HBO's Game of Thrones has turned into a mind-boggling crapfest. The show was great for four or five seasons, then it caught up with the books and started to go downhill and season 7 was so execrable that I lost all interest in seeing how the series concluded. I've got to admit, though, that I haven't been able to resist following the reactions to season 8 and I might end up watching it after all, just out of morbid curiosity. After season 7, I didn't think it was possible for the show to get any worse but judging by the reviews and the clips I've seen, it looks like the showrunners have managed to reach a new low.
Season 8, Episode 3 -- the long-anticipated Battle of Winterfell - is a case in point. I haven't seen the whole episode, but what I have seen of it makes me wonder if the writers even bothered to do any research when they were planning this thing. TV and movies have budget and time constraints, granted, but there's no excuse for the stupidity on display in this horrendous battle sequence. Considering the fact that this confrontation is the culmination of eight seasons of buildup, arguably the biggest payoff in the entire series, you'd think that the showrunners might have tried to ensure that the battle actually made sense.
For example, I'm no military historian but even I know that you don't position trebuchets out in the open in front of your troops. According to Wired, just one of many sources which have pointed this out, "any able field artillery officer could tell you that heavy-caliber indirect-fire weapons need to be positioned such that they’re both protected and mutually supportive of surrounding units. But the allies [in Game of Thrones] placed their batteries of trebuchets all along the lines, between the cav squadron and the infantry units. After a single initial barrage in support of the cav attack, they abandoned those mass-casualty producing weapons entirely."
The trebuchets should have been positioned inside the castle itself. Even if I hadn't known that already, it would have taken maybe a minute or two to look it up, but apparently doing this extremely basic research was too much for the writers. Maybe there was some technical or budgetary reason why they didn't want to include a couple of scenes of trebuchets firing from inside the castle. Who knows? Even one brief scene would have done the trick, but no, they positioned them outside in front of their infantry and as a result the trebuchets only managed to get off a couple of shots before they were, predictably, overrun.
Even worse, the trebuchets weren't used at all until the Dothraki cavalry had charged straight at the enemy, an army of the undead who presumably wouldn't break in the face of a cavalry charge. Never mind that trebuchets wouldn't have the range shown in the battle -- most movies and TV shows exaggerate the effects of medieval weapons. That's forgivable, but what isn't forgivable is that the trebuchets should have been used first to break up the mass of the advancing wights before the cavalry was sent in. Shell them first, then attack. That's Basic Warfare 101.
The cavalry charge itself doesn't make any sense. The Dothraki weren't heavy cavalry anyway, so they wouldn't have been all that effective as shock troops, especially against an army of the undead, and their total annihilation in a matter of minutes was probably the only realistic thing about this moronic battle. I could go on and on about the absurdities on display here. For instance, the defenders, supposedly the greatest military minds in Westeros, left their flanks and rear completely exposed. They stationed their infantry outside the castle, in front of their fire trenches. They didn't bother to man the walls with any sizeable force until they were about to be overrun. They didn't bring in their most effective weapons, the dragons, until after the engagement had started. Etc. Etc.
Even in a fantasy world, defenders as dumb as this should have been annihilated and that's almost what happened in the episode. They would have been completely wiped out if the writers hadn't brought in a Mary Sue to save the day. The scene where Arya appears out of nowhere and kills the Night King, ending the battle, makes no sense, but in a show that now makes no sense at all that's irrelevant. The disregard for logic and even a semblance of historical accuracy in movies and TV shows has always bugged me, but the thing that really drives me crazy about this particular battle is that the showrunners spent so much time, effort and money putting it all together. Even worse, they actually seem to think that they created a masterpiece:
"[The Battle of Winterfell] took 25 days to film, requiring 500 extras, 600 crew members and 70 horses. Benioff described the difficulty of coordinating horses in battle scenes, which is why they are rarely used except in 'big budget war films'. Weiss added, 'Miguel's really outdone himself. Fully fleshed out medieval battles require a tremendous amount of resources and choreography to get them right. It feels like we're doing something fresh that you don't see on TV and movies very often.'" (Wikipedia)
That's hilarious. To be fair to director Miguel Sapochnik, he did manage to create some good (if not particularly logical or historically accurate) battle scenes in earlier episodes, but the Battle of Winterfell is an abomination even as mindless entertainment. Its only saving grace, probably, is that the episode is so dark it's hard to tell what's actually going on.
Ultimately, I don't really care. I'm not one of these fanboys who gets all wrapped up and "emotionally invested" in a TV series, so I can more or less shrug off this insipid battle in particular and the decline of Game of Thrones in general as just another example of how the corporate entertainment industry destroys everything it gets its hands on. The Battle of Winterfell really upset some fans, though. See the next video for one reaction. Warning: nonstop F-bombs.
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Game of Thrones "The Long Night" Of Disappointment Season 8 Episode 3 Review