It was one of the last big moments in Game of Thrones. Most surviving major characters were gathered listening to Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister eloquently explain why a surprising character should become king.
Dinklage, with his grave, baritone voice, was very good. It was great drama in a show that in its final season has really pissed off longtime fans by not being so great anymore. Then someone somewhere watching closely spotted it. A perfectly modern, everyday water bottle beside the booted foot of Samwell Tarly (John Bradley). It was the coffee cup blooper all over again.
Had the final season of Thrones been on the level of, say, Breaking Bad—the AMC drama which some think set the gold standard for great finales—it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But the last two episodes of HBO‘s incredibly popular sword and dragons drama have been, in the opinion of many, bad.
This was insult to injury, for them, so of course there were plenty of tweets to go around.
Outrageous! Infuriating! Some folks were just over it.
Yes, passionate fandoms get weird online, they reinforce each other in freaking out over tiny stuff, but it’s easy to see why GoT devotees were especially hacked off. It just felt like another disappointment.
The fates of characters like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), who died ignominiously under a pile of rubble, the seemingly cold way Jon Snow (Kit Harington) said goodbye to his faithful direwolf, Ghost—all these and more have led critics and fans both to conclude the show’s writers kind of phoned it in, in the end.
Deciding whether that’s true or not is for another time. We can say, however, that at least Jon rectified that bit about Ghost. The huge white good boy definitely got a nice scratching behind the ears in the finale.
Nice save, Jon.
