It’s been a long two year wait for Game of Thrones fans, but the conclusion has finally begun. Sunday night saw the premiere of the final season and hype levels amongst viewers were sky-high. That translated into an impressive 17 million people tuning in (with countless more watching via other, more illegal means), and social media lighting up with folks offering their opinions on what happened.
Most of these were positive, but there were a few critics who said that this was a surprisingly sedate episode that felt a lot like scene-setting. Time’s Judy Berman was particularly excoriating, saying the following:
“It’s hard to imagine being satisfied with a premiere that broke almost every reunion (plus a few crucial introductions) into either a quick, quippy tease or several minutes of mostly unnecessary exposition. Add to that the cringey awkwardness of just about every scene between lovers, and Game of Thrones has kicked off its final season by amplifying many of the past few seasons’ worst mistakes.”
Yikes. Well, star Kit Harington wasn’t taking stuff like this sitting down, firing off a blistering answer in an interview with Esquire as to how he felt about the negative reviews.
“How I feel about the show right now is quite defiant. I think no matter what anyone thinks about this season — and I don’t mean to sound mean about critics here — but whatever critic spends half an hour writing about this season and makes their [negative] judgement on it, in my head they can go fuck themselves.
‘Cause I know how much work was put into this. I know how much people cared about this. I know how much pressure people put on themselves and I know how many sleepless nights working or otherwise people had on this show. Because they cared about it so much. Because they cared about the characters. Because they cared about the story. Because they cared about not letting people down.
“Now if people feel let down by it, I don’t give a fuck — because everyone tried their hardest. That’s how I feel. In the end, no one’s bigger fans of the show than we are, and we’re kind of doing it for ourselves. That’s all we could do, really. And I was just happy we got to the end.”
That’s a weirdly defensive answer from Harington, but I suppose at least it shows that he cares very deeply about the show and everyone working on it. Then again, just because a lot of talented people worked very hard on something doesn’t mean it can’t be terrible. Fortunately, while the final season premiere maybe wasn’t the best episode ever, it certainly didn’t let me down. And anyway, now that the show has all its ducks in a row, I’m sure the fire and steel is set to fly as we finally learn the fate of Westeros.
Even if this season were an anticlimax though, Game of Thrones would still go down in history as one of the all-time great TV shows. But I reckon the series still has some big surprises up its sleeve yet.
