Shuvrajit Das Biswas
‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 had raised several questions from fans when it came to the show’s logic, and the writers have finally decided to address these concerns. This seems like a smart move, considering the fact that Season 8 is almost upon us, and will air on HBO on April 14, 2019. This will mark the final season of the show and fans are understandably concerned whether the same logical gaps will prevail in Season 8 as it did in Season 7.
To jog your memory, the most gaping flaw in logic in Season 7 of ‘Game of Thrones’ was how quickly the characters seemed to travel all across Westeros. Since the seven kingdoms are, after all, a large place, previous seasons had shown characters spend an entire season trying to get from one place to another. This had led to an inevitable worry among fans that some characters would never end up meeting each other. However, Season 7 changed all of that with super fast travel, even if you were not Daenerys Targaryen riding her dragons. Some characters, especially Petyr Baelish or Littlefinger, seemed to be all over Westeros, having seemingly gained the power of teleportation.
In an interview with EW, the show writers have acknowledged this change of pace but have also noted that they did not feel it was anything that needed an explanation. Bryan Cogman, the co-executive producer said, “We made a choice to ‘just get on with it’ last season. You can sit at home and do the math on how long it took to get the boats from Point A to Point B and whatever that was, yeah, that’s what it was. There’s always something everybody has got to graft on to and I guess that outrage was better than others, so I’ll take it.” Writer Dave Hill also chipped in, adding, “With all the things we were balancing to set things up for season 8, sometimes we had to speed things up within episodes. We had a lot of time cuts the vast majority of viewers didn’t catch. We could have a [title card] on there saying ‘Three Weeks Later,’ but we did not. Sometimes when moving pieces around you’re going to cheat a little bit. [For season 8], we tried to keep more of the time logic rather than jet packs”.
While it would be wrong to classify what the fans felt as ‘outrage’, it is true that the sudden change of pace was confusing and drew sharp criticism from several quarters. However, showrunner Dan Weiss is not too concerned about keeping all fans happy and is more focused on providing the best show experience possible. He said, “If somebody says, ‘I don’t like the way you do this,’ I have no idea what percentage of the people watching that opinion actually represents. If that opinion happens to surface louder on the internet, I still have no idea — it could be 1 percent of people that becomes an internet thing for 10 minutes and then it just seems like it’s more than 1 percent. But there’s no way of telling — nor am I interested in finding a way of finding out — how accurate those thoughts represent the broad spectrum of people watching. If you start thinking about that you’ll drive yourself crazy”.
While the show writers and show makers do not seem too bothered by their apparent lack of logic in the previous season, they are committed to making Season 8 a pop culture phenomenon and one that the world will remember. ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 will have 6 episodes whose runtimes vary from a little under an hour to an hour and twenty minutes. The showrunners have the complex task of tying up all loose ends of the plethora of characters as they bring the show to a fruitful conclusion and depict how the kingdoms of Westeros unite against the White Walker invasion, and who finally sits on the Iron Throne.
