Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

Game of Thrones bungles the execution of its last great villain

Another season of Game of Thrones is over, and nobody knows when it will return. After a run of seven short weeks, last night’s extended ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ brought the curtain down on Westeros for the time being, except the curtain here was the colossal wall of ice that is the last barrier between the living and the dead.

‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ is a strange beast – extending its running time to 80 minutes allows the filmmakers to avoid most of the pitfalls of this season (notably the characters’ mysterious ability to teleport around the vast continent) but they are missing the confidence to know exactly what to do with that space. The episode opens with a, quite literally, theatrical summit at an abandoned ‘dragon pit’, that feels both far too stagey and also incongruous with the tone of the show during the halcyon days of its early seasons.

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in