Game of Thrones Throwdown

Game of Thrones, HBO’s most viewed television show, has taken the world by storm with its latest season of action packed medieval drama. The series recently concluded its seventh season, yet did so with only seven episodes, as opposed to the usual ten episodes. Since the beginning of the series in 2011, the show has been very expensive to produce due to a number of exotic costumes, scenery, as well as special effects and CGI, which have only become more expensive over the years. In fact, season six cost roughly $10,000,000 per episode. That’s 100 million dollars spent on just one season! In an effort to reduce cost, the creators of the show decide to cut this season short in hopes having fewer, but more entertaining episodes. This extra amount of money created the chance to see some really amazing special effects and digital art, yet many viewers felt as though they got short- changed. The intricate storytelling of original author, George RR Martin began to feel second to the CGI dragons and zombies.
In order to find out how McClatchy students and staff felt about this, I interviewed Ms. Heitz, a language arts teacher, who is a big fan of the show. She said, “Ideally we would like to have some storylines wrapped up at the end of a season, but considering how the pacing happened… I knew not much would get wrapped up.” Inevitably time became the season’s largest flaw. In the finale, storylines of focal characters seemed forced to come to an end and appeared poorly planned. Ms. Heitz noticed this as well, “As I got to the end of the season everything was rushed, and focused on how fast can the dragons fly? How fast can the ravens fly?” Rather than the in depth and thought provoking show that was created back in 2011, this season seems to have taken a shift towards more theatrics and high-intensity drama. Unfortunately, Game of Thrones fans will have to wait until summer to see where this shift will take the rest of the series.