‘Game of Thrones’ Series Review: Like Fire & Ice, It Was a Show About Contrasts

Now that Game of Thrones has ended, we can finally look back at all eight seasons and see one thing: wow, this show was a study in contrasts.

It’s in the series’ proper name of course — A Song of Ice and Fire — but all told, Game of Thrones was a show that was constantly trying to have it both ways. It wanted to portray fantastic cinematic spectacle and the kind of quiet dramatic moments you only see in indie films and off-Broadway shows. It gave us heroes undone by their own nobility, villains who were all too easy to love, and characters locked in a constant struggle between desire and duty. Off-screen, the show had its own meta battle raging. Since the books’ author George RR Martin never got to finish his version of the saga, fans and critics were constantly holding Martin’s version up against showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s interpretation.

That Game of Thrones even exists is something of a miracle. The books were created by Martin because he wanted specifically to write something that couldn’t be filmed. The first pilot ordered by HBO was infamously scrapped because it was so bad. The show was not expected to be a hit, and it’s somehow become a global phenomenon. Fans latched onto the show because it didn’t shy away from its core contrasts. In fact, it was a show about forces battling one another: Lannister vs. Stark, ice vs. fire, honor vs. survival, love vs. duty, and ultimately, two lovers pitted against each other politically.

Just as the characters in Game of Thrones constantly found their loyalties torn, the show itself sometimes didn’t quite know what it most wanted to be. Early seasons emphasized the quiet moments of contemplation where people reveal themselves over the bombastic spectacle that the series eventually became synonymous with. Characters sat in rooms and talked to each other for ten minutes at a time! Whole important battles happened off-screen. Give The Battle of the Whispering Wood the same care the Battle of the Bastards got? (Never!)

The past two seasons had the opposite issue. While they delivered on spectacle, they lost the tender touch of the first three seasons. Major character arcs were compressed to single camera shots, putting the onus on the actors to explain wordlessly what was happening to the audience and why. Emilia Clarke obviously had the hardest task in this arena, and she did her best to portray Daenerys’s unravelling with subtlety and grace. Nevertheless, the clear confusion over Daenerys’s arc has got to prove that the show fumbled a bit even as it delivered some of its most breathtaking shots.

Knotted into the framework of the show were other raging battles. Most notably: what is the role of women in fantasy genres? Even if we table the show’s approach to sex and sexual violence, which is its own can of worms, the show’s vibrantly three-dimensional heroines also fell into some troubling stereotypes. When Martin started writing the books in the early ’90s, Arya Stark and Brienne of Tarth were on the vanguard of a new wave in warrior women archetypes. Now, those types of roles can actually come across as subtly misogynistic. As Joe Reid put it back in 2016:

To me, Arya Stark has always been the Hit Girl of Westeros, a girl who stands out for being as bloodthirsty as any of the realm’s men, except, you know, she’s a tiny girl! How awesome and such! It’s a way for those largely male audiences to engage with a female character while at the same time using violence to bridge over all those things that make a female character in a realm like Westeros interesting/challenging.

In the last two seasons, though, Arya did evolve into something more challenging: a “hit girl” attempting to reclaim her humanity. Brienne also got to be softer, too, but her romance with Jaime was a whiplash-inducing tragedy. Elsewhere, Cersei Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, and Sansa Stark all jockeyed for power in their own interesting ways, with Cersei and Dany not only losing their lives in the process, but their minds and their morals to boot. The lesson there is potentially sexist in the extreme: women can’t be trusted with power, ever.

Still the fact that we care so much about these characters with strange-sounding names living in a fantasy world full of bickering lords and warring religions is a testament to the ways in which Game of Thrones succeeded. The show brought Martin’s world to vibrant life. This is thanks to its writing, yes, but also it’s incandescent directing, glorious technical crew, brilliant design, and sprawling cast of actors from all over the globe. Game of Thrones is not the first show to have a gaffe on set, but those water bottles and coffee cups made news because of the show’s reputation for excellence. (And because the show’s viewers are feverishly picking up every detail.)

Looking back at the entire series, Game of Thrones mostly succeeded in pulling off its ambitious mission. It is, without a doubt, one of the most spectacular shows ever made. The last season alone featured some truly transcendent filmmaking, and earlier seasons proved that you could make fantasy work for a mainstream audience. In an ironic twist, though, the show’s stumbles are the kind that can ruin a viewer experience for some. The way Game of Thrones has handled sexual violence has divided viewers, and the series finale wasn’t perhaps its finest moment. (I mean, I laughed.) Nevertheless, it is one of the grandest shows to ever air on television, and we will see its like again. HBO broke the television landscape and raised the bar once again with Game of Thrones. It’s biggest victory will be its pretenders and artistic successors.

Where to stream Game of Thrones