![]() Now, what matters is plot, and the plot’s needs require flitting from location to location, just to keep up. And now, as the characters head back toward each other, we can see just how much they’ve changed from those early days.īut that’s just the thing: Now that we’re this deep into the series, we don’t really need to establish who these characters are. Subsequent seasons traced how those characters and themes shifted and changed as events in Westeros merited. (Jon and Tyrion’s friendship, for instance, was born on the road to the Wall.) So long as the show kept us intrigued in some way, we were more willing to wait as it set up the basics. Thus, the early going of Game of Thrones was more welcoming to scenes that serve mostly to set up character or theme, and those scenes often occurred when characters were traveling from place to place. Similarly, establishing Ned as an honorable man who would lose his head for the sin of assuming everyone else was honorable established one of the show’s most potent themes. Digging into the relationship between Arya and Sansa, for instance, would establish character traits and moments of foreshadowing that the show is still paying off all these seasons later. ![]() In season one, we were still getting to know the characters. But where season one was pretty leisurely and tied distinctly to the passage of time over the course of several weeks, season seven is flying all over the place.ħ winners and 6 losers from a Game of Thrones full of twists of fate Now, in season seven, the characters are once again largely spread across a handful of locations (primarily King’s Landing, Winterfell, the Citadel, and Dragonstone, with some stragglers heading toward one of those locations). Then Game of Thrones scattered those characters across its map for the next several seasons, only beginning to collapse the story back in on itself in season six. Yes, we kept cutting away to the adventures of Daenerys across the Narrow Sea, or Jon Snow at the Wall, but for the most part, the characters were in a handful of the same locations, which set up relationships the show has been playing off in every season since. It was by far the most compact the show had ever been. Then the second half of the season covered the events of a few more weeks, as Ned Stark uncovered a deadly conspiracy and the characters struggled to stay alive in a treacherous political landscape. The bulk of the first half of that season is spent on many of the characters traveling from Winterfell in the North to King’s Landing several weeks’ journey south. Think back to the first season of Game of Thrones (which you could still make an argument for as the show’s best). The deeper we get into a story, the less patience we have for fat Jon stands stoically, remembering the boat trip we’ll never get to see. This could be read as a complaint - and I do wish the show was slightly more transparent about how much time is passing - but at the same time, this is probably inevitable. At times, it seems like the characters have conversations, make decisions, then board Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop to travel between sections of Westeros over a matter of minutes. We might send Jon off to Dragonstone via ship in one scene, then pick up with him arriving in the next episode, but there’s little sense of how the journey weighed on him or changed his relationships with his fellow travelers. The effect of this elision of time is that the characters seem to be in stasis between their scenes. And it’s only getting more drastic in season seven: Conservatively, several months have passed across the first three episodes, but we’ve seen only a few snippets of moments across those several months. Episodes will crosscut between events that have to be taking place weeks or months apart, as when a relatively compressed story in Dorne back in season five was placed opposite far more sprawling narratives elsewhere. It’s had the curious effect of making the show seem increasingly unmoored from the passage of time. Game of Thrones season 7: news and episode reviews
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