Review

The name 'Pod' came up in something or other I was listening to recently and that made me think of the character Pod in Game of Thrones and with my new knowledge of movies I was able to crystallize a number of half-formed thoughts I had on the show. And so I wanna write up a postmortem and rant. Disclaimer that the show is generally well-produced and is, largely, entertaining minute-to-minute. Before I start shotgunning it away for it's many serious problems. Also nearly every problem I had was with the writing and were also issues that Elden Ring shared so I feel it may just be dear George I don't care for. Not necessarily the show itself.

Game of Thrones is Nashville (1975), the TV show. Every single problem I had with Nashville is 100% present in GOT. I know that people say that the show is amazing until like the last season or two, but I really gotta disagree. The problems that I had with it started late season one or early season two. First, it has too many goddamn characters. I checked and we watched five and a half out of the eight total seasons. I have no idea who the main character(s) are. That is a dire writing issue. That is on the level of you need to go back to the drawing board and make sweeping changes. I totally get that the core conceit of the story is that you're following an ensemble cast in their little machinations for power when the crown becomes available. And the mystery of who will come out in the end. Why then are we spending literal hours following characters who are not in the running for the crown? The show seems to treat every primary, secondary, and tertiary character with equal love. In the show's eyes, they are all primary characters. Similar to Nashville. It's insane. I also feel like it's so wasteful. HBO is burning through literal piles of money for seemingly zero purpose. The show will fully have me watch tertiary woman speak with quaternary man for 30 real life minutes and act as though anything at all has happened on my screen.

I will accept the idea that this approach can work better in a book series. You have a lot more time to get into the minutiae of each person's life and what they add to the whole. You do not have the time to do this in a TV show. I loathe when people say "I just want X but in other medium." Why? You have the original thing. What does putting it in another medium and making few to no changes get you? The big problem that I had with having 1000 different main characters is that it's so infuriating when you're watching someone and enjoying it and then the scene switches to some other piece of shit you don't care whether they live or die. And I know in my heart of hearts that we won't be getting back to whatever plot thread I was enjoying for very likely 1-3 episodes. There's just too much shit. Why did the show subject me to watching 10 episodes of whoever his name was slowly getting his frank and beans cut off and turned into a horrible dog slave man? When, again, he is not one of the fucks that may get on the throne? Nor is the person in the scenario who is doing the torturing. So what grander purpose does it serve? Eunuch man was bastard I guess and so we're seeing him get his comeuppance? Why does that take any longer than like an episode or two? And WHY the FUCK do you not have stupid Salsa doing anything to him as revenge? You do literally nothing with her for 15 seasons and then you have her meet up with him after he was bastard to her and her family and then?...I guess he is a dog now so we no longer care about that. One less fucking thing you could have her do.

I think Salsa really became the object of my ire. All of the core writing problems of the show are really embodied and exemplified in her and so she serves as a lightning rod for my dislike. I wanna pose a question. What decisions does Salsa make? And I wanna be very very clear here. I am not asking what huge sweeping decisions she made. Not every person in a show needs to be some uber important person that changes the course of everything. I am asking what simple decisions she made in the many many hours she is watched over the course of at least 5 and a half seasons. Like on the level of "Shall I wear red or blue today?"....Because I sat and thought about it and I can recall her making one decision. To trust someone who is obviously evil and do what they say. I will not be allotting her multiple points for making the same decision to trust someone else that is also obviously evil because it was a different instance with a separate person. Same decision, she gets one point. If I am being exceptionally giving I think I can recall her being given the choice of some different pastries by funny old woman. To which, I assume, she made a choice in eating one of them. The show has the gall to make me watch this bitch for hours. And she does nothing. But we KEEP. WATCHING. HER. For hours. What are we even doing?

Another of my principal complaints is that, even if we totally set aside the problem that I struggled to remember these people's names even when I was seeing them in front of me. Even if we just assume that, like Nashville, this is America and everyone is important and everyone's opinion will be heard. And that that is fine. The second big problem is I don't like anyone. None of these wretches are remotely good people. I guess there are some children that by sheer virtue of not having lived long enough to become corrupted, they are not bastard. But anyone in this show over the age of like 15 is almost wholly unlikeable. I really do not care who gets on the throne because 90% of the people that are in the running for it are irredeemably bad. It's all a race to the bottom. The world is as bad as like a Sin City or a Repo the Genetic Opera. Who even cares who the King is when we cannot go a single episode without someone being the most treacherous slime they possibly can be that day? It just starts feeling like I'm getting grime on me. I know that some people like the dirt and violence. But you pass a point, the moral event horizon, where I really feel it just makes everything else meaningless. We are in a fantasy dystopia, the person that gets on the throne does not matter. They are all bastards. So what then is the point of it all?

What do I think happens in the end? Hard to say given the principal complaint I believe people levied is that the ending season was not satisfying. But I started having problems with the show ages ago, so I'm already out of touch with the common man. I think it would be hard to try and reverse psychology what is likely to make people mad given they were seemingly not angry at any of the things that I saw as extreme cons to the show's writing. So my best guess is John dies defending big wall and that makes the people there put aside their differences and realize the horde of snow zombies are maybe an issue they should care about. Salsa does nothing because she is a cardboard cutout that we insist is a character. Dragon lady becomes the villain because she has shown to be too stupid to live and that is the only path I can see for her. Also the show did a really obvious thing where dragon lady is shown the throne and chooses it to leave it behind to go after something else in a vision. Thereby telling me metaphorically that she is choosing not the throne. Don't know why the show still pretended she was in the running any point after that. Felt almost patronizing. Circe girl-bosses her way to power and gets away with everything because the patriarchy has no control over an independent and powerful woman like her (Actually I think the show probably does something really horrible to her because she is both a woman, which we hate in this universe, and is also near the top of the treachery list. It's already really mean-spirited at the best of times so I'm sure we tar and feather her before putting her in the bronze bull or something equally terrible. But I choose to believe otherwise.). Peter Dinklage walks around quipping with various parties despite the fact that it would make all the sense in the world for him to give these people the bird and go retire elsewhere. Given he seems to be the only person who is self-aware and has no reason to be where he was sent. Dragon lady is not gonna be on the throne so I don't know why we sent him to her.

I think cripple boy ends up on the throne. My reasoning is that it would seem very weird to me to start the show in season one largely from the perspective of his family and not have one of them end up on the throne in the end. If I am wrong and one of them does not end up on the throne, I would say the entirety of season one could be cut with no change to the story. And we offed like 70% of that family over the course of the show already, with cripple being one of the few left, as of the last thing I watched. What would be the point of the entirety of season one if not one of them winning? Also of the various things the thousand different characters are doing, his stuff feels kind of main charactery I guess. I don't really see what his whole vision quest would be about if not how to win in the end. If they are just about the whole snow zombie thing, that would be stupid, because we already have a character over there dealing with that. Also, it would be symbolically appropriate if cripple boy wins because he is uniquely the only character in the show who cannot get onto the throne himself without others choosing to put him there. Because of the cripple business. So it would work well as a metaphor for people putting aside their differences and choosing to give someone else power.