories such as the Greyjoy family drama that no one really cares about are not taken into consideration.

Right off the bat we have Jon Snow resurrected by Melisandre. We all know this is what’s going to happen so let’s just bang it out right at the start of the season. Two minutes into the season premiere, here’s some king’s blood (likely Jon’s own blood) magic gets us off and running.

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For his first act, the happy-to-no-longer-be-dead Jon says “fuck ya’ll” to his backstabby Night’s Watch brethren and decides to settle all the Stark family’s debts. His next step is to recruit any of the Free Folk settled south of the Wall, wherein has gathers a nice little army en route to reclaiming Winterfell.

The first stop, geographically-speaking, would be to find Bran. But Bran can keep doing his vision quest/learning magic thing, because he’ll be needed in season seven. You’ll understand why by the end of this post. Meanwhile Rickon & Co can keep laying low wherever they are.

Jon hooks up with Brienne, Pod, Sansa & Theon before they get to Winterfell. There can be a happy reunion between Jon and Sansa, who talks him out of running Theon through since he helped her escape from Ramsey. And then we’re back to business.

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We get our first reckoning, as Jon’s army takes out the Bolton Crew. Jon kills Roose Bolton himself, perhaps by stabbing him repeatedly in the belly and slitting his throat in a combo platter of what Robb, Talisa, their unborn baby, and Catelyn got at the Red Wedding. Sansa and Theon can get their own justice by killing Ramsey in an adequately gruesome fashion.

Then they venture to the Twins, where they give old Walder Frey a bunch of arrows through his chest and other sensitive parts. At this point, they’ve progressed to the Vale, where Littlefinger managed to sweet talk them out of killing him. Perhaps they bring him along, but Sansa knows to keep a watchful eye on him by now.

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That brings them to King’s Landing. While the Stark Family Revenge Tour has been going on, Cersei and her FrankenMountain have been trying to deal with the Sparrow infestation. Let’s say they accomplish mixed result with it, and are still in the middle of the process when they have some uninvited guests knocking at their northern gates.

Where’s Jaime during all this? Probably grieving over his daughter and looking to get some payback of his own on the Dornish. This would involve him turning the boat around and heading back to Dorne where they can milk a substantial season-long subplot.

Meanwhile, down south, Daenerys consolidates some power by hooking up with a new Dothraki horde. She brings them to Mereen, where she apologizes for abandoning Tyrion, Daario, Varys and Jorah to go joyriding on Drogon. She then apologizes even more profusely to Rhaegal and Viserion, finally unleashing their reign of fire on the unworthy citizens of Mereen.

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She takes her buddies, her Dothraki, her Unsullied and her dragon kids as she finally moves towards Westeros. Along the way, they pick up Arya who, throughout the season has pretty much finished her assassin training, and pay an unwelcome visit to the south gate of King’s Landing.

While everyone is converging on King’s Landing, the snowfall hits and winter finally comes. With it, the Night’s King and his undead army of ass-kickery knocks down the Wall via some sort of dark magic, and that’s where the season ends. This, of course, leaves season seven to deal with the real main event of every living person vs every dead person.

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Unfortunately, I don’t actually expect this to be how the season plays out. But, if it were, I suspect it would be the most awesome single season of a TV show in history.

They could absolutely accomplish everything above in 10 hours of television. If you don’t believe so, then you’re most likely an HBO executive looking to milk a great show until it’s running on fumes. Personally, I’d rather to see things go down my way.

TeeVee Morghulis Or Why Game Of Thrones Must End

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Valar Morghulis – All Men Must Die – and the same can be said about every show on TV. Moreover, for a TV show to be considered truly great, I believe that it needs to have a strong beginning, middle and (perhaps most importantly) end.

HBO more or less just announced that Game of Thrones will run at least eight seasons. It had previously been suggested that they would wrap after seven seasons while, at the same time, HBO execs have said they’d like to see the show run ten seasons. I was personally very happy with the idea of seven seasons, that way they could ride out the momentum they’ve built without losing steam in the same manner that George R.R. Martin has several times in his Song of Ice and Fire novels.

A last season needs to be settled on sooner rather than later, so that the showrunners can set the home stretch in motion and deliver a conclusion on the highest level possible. Seven made sense to me, as that would give them twenty more hours after this past season to get to where everyone already knows the story is going. That being an army of nightmare creatures breaking down The Wall and laying siege to Westeros.

Already in this past season’s episode “Hardhome” we got a good look at the terror waiting to be unleashed once winter eventually arrives. After seeing that episode, I know I’m not the only one who cared considerably less about all the other storylines that were still dealing with political positioning, and smaller personal skirmishes. Assuming there were only two seasons left, I was ready for season six to be the last time winter was coming, and season seven being the madness that ensues when winter finally arrives. All-in-all, I’m just not sure how you can wedge another ten episodes in between there.

Game of Thrones shares DNA with something like Breaking Bad in that it is all clearly leading somewhere. There were events set in motion early on that would lead to a inescapable reckoning. In Breaking Bad, Walter White was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then rose to power as Heisenberg . It was therefore inevitable that either the cancer, or the sins he committed as Heisenberg, would kill him. Everyone knew this was coming, which is why everyone was excited when an end game was promised for season five. If they had tried to milk two or three more seasons out of the story, it would have diminished the legacy of the show.

I can also reference Starz’ Spartacus. They did a great job of going full speed ahead through the entire run of the series. That run lasting only three chronological seasons and one prequel season. Spartacus is a well known legend, and you’d have a hard time finding someone who didn’t know how it ends. With that in mind, it was important to make the journey to that ending as effective as possible, without any sort of lag time. Spartacus is one of the very few TV series that I own on blu ray, so you can draw your own conclusion about how I feel they did.

Lost is a cautionary tale on the flip side of this. I loved that show, even though I remember a couple of the middle seasons being a mess. The problem was that they had promised answers, and waited too long to lock down a time of resolution. The same could be said for another show I loved that suffered from stretching itself too thin over too many episodes – Battlestar Galactica. This show was also had what was, essentially, a single large story arc that required an ending. Part of the reason why both of these shows have sat in my Netflix queue for years with the unfulfilled intention of rewatching them is because they are both at least twenty episodes longer than they should have been.

Episodic shows like Mad Men, or The Walking Dead, or The Flash can run as long as they please. This is because they don’t need to worry about momentum building up over multiple seasons. When done well, an episodic series will build up momentum and deliver a measure of resolution at the end of each individual season. Game of Thrones does not have that luxury. Any time spent not leading towards the finale feels extraneous. In fact, you can feel this sort of stalling in many episodes of Game of Thrones that fall in the middle of each season.

Maybe eight seasons of Game of Thrones will be fine. I certainly hope they manage to pull it off, as it’s probably my favorite continuing series on TV (fare thee well to the already canceled Hannibal). That being said, I know that my attention will still waiver during scenes that don’t push the story towards its inevitable climax. I’d like to revisit Game of Thrones again once it ends but, if they keep driving it until it’s running on fumes like Lost or BSG, then it will likely end up sitting on my HBOGO watchlist as unwatched as those other shows in my Netflix queu.