Drizzle: Okay okay okay. Okay, Speed. Speed, okay. Non-spoilerrific review of the Game of Thrones finale and…go.

Speed: It was a letdown, considering how amazing the show was for the past decade. Then again, considering what’s happened in previous episodes–the Battle of the Bastards comes to mind as an excellent later-season episode, as does what we could actually see of “The Long Night”–just about anything aside from the Night King rising from his Dragonglass-impaled ashes would’ve paled in comparison in terms of the sheer “wowzers” factor. To me, at least, it was pretty weak.

Drizzle: Long story short? The makers of the show were tired of it.

via GIPHY

Speed: Same thing happened with a lot of shows. Look at Dexter or Lost or True Blood or even the last season of The Wire. People want to try new things. That’s human nature. But, there’s a difference between almost indifference to what you’ve created for people and wanting to branch out.

Drizzle: Endgame did it right.

The goodbyes were good and emotional. Most importantly, they–and the movie–made sense. Game of Thrones? I would’ve been happier if they were just like “fuck it, we’re done. Someone else do this. We don’t wanna.”

Speed: It’s kind of like the Confessions of a Dangerous Mind of GoT episodes. Self-important and rambling to the point where you end up undoing a lot of the goodwill you’ve built up over the years. The finale was like Logic, circa 2019. Fundamentally, it was sound, but there was no real emotion or gravitas to anything. It just felt…there.

Drizzle: Nope. Not even. Logic was incoherent. GoT was like “we’re rushing this.” It was coherent, just dumb. The entire season. Like, each episode felt like a mopup checklist.

Blend to last season? Check. Wrap up some secondary arcs? Check. Turn Dany into Team America World Police? Check. Oh crap, let’s get some more character development. Check. Hey look! CGI dragons and zombies. Check. And…let’s call it “done.” Good season, y’all. The telltale sign that it’d end up this was was that it was only six episodes.

Speed: Factual. Season seven was only seven, so the proof has been there for a bit.

Drizzle: What happened in season eight could’ve easily been stretched out to two seasons, just to make it feel more organic. And that’s before we get into all the shit that happened offscreen or even the story itself. It was rushed. It was unnecessarily short. They had the contract to do it and do it right, but they didn’t. They didn’t want to do it anymore. Point-blank period.

Speed: People are saying “well at least it wasn’t the Lost finale.” I’m like eh…true. But was it really any better?

Drizzle: It played like the last essay in high school. You know you’re going to graduate if you just do the minimum required. Now season seven was less like that. It was like they were trying to stretch it to the minimum. Decreasing margins and double spacing. Season seven could’ve stretched too. But, they focused a lot on getting Dany to help the North. The war with Cersei in episode five of season eight was over way too fast. The venture to North of The Wall was too fast. Old Town was too fast. But, hey! At least we got some more incest into the show with Jon and Dany.

Speed: The battle with Cersei should’ve been somewhat fast. Dany had a nuke.

Nuke trumps foot soldiers. And yes, incest. Again. Gotta keep those bloodlines “pure.” At least with what you saw of the Battle of Winterfell, it was epic.

Drizzle: Naw, we had an intercontinental war where the three top cities went down in two episodes. Robb Stark spent two seasons just trekking through the Riverlands.

Speed: True. But, no one besides Dany had a big-ass dragon or two just flying around, raining hellfire on everyone. While I don’t think it should’ve been over super fast, I can see why they ended it quickly. Either they pulled an Evangelion and ran out of money or they wanted another “ZOMG! THIS WAS INSANE!” moment or two. Shock value and such.

But, yes. This season has been a checklist but it’s also been more about the writers just throwing things out there to rile people up. Dany going Mad Queen was expected but it was started slightly abruptly and cliched in that she gave into her rage. It was more like the team was like “aight guys! Let’s see what we can get away with and still have the masses sing our praises.” It really was like a bad case of senioritis.

Drizzle: Rushed doesn’t even describe it. Plus, the dragon is nil since the one without the dragon was doing all the winning. It was rushed. Now, let’s get into some details. It’s explicitly said in the series that the ride from Winterfell to Kings Landing is a month when uninhibited. But Jon Snow had to fight through a Lannister and Frey army, that had Ed Sheeran in it no less, to get to Kings Landing. It made no sense. And speaking of cameos, apparently Aaron Rodgers was among the burned.

But Jon goes through the Frey army–the thing that killed fan-favorite Robb–and marched up to the doors of Kings Landing in two weeks? If you don’t get the fuck outta here…

I would’ve paid extra money to see him negotiated with the Freys like Robb did. One line like “my mom ain’t here to make deals for me” would’ve been worth a ninth season. But this season? Hop, skip, and jump. Honestly, seeing Jon do all the things Robb did–with success–would’ve been worth at least an episode. But they breezed over it.

Speed: They breezed over a heap of things.

Drizzle: The same way a high schooler breezes over their last essay. Because they’ve already graduated. There was too much shit we missed out on because these motherfuckers got senioritis.

Speed: In some ways, GoT became a victim of its own success because people wanted to see cool shit but everyone forgot that the series was more about the storytelling than just things going boom and explodey all the time. This wasn’t a Michael Bay movie.

Drizzle: Well, this season had neither. Senioritis.

Speed: At this point, I almost feel like the porno spoofs would’ve had a more coherent and thought out sequence of events than the finale.

Drizzle: Okay. Spoiler time. The pros of the episode are as follows. The acting was good and Jon pet Ghost. The cons? Everything else.

Speed: Acting was great. Dany’s death scene was amazing and Jon saying so much with so little in this episode was beautiful. Everything else? Eh. And that’s putting it lightly.

Drizzle: And Bran? BRANNNN!?!?!? That motherfucker was absent for a season and a half.

Speed: I laughed when people told me that’d he’d be king. And then I realized that, the way that this season went, it was entirely in the realm of possibility and I just hung my head. What type of M. Night crazy juice do you have to gulp down to think that this plot twist is a good one?

Drizzle: He took group projects classes, wrote one flashcard, but became Valedictorian.

Speed: What a twist!

Drizzle: Hey Bran, what did you do? “I told Jon he was a Targaryen and the rightful king. Oh wait…by the way, I did it for no reason because I’m the king now.” So…Bran did nothing.

Speed: He spoke in riddles most of the time when straight talk would’ve been so much more useful/effective/smart. He was Jaden Smith before Jaden started giving clean water to Flint. He was JoJo Simmons. He was Otis Williams in The Temptations biopic and we all know ain’t nobody comin’ to see no damn Otis.

Drizzle: Simply put, this was worse than Joffrey.

Speed: I’ve talk to a lot of people, long-time fans and first-timers. I’ve seen the responses. Almost no one is all that pleased with how things ended. We weren’t expecting a happy ending, but we weren’t really expecting…that. But there’s a general taste of “ugh” in peoples’ mouths right now and that’s how you know you messed up.

The Stark clan–including Jon Targaryen–got a glo-up, even while Jon just had a hard reset. But Bran as the King on the Meltyface Throne has the stink of “let’s throw things at the wall and see what sticks.” Thank you, Game of Thrones writer’s room for a decade of Thrones. But season eight wasn’t that good to me. I’m sorry that I’m not blindly going to say “oh this was amazeballs” just because the cast said “it’s rude to ask for a redone season.” I don’t want to see a redone season. It ended how it ended.

But, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.