"After a season that has largely avoided the time compression problems that felled Game of Thrones season seven, 'The Last of the Starks,' the fourth episode of season eight, abruptly hit the gas and tried to shove what felt like three episodes’ worth of story into one episode of television," says Todd VanDerWerff. "It was nearly an hour and 20 minutes long — so, only about an episode-and-a-third in total — but the overall effect was mildly chaotic, with a whole bunch of things happening and very few of them having the emotional weight that Game of Thrones clearly hoped they would have. Sansa would find out information in one scene and be sworn to secrecy, then immediately betray that trust the next time she appeared onscreen. In theory, weeks passed between those moments, when Sansa truly had to agonize over the secret she now carried. In practice, it felt like about five minutes." He adds that David Nutter's direction was top-notch, but David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' writing was "a mess, making for the weakest episode of the final season so far and an inauspicious preview of the show’s remaining few hours. Then again, maybe that’s the point! The fallout from all of these events would inevitably be messy and fractious and bloody; perhaps Game of Thrones is trying to mirror that inevitability via structural storytelling choices."
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Has Game of Thrones lost its way?: "Politicking, scheming, and backstabbing was once what this show did best, with every interaction dense with potential for surprising implications down the road," says Melissa Leon. "Now, with only two hours and some-odd minutes left in the series, character logic has begun to unravel, with egregious mistakes and head-scratching denouements being made left and right with little consequence or justification beyond the plot prescribing weird lapses in judgment."
On the back of Tyrion, Game of Thrones returned to what it does best: "Clearly, the hard fantasy elements are not where masterminds David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s hearts ultimately lie, despite the ominous warnings of Thrones’ own characters," says Alison Herman. "And as much as that priority may frustrate certain fans, it still presents an opportunity. By resolving the White Walker threat so early, the show left itself half a season to devote to the conflicts it did care about: those between humans, with their shifting loyalties, messy emotions, and other storytelling perks you just can’t get from a bunch of CGI zombies. Or, as Tyrion Lannister neatly puts it: 'We may have defeated them, but we still have us to contend with.'"
Gwendoline Christie on Brienne: "There were some things I didn’t expect. If there’s a character you care about and you feel like they go through some sort of hell you feel protective toward them"